Alden Projects™ at NADA Miami Beach 2013: OFF THE WALL (Booth P12)




Alden Projects™ presents at NADA Miami Beach 2013 Off the Wall: a re-valuation of 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s Pop and Post-Pop works which dispense with the conventions of the gallery wall as a universal and timeless support in favor of ephemerally insistent, fugitive, transient, or contradictory works which transport art...off the wall. Needless to say, approaches and intentions vary. Works include: a sheet of perforated stamps by Robert Watts (1963); a screenprinted Christmas card by Robert Indiana—the original, first printing of Love (1965), commissioned by MoMA, and preceding all Love to follow; a stamped post card by On Kawara announcing the time he got up in 1968 (1968); screenprinted wallpaper by Roy Lichtenstein (1968) rescued after being removed from the wall of a collector’s home; photographic images of Bronx wallpaper in a unique book by Gordon Matta-Clark (1973); a unique, grey-painted monochrome executed in a cardboard box, slyly distributed (like a wolf in sheep’s clothing) as an editioned “catalogue” by Gerhard Richter (1974); a drawing of a soup can in a philosophical book by Andy Warhol (1975); a chalk drawing of a UFO by Keith Haring removed from the 42nd Street subway walls (1982); a drawing of a space shuttle on a mailed envelope by Tom Sachs (1997); an “angry girl” drawing in a catalogue by Yoshitomo Nara (2004-10). All of these works once did (or still do?) eitheror bothof the following: 1) occupy the walls of everyday life (and were thus “off the wall”), or 2) remove and eschew the vertical support of the wall altogether in favor of surprising destinations: a mailbox, a book, a catalogue. Gerhard Richter's painted monochrome (1974) exhibited here in Off the Wall was sprayed in “original grey” anti-rust paint by the artist co-terminously with other grey monochromes that he otherwise hung on a German museum’s walls in 1974-75. What was the difference between the (unique) grey monochromes that occupied a museum wall and the (unique) “original grey” spray-painted monochromes occupying the space of a museum’s editioned catalogue?  What is the difference today? (Alden Projects proposes that Gerhard Richter knows the answer...)

What does it mean for Alden Projects™ to reorient these “off the wall” Pop and Post-Pop works on to the temporary support walls of a Miami art fair? 


Todd Alden says: “To be involved with art, (to paraphrase Marcel Broodthaers), is to move from art fair to art fair.”


© Todd Alden 2013                                         
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