COLLECTION NAME:
University Art Galleries (UMassD)
Record
exhibition_title:
Lasse Antonsen: "Zera Kodesh (Prague 1827)" and Other Works
exhibition_dates:
July 6 - July 30, 2006
exhibition_year:
2006
exhibition_location:
Gallery 244 (UMass Dartmouth Galleries)
exhibition_curator:
Lasse Antonsen
exhibition_note:
This exhibition featured objects from the Museum of Black Milk. Lasse Antonsen explores how objects can be classified, and how ideology and metaphysics affect reality. There are museums devoted to the story of the Holocaust. There are no museums - at least official ones - that present, or explore, Fascist ideology and history. There is no Museum of the History of Nazism. The Museum of Black Milk presents historical objects that participated in the Nazi "theater." The objects are presented in such a way that artistic fiction interacts with historical fact. It would be tempting to say that there is no separate fiction and no separate fact. In the Museum of Black Milk, a different realm of participation is sought, one that moves within fiction and within fact, but explores questions related to collective and individual fate. The title of the Museum of Black Milk refers to the German speaking, Jewish writer, Paul Celan's poem "Todesfugue" (Death Fugue), written in 1945. Many of the German Nazi soldier objects displayed in the exhibition were selected specifically to engage in, and pay homage to, the German artist Joseph Beuys, but also to question his use of the past. Joseph Beuys served as a radio technician and pilot on airplanes during the Russian campaign. After the war, he became the most important German visual artist to attempt to create an "open reality" with which to oppose the heritage of fascist ideology. In the exhibition, the Organisation Todt trousers, found in Austria, were especially important to the Museum of Black Milk project. Their reality is situated between the Nazi objects and the Jewish objects. We will never know the identity, the history, or the thoughts, of the person, or persons, who wore them, and lived in them. They might have started out as trousers for a German soldier, and later ended up being worn by a forced laborer or concentration camp inmate. Only hardship and extreme suffering is available to the naked eye. We do not know if anybody survived them. Objects recently acquired by the Museum of Black Milk refer not only to Joseph Beuys, but also to the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and references his involvement in National Socialism. The Zera Kodesh exhibition was dedicated to the Spanish writer, Jorge Semprun, who fought in the French resistance movement and survived Buchenwald - and realized that he would never be able to tell the story of what had happened to him.
exhibition_genre:
mixed-media, wearable objects
resourceID:
13009_006
resource_type:
ephemera - invitation
copyright notice:
COPYRIGHT NOTIFICATION: Under the direction of the Visual Resource Center digital collections are made available to the UMass Dartmouth campus community for the sole purpose of classroom instruction and study in accordance U.S. Copyright Laws . All other uses are prohibited and are subject to copyright infringements.
credit line:
UMass Dartmouth Art Galleries
artist name:
Lasse Antonsen
artist_nationality:
Danish
artist_vital dates:
1947 -
artist_biographical note:
Lasse Antonsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1947. He has, since 1978, lived in the US, in New York, Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, and New Bedford, Massachusetts. He studied art in Copenhagen in 1963-64 at the Experimental Art School with Poul Gernes and Per Kirkeby, and art and creative writing in 1964-65 at Holbæk Kunsthøjskole with the poet Inger Christensen. He studied art history at Copenhagen University in the mid and late 1970s, and after moving to the US, continued his studies at the Harvard University Extension Program and Tufts University. He received an MA in art history from Tufts University in 1986. Antonsen has worked as a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and as curator of the Danforth Museum of Art. He was director of the University Art Gallery at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for twenty-five years. He has curated and organized more than two hundred exhibitions, presenting the work of artists such as Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Georg Baselitz, Ilya Kabakov, Nancy Spero, Frank Stella, Paula Rego and Mark Dion. As an art historian he has taught graduate courses at Rhode Island School of Design, and currently teaches at Massachusetts College of Art. As an artist he has created installations at the Artists Foundation in Boston, at 150 Chestnut Street Installation Space in Providence, Rhode Island, at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, and is currently featured at the Museum of Natural History in Providence. He has had many one-person exhibitions, most recently at the Colo Colo Gallery in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 2012, his work was included in exhibitions in Brooklyn, New York, at Proteus Gowanus, and in Jersey City, New Jersey, at Curious Matter.
work_title:
"Zera Kodesh (Prague 1827)" and Other Works
work_date:
2006
date_of_ record:
10/09/13
name_cataloger:
jtrinh
"Zera Kodesh (Prague 1827)" and Other Works
