Peter Friedl: Work 1964-2006

Miami Art Central from January 20 through April 15, 2007.

Peter Friedl (b. Austria, 1960) has made a steady incision in the methods and conventions of contemporary art. After publishing reviews and essays on contemporary theater for a few years, Friedl turned to his own artistic production in the 1980s. Presented today in the form of a retrospective, Friedl’s work—consistently heterogeneous in classical terms of medium, style, and meaning—highlights political awareness, autobiography, permanent displacement, design interventions, potential counter-imagery, and the reinvention of genres left over from the history of Modernism. His exhibition presents aesthetic models for disarming configurations of power.

The exhibition Peter Friedl: Work 1964–2006 problematizes the genre of “retrospective,” that is, the placement of a body of artwork within the framework of institutional logics (the museum) and within the context of its own history. With only a very few exceptions, the installations in this exhibition are not re-staged in their original form or in separate spaces, but instead are edited and exhibited together, nearly as documents. In addition, the exhibition brings together a vast selection of drawings on paper, presented chronologically, from Friedl’s earliest artistic production to the present. These drawings offer a glimpse of formal elements (handwriting, motifs, colors) and content (historical references, signs, symbols) that often reappear in other works and projects: the poster-piece Map (1969–2005) is based on an early drawing from 1969 that assigned the names of Native American peoples to the territory of the United States.

Started in 1995, Playgrounds takes the form of an ongoing anthological project. It currently comprises a selection of 600 color slides arranged for various digital wall projections in kid-sized formats. The pictures—all in “landscape” format and taken by the artist—show public playgrounds around the world. Playgrounds deals with an urban typology of modernist planning, which can be seen today as a remnant of twentieth-century utopias. It plays with the genre of conceptual and documentary photography, as well as with the representation of childhood, a theme that is also present in other works, such as Snjókarl (Snowman, 1999) or the book project Four or Five Roses (2001–04), which contains children’s monologues recorded in various cities and townships throughout South Africa.

A singular form of visual and auditory contemplation characterizes the video installation King Kong (2001). Again, the site of action is South Africa—Triomf Park, located in Sophiatown, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The film mimics a video clip, featuring American songwriter Daniel Johnston against the backdrop of apartheid history. The artist creates a temporary, freed, epic zone where the big story and many little stories come together.

In the form of conceptual aesthetic acts, and based on exemplary brief actions, video works such as Dummy(1997) and Tiger oder Löwe (Tiger or Lion, 2000) investigate how art history and social history function. The computer animation No Photography (2004) comes from the larger project OUT OF THE SHADOWS, in which Friedl used the example of Cyprus to mirror the construction of history and of concepts in an aesthetic of division and borders.

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This exhibition is produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain, and curated by Bartomeu Marí (MACBA). Peter Friedl: Work 1964-2006 will be on view at Miami Art Central from January 20 through April 15, 2007.   In Miami, the exhibition was coordinated by Rina Carvajal, MAC’s Executive Director and Chief Curator. This presentation is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, and through the supporting partnership of Porsche Cars North America, Inc. and Deutsche Bank, with additional support from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, and the Cowles Charitable Trust.