April Friges, Simon Hughes, Mimi Lauter  |  Opening Reception Thursday, April 22, 6-9 pm  |  April 22 - April 30, 2010

Andrew Printer, Betsy Seder, Jenny Yurshansky  |  Opening ReceptionThursday, May 6, 6-9 pm  |  May 6 - May 14, 2010

Nina Becker, Shane Quentin, Alison O'Daniel, Stephen Walters  |  Opening Reception Thursday, May 20, 6-9 pm  |  May 20 - May 28, 2010
Outdoor Amphitheater  |  Screening of “Night Sky” by Alison O’Daniel  |  May 20 - 8:30 pm

The UAG / Room Gallery and the Studio Art Department at UC Irvine anounces its Winter Critical Aesthetics lecture series. This quarter there will be lectures by; Andrea Frazer, Liz Kotz, Mark Hosler, Joe Sola, Constanze Ruhm, and Kerry Tribe.  Please see schedule for times and locations of the lectures.  Schedule

The UAG / Room Gallery proudly launches its Critical Aesthetics Line, an exhibition series showcasing internationally renowned art works by mid career artists.  This year’s selection is Constanze Ruhm’s X Love Scenes / Pearls without a String, which will be shown in Room Gallery.  Constanze Ruhm lives and works in Vienna.

What would it mean to stage a love scene in film that would extend to a love scene in life?  It’s a question of image before experience or, more precisely, a question of experience inextricably bound up with image.  This is what X Love Scenes, a multi-channel video installation, explores. Edison's famous May Irwin Kiss from 1896, a quintessential trope of cinema narrative, is restaged in X Love Scenes as an unresolved, traumatic, repetitive cycle.  What we are given to see is an actress, a director and a script girl on a film set.  The male lead is absent, replaced by a mark - a white chalk X on a black flag - that becomes the actor's stand-in.  While the script girl reads the actor’s lines, the actress performs her part vis-à-vis the flag - an empty sign.  As in Ruhm’s other films from her X Characters series (initiated in 2001), the lead actress is based on a character culled from a modernist film; here it is Michelangelo Antonioni's Il deserto rosso (1964). Taken together - the actress who refers to an actress from another film and an actor who is represented by an empty sign - X Love Scenes reveals that the counter shot of the "Other," a convention required to maintain cinema’s reality effect, is in fact a visible absence.  We, in turn, are invited to explore the boundaries of our reality - in film as in life - and the role that desire plays in constructing it. Curated by Juli Carson.
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VIDEO DADA: No repeat of history, not neo-Dada, but still wreaking havoc with conventional parameters of art.  Nowadays inventive, intelligent, and aesthetically sophisticated videos can be seen far afield, outside traditional art venues like museums and galleries.  And artists circulate their videos on a much wider scale than that achieved by any television network.  VIDEO DADA asks how these changes complicate the conceptual and aesthetic contours of art.  The exhibition features 300 plus videos — playing on eight screens — by individual artists and art collectives that circulate in the hurly-burly multiverse of the internet.  Some serious, some humorous, and some both at once, these works exercise manifold strategies: absurd drama, wry animation, politically astute collage, wild performance, and uncategorizable others.  Some play with music; some incorporate extraordinary written or spoken texts; some prefer silence and all the noise that offers.  In sum, VIDEO DADA surveys the internet’s amalgamation of popular culture and art, calling into question the difference between the two.

And, yes, there may be echoes of Dada: “Dadaism was no ideological movement but an organic product that came into existence as a reaction against the cloud- cuckoo -land tendencies of so-called sacred art.... while military leaders painted in blood.” — George Grosz, 1924 .

Please Join us for a roundtable discussion on Roberto Jacoby’s 1968: el culo te abrocho.

Roberto Jacoby is an Argentine artist whose artwork in the 1960s defined a branch of “new media” conceptual art, one informed by the writings of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a full decade before such aesthetic experiments were made in the Northern Hemisphere. During Jacoby’s hiatus from the art world in the 1980s, he was the lyricist for the Argentine new wave band “Virus.” In 1968: el culo te abrocho Jacoby superimposes those lyrics upon digital reprints of archival documents related to his activities at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aries In the year 1968. Taken together, the political posters and lyrical texts provoke us to reflect upon the utopian, poetic hopes that characterized the global cultural revolution of the 1960s and to ask what that legacy might mean to us now.

Featured speakers are Catherine Benamou (Director, Film and Video Center), Julia Bryan-Wilson (Director, Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies), Juli Carson (Director, University Art Gallery), Catherine Liu (Director, Humanities Center). View Images

The UAG continues its Major Work of Art Series with Roberto Jacoby’s 1968: el culo te abrocho.  Jacoby is an Argentine artist whose artwork in the 1960s defined a branch of “new media” conceptual art a full decade before such aesthetic experiments were made in the Northern Hemisphere.  Along with his colleagues Oscar Masotta, Eduardo Costa and Raúl Escari, Jacoby led experiments in “social oriented” Conceptualism at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires.  One of their most important interventions was Total Participation Happening, which consisted of a feature picked up by the local press about a series of Happenings that the group staged for the camera but, in fact, never took place.  During Jacoby’s hiatus from the art world in the 1980s, he was the lyricist for the Argentine new wave band “Virus.”  In 1968: el culo te abrocho Jacoby superimposes those lyrics upon digital reprints of archival documents related to his activities at the Instituto Di Tella. Taken together, the political posters and lyrical texts provoke us to reflect upon the utopian, poetic hopes that characterized the global cultural revolution of the 1960s and to ask what that legacy might mean to us now. Curated by Juli Carson. 
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In conjunction with Roberto Jacoby’s 1968: el culo te abrocho, the UAG will feature the continuous screening of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s, The Hour of the Furnaces.  This legendary 1968 documentary, about the post-war struggle against neo-colonialism in Argentina, quotes Che Guevara who famously said, "Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen."  As Paul A. Schroeder, author of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: The Dialectics of a Filmmaker, notes the film was shot clandestinely between 1966 and 1968, during the initial stages of what would come to be known as Argentina’s infamous “dirty war.” It was also screened clandestinely, to sympathetic audiences of workers, anarchists and revolutionaries who would regularly interrupt the projection to discuss concepts and issues raised in the film.  What’s moving about the film today goes beyond the "truth claims" made by the filmmakers.  The Hour of the Furnaces captured a revolutionary stance on the eve of the 1970s military coup that would soon advance genocide upon the Argentine Left.  As such, it’s a prescient film for Americans to view today, not as a call to arms, but as a call for historical memory and global accountability.  Related Links

Continuing its Emerging Artist Series, Room Gallery presents Suspended Projection, a multi-media installation by D´Ette Nogle.  Beginning with its title, the project reflects upon the literal use of a suspended video projection as well as the psychoanalytic notion of a melancholic projection onto the past.  Informed by the legacies of Conceptualism and Feminism, Nogle’s projects produce complex juxtapositions.  For Suspended Projection, she presents video illustrating what she - the artist - “was-going-to-do” during several years of non-production.  What viewers consequently encounter are the fits and starts of partial and/or altered photographic, sculptural, painted and printed realizations of past intimations.  Building upon Rosalind Krauss’s assertion that the medium of video art is inherently narcissistic, and that video work may present the artist as cut off from history, Nogle is suspended in a past-progressive state of lack, estranged from her own imagined history of unrealized works.  The viewer, in turn, moves through the intimate space of Suspended Projection, provoked to consider his or her own engagement with personal history and memory.  Guest curated by Jesse Benson and Becky Koblick.  Read More | Reviews