Martin Beck (artist)

Martin Beck (born 1963) is a visual artist based in New York and Vienna. His artworks often derive from in-depth research into narratives from the fields of architecture, design and popular culture and are characterized by his usage of diverse media, including installation, photography, video, writing, sculpture, and drawing. Beck also works collaboratively and has, since the late 1990s, co-authored various exhibitions, publications, and exhibit design projects with artist Julie Ault.

For other people named Martin Beck, see Martin Beck (disambiguation).
Martin Beck
Born1963 (age 56–57)
Bludenz, Austria

Education and teaching

Martin Beck studied at the University of Applied Arts as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Vienna, Austria, where he graduated in 1988. Beck has been a visiting artist in the art and design programs at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California (1999–2000); he has held a guest professorship in the CCCS program at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Geneva (2001–2005). Since 2004, he has worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna[1] where he teaches courses on exhibition and display issues as well as artistic and design methodology.[2]

Artistic practice

Beck’s artworks range from complex, mixed-media installations to subtle architectural interventions, and often explore the role of display in exhibition frameworks. He adapts many mediums and strategies in order to “...problematize the exhibition form, along with the social and aesthetic implications it wields on our perceptions.”[3] His exhibitions investigate the boundaries between artworks, exhibit and support structure, as well as the relationship between art and social conditions or popular culture. Artist and critic Yuki Higashino writes in the Avery Review: “[Beck’s] true medium is exhibition making. It is the totality, the configuration of artifacts, the social context, the supplementary materials like a press release, and the architecture of the venue that together constitute the art exhibition and the work of art that Beck produces.”[4] Frequently Beck’s projects and shows include artifacts or works by other artists, architects, designers, and historical objects. His practice elaborates and expands the conceptual tradition of redefining the role of the artist and of what constitutes an artistic practice.

Bodies of work

His main bodies of works from the 2000s investigated how the modern conception of display developed in the mid-20th century. For his solo exhibition an Exhibit viewed played populated at Grazer Kunstverein, Beck presented works that emerged out of his research on Richard Hamilton’s 1957 an Exhibit in which colored acrylic panels, suspended from the gallery ceiling, created an environment that turned the gallery space itself into an artwork. For Installation, his collaborative exhibition with Julie Ault at Vienna Secession, he reconstructed a modular exhibit system called Struc-Tube, designed by George Nelson in 1948.[5] The system was presented both as a sculpture and a functional structure to display other works by Beck and Ault.[6] Subsequently, he used the same tubular system as a protagonist for a video-work titled About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), first presented as part of his exhibition The details are not the details at the artist-run gallery Orchard in New York.[7]

Between 2000 and 2010, Beck frequently designed exhibitions for art institutions, mostly in collaboration with Ault. These include over two dozen shows for the International Center of Photography in New York between 2001 and 2004; X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions of the 1960s and 1970s (2003) and Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987 (2010)[8] for Mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Projekt Migration (2005) at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment (2010)[9] at Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, and Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take (2014)[10] at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2011, in collaboration with architect Ken Saylor, Beck designed the gallery architecture of Ludlow 38 in New York.

In more recent years, Beck’s practice has expanded to address the cross-section of design, social history, and pop culture. For his project Panel 2—“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes...," he drew on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) and the development of the Aspen Movie Map. The 1970 conference, themed “Environment by Design,” marked a turning point in design history wherein the vanguard of 1950s modernism such as George Nelson and Herbert Bayer confronted younger, hippie culture-influenced environmental activists and designers. Beck combined the narrative of this event with his research on the predecessor of today’s navigation systems and developed an exhibition consisting of videos, photography, prints, sculpture, and artifacts.[11][12][13]

Beck’s interests have progressed to the formation and functioning of temporary communities. Through a series of loosely connected works, he has been exploring the history of American countercultural communes of the 1960s and early 1970s. His video Turn Take Merge uses GPS directions leading from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the epicenter of 1960s hippie culture, to Drop City, a countercultural community established in southern Colorado in 1965 and abandoned by the early 1970s that became known as the first rural hippie commune. For the work titled rumors and murmurs (2012/17), Beck used an illustration from the 1968 Dome Cookbook by Steve Baer, a manual for dome building, to create a freestanding wall covered in fabric sewn together from irregular polygons.[14]

Between 2012 and 2016, Beck worked on Last Night, a series of works centered around a sequence of records David Mancuso played on June 2, 1984 during one of the last dance parties of the Prince Street iteration of The Loft, an underground dance party begun by Mancuso in 1970. Beck researched all the records played that night and published their production information as an artist book in 2013 (a revised second edition was published in 2019). The culmination of his project was a thirteen-and-half hour video work, first presented as an installation at The Kitchen in New York (2017).[15][16] The video shows each record played in its entirety on a vintage turntable.

