The Jewish Museum is hosting an unusual exhibition—one where visitors can walk off with a piece of art. "Take Me (I'm Yours)" encourages museum goers to touch, get directly involved with the art and even take some of it home. The exhibition features art by 42 international and intergenerational artists, many of who created new and site-specific works for the exhibition. By asking visitors to move beyond viewers only to have a close encounter with art, "Take Me (I’m Yours)" aims to create a democratic space for visitors to take ownership of artworks and curate their personal art collections by subverting the usual politics of value, consumerism, and the museum experience, according to The Jewish Museum.
Due to the participatory aspect of the exhibition, its form and the presentation in the galleries are in constant flux as visitors engage and change the art on view. To further present the visitor experience, the museum is posted Instagram pictures tagged with #TakeMeImYoursNYC in a scrolling grid on its website.
"Take Me (I’m Yours)" at the Jewish Museum builds upon an iconic exhibition of the same name that took place in 1995 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Conceived by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist Christian Boltanski, it included works by twelve artists, several of whom are participating again here. Obrist and Boltanski took inspiration from a host of histories and ideologies related to possession, from the anarchist idea that “ownership is theft” to the post-1960s dematerialization of the object in conceptual art.
Restaging the exhibition at the Jewish Museum offers the occasion to rethink the role of the museum as an archive. Instead of collecting works and preserving them for all eternity, the museum is giving them away. Sharing pervades Jewish life, beginning in the home and extending out to the community. In "Take Me (I'm Yours)," the exhibition becomes the home and the art is what is shared with the museum's visitors. The show is on view from September 16, 2016 to February 5, 2017.
Participating Artists
aaajiao, Kelly Akashi, Uri Aran, Dana Awartani, Cara Benedetto, Christian Boltanski, Andrea Bowers, James Lee Byars, Luis Camnitzer, Ian Cheng, Heman Chong, Maria Eichhorn, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, General Sisters, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Yngve Holen, Carsten Höller, Jonathan Horowitz, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Alex Israel, Koo Jeong A, Alison Knowles, Angelika Markul, Adriana Martinez, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jonas Mekas, Rivane Neuenschwander, Yoko Ono, Sondra Perry, Rachel Rose, Martha Rosler, Allan Ruppersberg, Tino Sehgal, Daniel Spoerri, Haim Steinbach, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Amalia Ulman and Lawrence Weiner.
A gallery performance of James Lee Byars Be Quiet, 1980 takes place on Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m.
The exhibition includes the work Untitled" (USA Today) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1990. The piece was recently presented at The Met Breuer in “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” The installation is made up solely of hard candies in colorful wrappers of blue, red and silver that spill from a corner. The collective weight of the candies is around 300 lbs optimally when fully replenished, according to MoMA, and diminishes as candies are steadily removed, mimicking the weight loss of one suffering from AIDS as the artist did. The artwork is a physical manifestation of its premise that instability and change are constant. Profoundly human, the art work is both intimate and fragile and destabilizes with every encounter yet retains its core essence even as its physical form changes.
Born in Cuba, Gonzalez-Torres settled in New York City in the late 70s. An engaged social activist, he participated in the art collective Group Material in the 1980s and in a short time developed an influential body of work of Conceptual Art and Minimalism that mixed political critique, emotional affect with formal concerns of art. He died in 1996 from complications of AIDS. was
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"Untitled" (USA Today) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1990. Candies individually wrapped in red, silver, and blue cellophane, endless supply. Installation view of "Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form," Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, January 28 - March 14, 2011. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.
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"Untitled" (USA Today) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1990. Candies individually wrapped in red, silver, and blue cellophane, endless supply. Installation view of "Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form," Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, January 28 - March 14, 2011. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.
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BASIC FACTS: "Take Me (I'm Yours)" remains on view through February 5, 2017. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York, NY 10128. www.thejewishmuseum.org.
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