For its inaugural exhibition, Albertz Benda presents a solo show of early works byBill Beckley from 1968-1978. As a fundamental member of the ‘70s SoHo art community, Beckley provides a crucial glimpse into one of the key New York art movements of the 20th century through his work. The Accidental Poet (The Avoidance of Everything) features materials drawn from Beckley’s archives, shuttered since the 1970s, unveiling never before seen performance documentation, watercolors, and studies for his best- known work, among other materials.
The exhibition will also feature the artist’s conceptual narrative work of typed fictions and framed photographs—previously shown at landmark exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Documenta and the Venice Biennale—which have not been on view in the United States since the 1970s. The Accidental Poet (The Avoidance of Everything) is on view through October 3, 2015.
Born in response to the minimalism of Robert Morris, Carl André, and Sol LeWitt (artists who made terse and immensely self-evident objects), Bill Beckley’s work represents the next generation and is comprised of many mediums full of shifting meanings. He is part of the highly influential ‘112 Greene Street’ group, made up of artists such as Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Yvonne Rainer. They flooded SoHo, what was then an industrial neighborhood, and used the raw, cavernous spaces to the benefit of new creative processes.
Bill Beckley’s work does not get to the point. Instead, it teases strange and beautiful poetry out of the mundane, orbiting around matters, sometimes nearing a center of gravity only visible to him, and other times soaring to another dimension. His subject matter draws from the parts of existence that cannot be pinned down.
Akin to synesthesia, where modes of sensory experiences are swapped, Beckley’s ideas are often described through an unexpected sense. This is evident in works like Song for a Chin-Up, performed in 1971 at Holly Solomon loft (98 Greene Street), where the motion of a chin-up was defined through notes sung gradually higher in scale, then swiftly down key. The song will be re-performed, for the first time since the ‘70s, during the Albertz Benda show. In Raven Recitations, 1971, Beckley taught a raven to say “dark”, then photographed her reciting the word. The sound is absent; all that is visible is her beak and tongue. These works demonstrate he is much more than a storyteller – he is a visual poet. Like verse, his work invokes all fives senses through more than just one medium.
The narrative work in the exhibition represents the last of the Cibachrome photograph printing process, now impossible to recreate. Using the last remaining paper supplies available in New York, Beckley reprinted the last editions of many of his influential narrative work in 2014. Cibachrome is a uniquely robust, almost glowing, printing process, which Beckley used for its sensual qualities and almost object- like presence.
EXHIBITION
The Accidental Poet (The Avoidance of Everything)
by Bill Beckley
From September 10th to October 3rd, 2015
Albertz Benda Gallery
515 W 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
USA
