The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University is architect Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and one of the last to be completed during his lifetime. In 2013, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts will celebrate its 50th anniversary.
For this occasion artists Katarina Burin and Amie Siegel conceived of the exhibition Brute. Engaging with the Carpenter Center building, Brute encompasses a set of new commissions by six international artists, a speculative exhibition model deploying objects and artworks from the Harvard University collections, as well as a series of events and performances. Burin and Siegel use the exhibition form itself as non-hierarchical process of discovery, inquiry, and collaboration.
The focus of the exhibition is on a set of specially-conceived works by internationally-acclaimed artists Nairy Baghramian, Anna Barriball, Barbara Bloom, Katarina Burin, Alexandra Leykauf, and Amie Siegel. These artists cross generations and represent diverse practices that reinterpret design and architectural history in playful and ambiguous ways, often subtly undermining predisposed ideas of genius and historical importance. Questions about the circulation and visibility of design reverberate throughout the exhibition, as do concerns of gender, collections, archives, (heroic) architecture, and cinematic space—the here and elsewhere of modernism. The role of the document as “fact” versus fiction, and the formal gestures of remaking, re-printing, and repurposing become an analogue to the building’s varied use over time. Several participating artists have worked collaboratively and often involve cross-disciplinary practices — from sculpture, drawing, and photography to film projection, video, and modes of display. An audio recording of “Clairvoyance,” a short story by J.A. Gibson, playing simultaneously in the Carpenter Center and on Alvar Aalto’s 1960’s “Listening Station” in Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, doubles the real and imagined space of a fictional architect.
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617.495.3251
www.ves.fas.harvard.edu