Both projects explore the notion of community, however temporal, and the social and physical structures that are required for its formation. Art historian Branden W. Joseph wrote: “The question ‘Is there a form to shared togetherness?’ guided Beck’s investigation into both the communes of the 1960s... and the disco of the ’70s and early ’80s, two cultural poles most often perceived as in stark opposition to each other. (This dichotomy is similar to that between the counterculture of the ’60s and the management culture of the following decades, which Beck’s work also deconstructs.)”[17]

In 2014, Beck was commissioned to develop a project to go along with the re-branding, initiated by then-director James Voorhies, of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.[4][18] The commission resulted in a two-year exhibition titled Program that consisted of ten episodic interventions, each addressing one of the institution’s channels of communication. The project culminated in the book An Organized System of Instructions.[19][20]

Beck is represented by 47 Canal gallery in New York.[21]

Exhibitions

Beck has held solo and collaborative exhibitions at Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin (2000, with Julie Ault); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2003); Secession, Vienna (2006, with Julie Ault); Casco, Utrecht (2007); Gasworks, London (2008); Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University, New York (2009); Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal (2012); Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2013); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (2017); The Kitchen, New York (2017); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2018); Frac Lorraine, Metz, France (2018); and 47 Canal, New York (2012, 2015, and 2018). In 2017, Mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, staged a mid-career survey of his work.[22]

Group show participations include the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014–15); The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2013); the 29th São Paulo Bienal (2010, with Julie Ault); and the 4th Bucharest Biennale (2010).

In 2013, with Julie Ault, Nicola Dietrich, Heinz Peter Knes, Jason Simon, Danh Vō, and Scott Cameron Weaver, he co-curated Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault for the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Culturgest in Lisbon, and Artists Space in New York.[23][24] Concurrent with his 2017 survey show at mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna – he curated watching sugar dissolve in a glass of water, an exhibition of works from the museum’s collection. In April 2020, together with Julie Ault, Scott Cameron Weaver, and James Benning, Beck co-curated and produced the online exhibition Down the Rabbit Hole: JB in JT for O-Townhouse.[25][26]

Artist books and monographs
  • rumors and murmurs (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017) ISBN 978-3960981374
  • An Organized System of Instructions (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017) ISBN 978-3956792632
  • Last Night (New York: White Columns, 2013) ISBN 978-0964846876
  • the particular way in which a thing exists (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University, 2013) ISBN 978-2-920394-93-3
  • The Aspen Complex (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012) ISBN 978-3-943365-07-8
  • Installation, with Julie Ault (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006 ISBN 978-3865601353
  • an exhibit viewed played populated (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2005) ISBN 978-3865881748
  • half modern, half something else (Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh editions) (Vienna: Montage, 2003)
  • Critical Condition: Ausgewählte Texte im Dialog, with Julie Ault (Essen: Kokerei Zollverein, 2003) ISBN 978-3935783118
  • Outdoor Systems, indoor distribution, with Julie Ault (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, 2000) ISBN 978-3926796691
gollark: Well, sonata, it can be proven that you are isomorphic to the field of complex numbers without 3.
gollark: I hope they aren't having people pack them *manually*.
gollark: Well, it's probably fine, as you can't just set the frequency of light arbitrarily precisely.
gollark: Oh dear. Apparently frequency is in fact continuous.
gollark: Due to uncertainty things non-[HG]Tech™ entities cannot, as far as I know, measure light and whatever to arbitrary precision, so I assume they can't create it to that either.

References
  1. "Nachbesetzungen an der Akademie". October 2004.
  2. "Beck, Univ.-Prof. Mag. Martin". Akademie der bildenden Künste (in German).
  3. James Voorhies, “Institution Building,” in Martin Beck: An Organized System of Instructions. Sternberg Press. 2017.
  4. Higashino, Yuki (October 2017). "The How of an Exhibition". The Avery Review.
  5. "Julie Ault / Martin Beck « secession". www.secession.at. Retrieved 2019-05-22.
  6. "Installation". seccession. 2006.
  7. Burton, Johanna (September 2007). "Martin Beck". Artforum.
  8. "Changing Channels". mumok. 2010.
  9. "Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment (Exhibition, 20 October 2010 to 13 March 2011)". Canadian Centre for Architecture. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
  10. Phinney, Maddie (October 2014). "Give You So Much More: Jim Hodges at the Hammer Museum". artcritical.
  11. Tang, Jeannine (September 2013). "Unsustainable Design: Jeannine Tang on Martin Beck's The Environmental Witch-Hunt, 2008". Artforum.
  12. Howe, David Everitt (January 2012). "Contentious Utopias: Martin Beck's Avant-Garde Art and Design". Afterall.
  13. Hunt, Ian (November 2008). "Martin Beck". Frieze.
  14. Walleston, Aimee (November 2012). "Long Way Home: Martin Beck at 47 Canal". Art in America.
  15. Colucci, Emily (March 2017). "Lost In Music: Reclaiming Past Disco Days At Martin Beck's 'Last Night'". filthy dreams.
  16. "Martin Beck: Last Night". The Kitchen. March 2017.
  17. Joseph, Brandon. "Best of 2017: Martin Beck". Artforum.
  18. "Martin Beck: Program". Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. October 2016.
  19. "Martin Beck: A Social Question". Harvard University. January 2016.
  20. "Artist Talk: Martin Beck". Harvard University. March 2016.
  21. "Martin Beck". 47canal.us. Retrieved 2019-05-21.
  22. "Martin Beck". www.mumok.at.
  23. Pollack, Maika (February 2014). "'Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault' at Artists Space". Observer.
  24. Cotter, Holland (December 2013). "Art as Currency in a Tragic Time". The New York Times.
  25. O-Townhouse (April 11, 2020). "Down the Rabbit Hole: JB in JT".
  26. Farago, Jason. "2 Art Gallery Shows to Explore From Home". New York Times. Retrieved July 29, 2020.
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