Jon Kessler
09 Apr - 25 May 2008
JON KESSLER
"he Palace at 4 A.M."
9th April - 25th May 2008
Louisiana has let a technological monster into its exhibition halls. Jon Kessler’s installation work The Palace at 4 A.M. is a noisy termite’s nest of surveillance cameras, more than a hundred monitors, kilometres of cable, giant posters and mechanical sculptures. In short, a monumental political work that gives free rein to the global paranoia after the terrorist attack of 11th September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq.
The Palace at 4 A.M. is absolutely Kessler’s most ambitious production to date. It was created in 2005 for the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and helped to re-situate him as one of the USA’s most important contemporary artists after a break of almost ten years from the mid-1990s on.
Jon Kessler is himself a New Yorker and lives a few streets from Ground Zero, where the attack of 11th September 2001 resulted, in an instant, in a new view of the world.
The encounter with Kessler’s installation is like walking into a labyrinth of war news from Iraq, TV programmes empty of content, commercials, propaganda and film clips. The work spreads both outward and inward, fills the exhibition space completely, and penetrates all the way into those who dare to enter. In the flow of information, there arise gaps and mutations that make us see the powerful meaning of images. Nothing is hidden, and there is nowhere to hide.
The work is named after one of Alberto Giacometti’s Surrealist masterpieces from 1931.
Biography
Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1957. He exhibited for the first time at Artists Space in N.Y. in 1983, and since then has exhibited at museums and galleries in the USA, Europe and Japan. Kessler is a professor of visual art at Columbia University
"he Palace at 4 A.M."
9th April - 25th May 2008
Louisiana has let a technological monster into its exhibition halls. Jon Kessler’s installation work The Palace at 4 A.M. is a noisy termite’s nest of surveillance cameras, more than a hundred monitors, kilometres of cable, giant posters and mechanical sculptures. In short, a monumental political work that gives free rein to the global paranoia after the terrorist attack of 11th September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq.
The Palace at 4 A.M. is absolutely Kessler’s most ambitious production to date. It was created in 2005 for the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and helped to re-situate him as one of the USA’s most important contemporary artists after a break of almost ten years from the mid-1990s on.
Jon Kessler is himself a New Yorker and lives a few streets from Ground Zero, where the attack of 11th September 2001 resulted, in an instant, in a new view of the world.
The encounter with Kessler’s installation is like walking into a labyrinth of war news from Iraq, TV programmes empty of content, commercials, propaganda and film clips. The work spreads both outward and inward, fills the exhibition space completely, and penetrates all the way into those who dare to enter. In the flow of information, there arise gaps and mutations that make us see the powerful meaning of images. Nothing is hidden, and there is nowhere to hide.
The work is named after one of Alberto Giacometti’s Surrealist masterpieces from 1931.
Biography
Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1957. He exhibited for the first time at Artists Space in N.Y. in 1983, and since then has exhibited at museums and galleries in the USA, Europe and Japan. Kessler is a professor of visual art at Columbia University