Barry Flanagan: Pataphysics and Play: Online
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Kasmin is pleased to present Pataphysics and Play, an exhibition of sculpture by Barry Flanagan (1941–2009). Including never-before-seen work from the artist’s estate, this presentation focuses on the importance of the imaginary realm in both the tenets of play and the philosophy of ’pataphysics as coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry. Absurdity, Flanagan proposes, is equally as justifiable as profundity.
Related programming: Dr. Jo Melvin, Director of the Estate of Barry Flanagan, on the artist's interest in 'pataphysics. Hosted on Saturday, April 22 from 11:30am–12:30pm. View the recorded event on our YouTube channel here.
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Central to the exhibition is Flanagan’s Chess Set (1971). The work is a reimagining of a traditional game of chess, featuring 32 dense green cotton fabric pieces on a cork base. Rather than two opposing and distinguished sets of pieces, however, Flanagan creates two identical sets remarkable only by the base of the piece which is covered with either green or black felt. Flanagan prohibits players from referencing these markers during play, however, transforming the logical underpinnings of the game into one with memory at its core and a scarcely inevitable chaos as its conclusion. This original, even mischievous, approach to a game renowned for its embodiment of pure reason and strategy underscores Flanagan’s approach to themes that recur throughout the exhibition. Created in 1971 in an edition of 40, Chess Set is composed from aluminum, cloth, cork, and sand—materials used throughout the artist’s early oeuvre when the soft sculpture was a particular preoccupation. Editions of Chess Set are included in several major European museum collections including the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
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"For all their grounding in photography, Gordon’s pieces invite painterly comparisons: his composites are like stripped-down versions of seventeenth-century Dutch tabletop still-lifes, rendered in a Fauvist palette."—Johanna Fateman, The New Yorker
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Patamaterplique (c. 1999), a bronze work never before exhibited, may be observed alongside Desert Island (1999) and Small Presidential Election (1990) as significant examples of the artist’s material sensitivity and formal inventiveness. Cast from clay models, their surfaces retain the immediacy of the artist’s hand and act as mediators between the language of Flanagan’s soft sculpture and the unyielding formal qualities of the medium. Several elements of Patamaterplique’s composition reference Père Ubu, a character in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi who is depicted as a large, almost spherical creature with a spiral marked across his chest and stomach. Flanagan’s anthropomorphic form blends this reference with a dislocated version of his beloved subject—the hare.
Flanagan repeatedly utilizes animal forms to bring to mind a myriad of references drawn from both myth and cultural memory. Small Presidential Election (1990) uses the donkey and the elephant to evoke the two American political parties. With lightness of touch, Flanagan asks us to reconsider the absurdism of any absolute allegiance to the engines of modern political discourse. Similarly, Desert Island’s morphological shape includes the two figures sitting, facing away from one another, each a victim of his own stubbornness.
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Barry Flanagan at work, Pietrasanta Fine Arts Inc., New York, 1996. Courtesy the Estate of Barry Flanagan.
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Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) and Simon Watson Taylor (1923–2005), eds. “What is ’Pataphysics? [’Pataphysics Is the Only Science].” Cover after a design by Juan Esteban Fassio (1924–1980). Special issue, Evergreen Review 4, no. 13 (1960). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197062. © 1960 by Evergreen Review. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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"Left with the inertia of sculpture may I say the form of dance is in rapture to me in imagination and spirit."
—Barry Flanagan -
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