4601 Collins Ave
Indian Beach Park
33140 Miami Beach FL
In partnership with Art in America
This year Black & White Gallery/Project Space is changing up its format and will debut the Savonarola Suite installation by New Jersey-based artist Gregory Perkel, marking the artist’s first solo art fair presentation.
This ambitious cross-media installation explores the current cultural discourse and offers viewers the opportunity to interpret recent art market history from multiple perspectives of its various protagonists. It unveils existing deep stratification, ambiguities and dissonances as well as clears the stage for a new cultural ecosystem to be supported by diverse forms of visual content and media channels.
The installation consists of two elements: a diptych of large-scale, visually stunning video works, documenting (Investigation) and burning (Savonarola Suite) four decades of art market history to project at Pulse Play platform for video art, and a set of photographs under the same title as the Savonarola Suite video work to reinforce the installation’s visual language.
Curator: Tatyana Okshteyn
PULSE Play Platform for Video Art: Video Diptych
Investigation is a single-channel video that retraces and reveals four decades of the recent art market phenomenon of nonstop exhibitions, art fairs, biennials, etc. through monthly print issues of Art in America and Art News magazines (a total of some 700 volumes) from 1977, when the artist first arrived to New York City from Moscow, until 2017—a time when the Internet had already reshaped every aspect of our lives. Paging through each magazine’s monthly issue chronicles compelling art market events that resonate poignantly with art market participants directly affected by its movements and the social relations it creates. Investigation video provides a unique opportunity to engage audience in exploration of the complex and sometimes paradoxical evolution of the recent art market and contemplate the wide-ranging effects of information in those pages prior to their destruction by fire.
Savonarola Suite is a single-channel video that documents the staged real-life destruction of all 700 monthly issues of Art in America and ArtNews magazines by fire to mark the end of an era they reflected. Documenting a fiery act of destruction by burning all magazines, one by one, called for the design and fabrication of a steel grating structure, named “Savonarola” in honor of the famous 15th century Italian monk Girolamo Savonarola who appealed to the citizens of Florence to burn “bourgeois” luxury items, including paintings, in the flames of a vast fire set in the central square of the city. Many answered his call, including the great Botticelli who threw his drawings into the fire and never touched a paint brush again. In fact, this ritual act by Botticelli became the conceptual framework for the Savonarola Suite. As the incineration of the magazines begins, it becomes evident that the act of burning, by the very nature of fire, is giving birth to a new form of visual reality.
Booth 500: Photography
Savonarola Suite photo exhibition features a limited portfolio of photographs selected in conjunction with the artist himself from thousands of photographs he took during the real-time burning of 700 monthly issues of Art in America and ArtNews magazines. On view, will be photographs from a distinct but related body of work that, in different ways, showcases Gregory Perkel’s sustained engagement with process and form.
Savonarola Suite Artist Book (Two-Volume Set)
Black & White Gallery / Project Space and Perkeland* present a new limited edition artist book published in November 2019 to accompany a premiere presentation of the same title at Pulse Art Fair | Pulse Play in December 2019. Designed and signed by the artist, the set includes original inkjet archival prints of images documenting a fiery act of destruction by burning selected issues of Art in America and ArtNews magazines from which the entire installation draws.
Publication Details
November 2019
Book design: Gregory Perkel
English
Hardcover
100 pages | original archival inkjet prints / each volume
10 x 12.5 in / each volume
Edition: 50
Signed and numbered by the artist
*Perkeland is an art production enterprise founded and operated by Gregory Perkel
About the artist
Gregory Perkel was born in Ukraine in 1939, studied art in Moscow and moved to the United States in 1977. Perkel is an established American Conceptual artist working in a variety of media. His work critiques the value systems of market economy and those found in the art world. Over the years Perkel has developed his own unique structural language to interrogate diverse themes often working with source material and manipulating imagery to transform it into something totally new. In this way, he inhabits existing material, bending it to his will to form an original and sometimes unexpected narrative of his own (re)construction, creating new versions of a story every time. Among his conceptual installations are Consumed, Taplin Gallery, Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton, NJ (2010), Manuscripts of the Cardboard Culture, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ (2007), Artist Against The State: Perestroika Revisited, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, NY (2006). Gregory Perkel lives and works in New Jersey, USA.
