Museum Tinguely

Following his travels throughout Asia in the 1970s, Cheng shifted his focus from exhibiting stand-alone objects within conventional art galleries to creating large-scale, kinetic installations and competing for Percent-for-Art public art commissions. In the 1960s, many cities across the US adopted a Percent-for-Art program where one percent of every development project’s budget was allocated towards public art projects, in effect creating a new need for and emphasis on art in public spaces across the country. In 1979, soon after Cheng staged his self-initiated Natural Museum of Modern Art, he was awarded his first official public art commission for Seattle Underwater. Cheng’s background in industrial design provided the skills he needed to create compelling and practical proposals, and his experimental approach to artmaking enhanced his ability to engage with a variety of environmental factors and materials. Cheng views his public art projects as opportunities to work on a larger scale and reach a wider audience. He also sees them as an expanded investigation into what he terms 'human erosion'. For Cheng, the eventual deterioration of many of his public projects due to vandalism or lack of maintenance, as well as the ephemerality of artworks made from organic or natural materials, become metaphors for the precarity of a climate and landscape irrevocably changed by humans and their built environment. In his Pico Boulevard studio, Cheng developed the first prototype of a S and Rake Art Tool, which, in its earliest iteration, scored lines of sand in crude linear patterns. In 1979, he created another prototype on the second floor of his Santa Monica Pier studio above the Natural Museum of Modern Art. With this new device Cheng operated an expanded XY plotter retrofitted with droppers, scrapers, brushes, and drawing tools made from his collected organic specimens to carve into, shape, and smooth over the surface of a bed of sand. The resulting installation was titled Drawing at the Beach. Over the years, Cheng has continued to refine this Art Tool, integrating parts of the original sand rake art tools into newer incarnations that have created increasingly sophisticated installations for venues such as: Artec ‘93, in Nagoya, Japan in 1993; the Sculpture Center in New York in 2000; and REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2022, the latter of which was co-restored by the organizers of this exhibition in preparation for its current presentation. Fundamentally, the rakes are Art Tools to be used to create increasingly complex sand drawings. To make the installation Cheng works alone at the site over the course of up to two weeks. Using a controller, he instructs his tool to drag different patterns, drop sand, blow air, and drip water to produce a layered intuitive drawing that is erased at the conclusion of the exhibition. A behind-the-scenes look at Cheng’s process can be seen in the related video on view in this gallery. The Sand Rake Art Tool raises methodological questions about the status of the artwork (for example, should the tool also be considered an artwork unto itself?) as well as a profound conundrum around preservation given the sand drawings’ ephemeral nature and dependence on the artist himself.

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and comprehensive solo exhibitions at Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; SALT Galata, Istanbul; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Cultural Centre of Belgrade; Belvedere 21, Vienna. Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013, 2024), Athens (2013, 2015), Quebec (2014), Helsinki (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019) and Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST). Ressler has completed forty-two films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013. In 2002, Ressler won the first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and he is the first prize winner of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016. For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues (2011-2016). 2019–2023 Ressler has directed Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Configurations of the project were solo exhibitions at Camera Austria, Graz (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2022); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (2022); Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn (2022); LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (2023); The Showroom, London (2023).