EAST LANSING, MICH.- The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University announces Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, opening March 21st. Spanning the decades from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition, which is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA Denver), features the work of over 50 international artists and writers who are exploring the artistic possibilities of language through painting, sculpture, video, site-specific installation, and works on paper.
"Similar to the way that the Broad MSU is a laboratory for artistic experimentation, Postscript as an exhibition is experimental in the way that it bridges the practices of art and literature," says Michael Rush, Founding Director of the Broad MSU. "This is also another opportunity to demonstrate how exhibitions, including those that travel from other leading contemporary art institutions like MCA Denver, transform and respond to our unique space."
Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art engages numerous linguistic forms and strategies—including transcription, translation, appropriation, constraint and redaction—to consider the ways we read, look at, hear, and process language today. Among the exhibition’s major underlying arguments is the idea that the literary movement known as “conceptual writing,” in which the ideas behind a text are as important as its form, is closely tied to developments in contemporary art.
Postscript is the first exhibition to present artworks and works of conceptual writing side by side, in juxtapositions that produce new insights into the meaning of both disciplines. Occupying a number of galleries and public spaces at the Broad MSU, the installation is organized in groupings that include historical text-based works as well as contemporary pieces that explore similar strategies. These pairings highlight conceptual writing’s ties to the art of the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which the concepts behind art objects began to take precedence over their physical qualities. Yet despite such parallels, Postscript brings together different generations and disciplines to demonstrate that works that look alike can take on different meanings.
Participating Artists Include: Mark Amerika & Chad Mossholder, Carl Andre, Fiona Banner, Erica Baum, Derek Beaulieu, Caroline Bergvall, Jen Bervin, Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw, Christian Bök, Marcel Broodthaers, Pavel Büchler, Luis Camnitzer, Ricardo Cuevas, Tim Davis & Robert Fitterman, Mónica de la Torre, Craig Dworkin, Tim Etchells, Ryan Gander, Michelle Gay, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dan Graham, Alexandra Grant, James Hoff, Seth Kim-Cohen, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Tan Lin, Gareth Long, Michael Maranda, Helen Mirra, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, João Onofre, Michalis Pichler, Paolo Piscitelli, Vanessa Place, Kristina Lee Podesva, Seth Price, Kay Rosen, Joe Scanlan, Dexter Sinister, Frances Stark, Joel Swanson, Nick Thurston, Triple Canopy, Andy Warhol, Darren Wershler, and Eric Zboya.
