03.30 — 06.04.2012
Curator: Philip Larratt-Smith
Malba – Fundación Costantini will inaugurate its expanded international programme with the landmark exhibition Bye Bye American Pie, a selection of more than 110 works by six major American artists: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Paul McCarthy, here presented together for the first time in Buenos Aires.
Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith and conceived as a sequel to his previous exhibition at Malba, Andy Warhol, Mr. America (2009-2010), Bye Bye American Pie explores the changing valences of American culture from the 1970s to the present through key works of these important and influential artists.
The works in the exhibition establish a balance between artistic sensibilities and formal strategies within a diversity of media. In the words of the curator: “The hard documentary quality of Clark’s photographs and the diaristic intimacy of Goldin’s slideshows are balanced out by the critique implicit in Holzer’s LEDs and redaction paintings and Kruger’s juxtapositions of text and image. Basquiat’s assimilation of urban black idioms and vernacular street forms like graffiti into the traditions of high Modernist painting intersects with McCarthy’s restaging of cultural politics at the level of the id.”
Taking its name from Don McLean’s folk song about the loss of innocence of the hippie generation, Bye Bye American Pie offers a focussed survey of a particular tendency within American culture, when the high tide of American civilization which Warhol so brilliantly celebrated gave way to critique and deconstruction, and when a single dominant culture reinforced by television and Hollywood broke up into multiple subcultures. “The production of these artists foreshadows the gradual decline of America not only as an economic and political hegemon but also as a culture and an ideal.”
Philip Larratt-Smith
Toronto (Canada), 1979. Curator and writer based in New York and London. Some of his previous projects include “Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed” (Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brasil; Museu do Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (all 2011); and the Freud Museum, London, UK, (March 2012)); “Larry Clark” (Fototeca de Cuba, La Habana, Cuba, 2011); “Joan Mitchell” (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2010); “Andy Warhol, Mr. America” (Banco de la República, Bogotà, Colombia; Malba – Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil, 2009 – 2010); “Louise Bourgeois: Nature Study” (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2008); “Robert Mapplethorpe: Sagrado y Profano” (Fototeca de Cuba, La Habana, Cuba, 2006); and “Louise Bourgeois: Uno y Otros” (Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, La Habana, Cuba, 2005). Larratt-Smith has written on artists such as Jenny Holzer, Tracey Emin, Milton Resnick, Iran do Espírito Santo, and Roni Horn. Born in Toronto, Canada, Larratt-Smith received a bachelor’s degree in Latin and Greek literature and philosophy from Harvard University in 2003. Since then he has worked as the literary archivist for the Louise Bourgeois Studio. He is currently preparing an edition of the psychoanalytic writings of Louise Bourgeois for publication in 2013.
