Painting Revolution Preview Party!
Saturday, January 27
7:00-11:00 p.m.
$10/$5 for WAM members, students, and seniors
For reservations call the Weisman events hotline at 612-626-4747 before
January 24
Be the first in the Twin Cities to view this extraordinary exhibition.
Meet and greet visiting dignitaries from leading museums in Russia.
Devour Russian delicacies topped off by ice cold vodka. Experience the
subtle groove of The Cosmonaut Group. Take in a Russian ballet of experimental
proportions. Catch a screening of the 1929 avant-garde film Man with
a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov). More fun than should be allowed
in one night!
An Afternoon with the Russian Avant-Garde
Sunday, January 28, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
A complimentary reception is offered during a break between the two
following presentations. Moscow on the Hill, a St. Paul restaurant,
caters tea and pastries.
•Saving the Russian Avant-Garde
Victor Chilov, Luidmilla Volovenskaia, and Andrei Sarabianov
2:00 -3:00 p.m.
In this roundtable discussion, Victor Chilov, director of the Serpukhov
History and Art Museum, Luidmilla Volovenskaia, director of the Ivanova
District Museum, and art historian Andrei Sarabianov–all visiting
from Russia–share the dramatic history of the artworks in Painting
Revolution. Ordered destroyed by the Soviet government, the paintings
were saved and stored for decades by courageous museum staff. Weisman
director Lyndel King moderates the discussion.
•When Painting was Revolutionary
John Bowlt
3:30 p.m.
A leading scholar on the Russian avant-garde and curator of Painting
Revolution, John Bowlt discusses the constellation of artists and
movements that revolutionized Russia and the art world in the early
decades of the 20th century. The artistic developments of Kandinsky,
Tatlin, Malevich, and others are examined in relation to the late Imperial
Russia, the October Revolution, and the emergence of the Soviet state.
Keynote Lecture
From Kandinsky to Karen Finley: The "Spiritual" and the
"Unspeakable" in Art
Jonathan Fineberg
Saturday, February 3, 2:00 p.m.
In this slide lecture, Jonathan Fineberg speculates, from a psychoanalytic
point of view, on why works of art stir such strong feelings both of
spirituality and transgression. Embarking from the observation that
art frequently evokes physical sensation, he explores the idea that
art may articulate bodily experience. The inaccessibility of art to
verbal account also leads him to examine its relation to the preverbal
world of the primal bodily ego. His specific examples will range from
Kandinksy, Klee, and Picasso to performance artist Karen Finley.
Fineberg is professor of art history at University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.
He is author of Kandinsky in Paris 1906-7 as well as the major
publication Art Since 1940-Strategies of Being, among other publications.
This lecture serves as a keynote to the series "Divine Perversities:
Religion and Contemporary Art in the Public Sphere," organized
by the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota with the Minnesota
Center for the Humanities and United Theological Seminary. For more
information on this series, call the art department at 612-625-8096.
The Color Series
Variations on a Theme of Painting Revolution
Rhapsody in Color
Thursday, March 8, 7:00 p.m.
This program debuts works by local writers responding to the exhibition
Painting Revolution. Featuring spoken word artists Thien-bao Thuc Phi,
Marcie Rendon, Douglas Kearney, and Yerik Kaslow. This program is organized
in collaboration with SASE: The Write Place.
Color in Vogue–A Fashion Fete and Concert
Friday, March 16, 7:00 p.m.
$7 general admission/$5 WAM members and students; call the Weisman Museum
Store at 612-625-9495 for tickets
Join us for an evening showcasing colorful costume constructions created
by Tulle & Dye (Lyle Jackson & Ellen Roeder). Drinks, hors d'oeuvres,
and the avant-garde sound of music scenesters The Chicago Underground
Trio. Come to see and be seen!
Color/Dance with Matt Jenson's New and Slightly Used Dance
Thursday, March 22, 7:00 p.m.
Friday, March 23, noon & 7:00 p.m.
Matt Jenson and members of New and Slightly Used Dance perform an original
dance piece that inscribes the intensity, modulation, and expressiveness
of color in the articulation of physical movement.
Russian Avant-Garde on Video
Digitally mastered from archival 35mm prints, with new scores.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Dir. Dziga Vertov
Screening at opening January 27
Playful, hallucinatory and exhilarating to the senses, Man with a
Movie Camera offers the spectacle of a city whirling in motion,
while a roving cameraman wanders the streets attempting to capture its
quicksilver essence. The addition of a new score by the Alloy Orchestra
completes Vertov's masterpiece, following his precise instructions for
musical and non-musical accompaniment. (75 min.)
Strike (1925)
Dir. Sergei Eisenstein
Thursday, February 1, 7:30 p.m.
Along with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Strike marks the most remarkable
directorial debut in cinema history. In dramatizing the machinations
of a labor strike (and the factory owners' efforts to crush it), Eisenstein
employs a host of experimental techniques that are as visually breathtaking
as they are recklessly innovative. This edition features a new score
by the Alloy Orchestra. (94 min.)
Russian Film Series at Oak Street Cinema
Oak Street Cinema, a Weisman arts partner, presents Soviet films in
conjunction with the exhibition Painting Revolution: Kandinsky, Malevich,
and the Russian Avant-Garde. Weisman members pay the student/senior
admission ($4.50) for these films when presenting their WAM membership
card at the ticket office. Oak Street Cinema is located at 309 Oak Street
SE, Minneapolis, in the Stadium Village district, bordering the University
campus. For more information call Oak Street at 612-331-3134.
Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924)
Dir. Yakov Protazanov
Presented with live music by A Most Happy Sound
Tuesday, February 20, 7:30
Little seen outside of Russia, this Martian fantasy is one of the most
interesting experiments of the revolutionary cinema. In this magnificently
odd film, a Soviet engineer builds and pilots a space ship to find the
alien woman who haunts his dreams. The dramatization of communist life
includes a workersÕ revolt on the angry red planet set amid dazzling
Constructivist costumes and sets. Costumes designed by Alexandra Exter
and sets by Isaak Rabinovich. Silent with live accompaniment.
Mother/Earth Double feature on Tuesday, February 27:
Mother (1926)
Dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin
7:30 p.m.
A mother finds herself caught in an emotional conflict between her husband
and son on opposite sides of a workers' strike set in 1905. Propagandistic
and artful, Pudovkin's film uses the peasant woman's story to advance
his notion of the individual as the most powerful element of the cinema.
Silent with live accompaniment.
Earth (1930)
Dir. Alexander Dovzhenko
9:15 p.m.
Earth is a poetic exploration of life, death, violence, and other issues
as they relate to the land and collective farm experience. Dovzhenko's
masterpiece is noted for the beauty of its epic and lyrical montage
sequences. Silent with live accompaniment.
Tarkovsky Tuesdays!
Andrei Rublev (1969)
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Tuesday, March 6, 7:30 p.m.
Based on the life of the fifteenth century Russian monk and icon painter Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky's film is an impassioned moral meditation on the place of the artist within a ravaged and invaded nation. A major work of art from one of the cinema's true masters. Russian with English subtitles. (185 min)
The Mirror (1975)
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Tuesday, March 13, 7:30 & 9:45 p.m.
Mixing flashback, historical footage, modern day action, and dream-images, Tarkovsky's film presents an unusual and haunting story of a dying man's life memories. The shifting human experiences of hope and despair are expressed in the experimental visual and temporal structure of The Mirror.