Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce an exhibition of this collaborative project between Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler. This work is an on-going project that has had various manifestations. Lehmann Maupin will present a version of the original video installation done in a space designed by American architect Richard Meier at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Spain (MACBA). The installation has been adjusted to the gallery space at Lehmann Maupin designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
This installation consists of five color projections with musical soundtracks by the Poetics which project out onto free hanging, curved projection screens which approximate the curvature of the walls of the original MACBA location. A sixth projection at eyelevel shows black and white documentary interview footage.
The Poetics Project 1977-1997 examines the conventions of documentary video using as its subject "The Poetics", a collaborative artists' rock band that Kelley and Oursler were members of in the late Seventies and early Eighties which ended in 1983. The video footage utilized in the installation covers a wide range of subjects, in a variety of visual styles to produce a fractured "rockumentary" of the Poetics' scene. The diverse material includes straight "talking head" interview footage (some actual documentary footage and some scripted by Kelley and performed by an actor); images of various locations in Southern California (some of which have been treated to imitate the look of late Sixties/early Seventies art video); early Eighties-style pseudo-rock video footage; the wake of former Poetics member Bill Stobaugh; and documentation of the process of producing the Poetics CD box set "The Poetics: Remixes of Recordings from 1977-1983".