Laurie Parsons

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Laurie Parsons (* 1959 in Mount Kisco , New York , United States ) is a minimalist artist who withdrew from the art business after ten years and is now socially committed .

life and work

Laurie Parsons had a middle-class, cosmopolitan family. Her mother ran a gallery and gave her early contact with art and artists. Laurie Parsons completed an art degree at Yale University until 1983 . While making a living as a publishing clerk, she experimented with photographs, texts and wood painting .

In 1986 she picked up discarded, discarded household and industrial items on walks. She thought that these things had that special charisma like that of works of art. In 1987 she took part in a group exhibition with her found objects that had been declared art objects. The following year she had a solo exhibition at the Lorence-Monk Gallery in New York . In 1989 she did the same with Rolf Ricke , whose Cologne gallery was one of the first European locations for minimalist artists such as Barry Le Va , Richard Serra and Keith Sonnier . The found objects laid out on the floor along the walls, which, depending on their state of preservation, could still be recognized as objects or only as mere materials (if they were not already there from the start), had lost their function and thus their everyday value. They were in no way related to each other and only showed the chronology of their discovery. Among them was a pile of charcoal, a weathered pulley, a battered suitcase, a yellow nylon sling, an uprooted tree trunk, a deformed bed frame, and the like. Nothing was sold in New York, but in Cologne the object arrangement went to a collector as a whole . Parsons then demanded that nothing more of what she would show in the future should be allowed to be sold. She also appealed not to make items that have already been sold available for exhibition purposes.

In 1988 Parsons removed the top layer of rubble from a 150 square meter plateau next to the Hudson River . She received a mixture of detritus and small parts of civilization, garbage drifts like soy sauce sachets or lottery tickets, as well as lost items like keys or bicycle valves. The planned complete covering of the gallery floor did not materialize because their work called Field of Rubble was destroyed in the interim storage facility. She named three of the works she created the following year: Pieces , Dried Mud, Rocks, etc and troubled . For her second exhibition in the Lorence-Monk Gallery in 1990, she left the rooms completely empty and the invitation cards contained nothing other than the gallery address. At the end of the year she installed video cameras in her studio apartment. The live images were broadcast to a gallery around the clock. If you were absent, you could only see the inanimate rooms and at night the broadcast continued continuously, although no one at the broadcast location could watch. In 1991 Udo Kittelmann offered Parsons a presentation in the Forum Kunst Rottweil. She moved into the showroom for seven weeks and did a job in a local mental hospital with developmentally disabled children . The action attracted many locals who have never been to this museum. You were invited to spend time with Parsons. In 1992 Parsons participated in the exhibition The Big Nothing at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Most artists played hide and seek with their art and installed it on the ceiling or in other unlikely locations. Parsons brought in a pile of 300 one-dollar bills and told the guards not to interfere when people were helping, which was actually happening all too soon.

Parsons finally switched to immaterial exhibition work, for example by training admission and supervisory staff, who are usually not allowed to comment on or even evaluate the art, to become walking information carriers and art discussants.

In 1994 Parsons left the art business in order to turn to the socially disadvantaged, mainly the mentally ill . She worked with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). In addition to her social commitment, she writes, or as she puts it: "collects words as she has previously collected things". However, she does not plan to publish it during her lifetime.

In 2019 the solo exhibition Laurie Parsons was held at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach . A Body of Work 1987 , in which only works from 1987 were shown, which Parsons put together under the title A Body of Work and sold in total to a German private collection.

style

The Internet portal galleriesnow.net writes that Laurie Parsons' things that have been picked up and become functionless bear the stigmata of abandonment and the erosion of time. In the museum, these small urban wrecks took on a particular strength and led the street in a brutal way into the homeland of culture. Although Parsons, says the art critic Martin Herbert, was the first artist to bring street garbage into the gallery, retrospective aspects can be seen in her work, above all the “ ready-made ” idea, the “ environment ” method, which was used in the later 1960s was predominant, or the post-minimalist litter installation.

Both gallery snow and Herbert, as Bob Nickas, luminary and curator in the field of abstract art , discovered in the Field of Rubble Robert Smithson's practice again: the one whose "non-sites" which referred to as "landscape extractions," on the other the “entropic dimension”, which a non-rigid work of art brings with it, which can adapt to the respective room width and which is inevitably changed by the public inspection.

The idea of ​​the accessibility of their gravel field project was the starting point for Parsons to turn to the interaction between artist and audience, which found its strongest expression in the Rottweiler event.

The empty Lorence-Monk Gallery in 1990 recalled the empty space continuum from Yves Klein to Michael Asher to Christopher D'Arcangelo, Herbert explains further possible role models. With the knowledge of Parsons' departure from the art business, the French art historian Anna Dezeuze looks back on the empty gallery, however, less than a work of art than provocation, dissent and criticism.

In addition, according to Herbert, Parsons has traits of Charlotte Posenenske and Cady Noland in itself, namely the feeling of being uncomfortable with the art business and ultimately the exit from it (Posenenske) as well as the "after-sales control", that is, the wish after not exhibiting what was sold (Noland).

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g h Renate Puvogel : Lehrgeld. Twenty artist portraits . Oktagon Verlag, Cologne 1995, ISBN 3-89611-006-3 , Laurie Parsons, p. 30-37 (also in: Artis , June / August 1991, pp. 28-33).
  2. a b c d Kim Levin: Laurie Parsons . In: Art Forum . International. tape 125 , January / February, January 1994, Operating System Art - A Retrospective, p. 143-147 .
  3. a b c d e f g h i j k l m Bob Nickas: Theft Is Vision . Collected Writings and Interviews (=  Documents Series . Volume 2 ). JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG & Les Presses du Réel, Zurich, Dijon 2008, ISBN 978-3-905770-36-0 , Whatever Happened to Laurie Parsons ?, p. 98-105 (English, mutualart.com [accessed November 26, 2017] First published in Artforum , April 2003; Internet version title: Dematerial Girl , also April 2003). Theft Is Vision ( Memento of the original dated December 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mutualart.com
  4. a b c d e f g h Martin Herbert: Tell Them I Said No . Sternberg Press, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-95679-200-7 , A Realer Real. Laurie Parsons, S. 95-101 (English).
  5. Review: Laurie Parsons. A Body of Work 1987. In: Museum Abteiberg. Retrieved April 3, 2020 .
  6. a b Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Félix González-Torres. Mamco, Geneva. In: galleriesnow.net. 2017, accessed on November 26, 2017 .
  7. Bob Nickas: On Laurie Parsons, 578 Broadway, 11th Floor, May 1990 . In: Mathieu Copeland, John Armleder , Laurent Le Bon , Gustav Metzger , Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Phillpot, Philippe Pirotte (eds.): Voids. A retrospective . Center Pompidou, Kunsthalle Bern, Center Pompidou-Metz. JRP Ringier, Ecart Publications John Armleder, Zurich, Geneva 2009, ISBN 978-3-03764-017-3 , pp. 113-119 (English).
  8. Anna Dezeuze: Nothing Works. The Void. In: tate.org.uk. January 1, 2011, accessed November 26, 2017 .

Web links