For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960
February 2 – June 29, 2024
How can we attempt to understand the value systems that surround us and guide our lives?
With this question, For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960 brings together 80 artists from across generations and geographies to explore one of the fundamental concerns of our time: an increased attention to the values and systems around us that has arisen out of confrontations with established social, political, and cultural power structures. Grounded in the systems-based thinking and art-making that emerged out of the transnational conceptual art tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s, this exhibition builds on the artistic strategies of this complex era that continue to reverberate through art and the world today.
All exhibitions presented at The Warehouse begin with works from The Rachofsky Collection. The starting point for this project was our desire to look more closely at conceptually oriented work, and in doing so consider important works in the collection by artists such as Giulio Paolini, Jiro Takamatsu, John Latham, Mario Merz, Judy Chicago, Piero Manzoni, Sherrie Levine, Mona Hatoum, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The visual, conceptual, and institutional strategies of these artists act as guideposts for a series of themes that play out over the 16 galleries of The Warehouse.
Embedded in many contemporaneous social shifts, protests, psychological traumas, and philosophical questions is a vibrating awareness that current value systems are deeply in flux, in ways that are both hopeful and devastating. In many of these systems—and the artworks that explore them—values are codified and communicated through verbal and non-verbal language, as well as by patterns of behavior. Our hope is that the experience of the exhibition unfolds as a series of questions and conversations around themes connected to the structures that fix values within society— be that power relationships and the frictions between the individual and the majority; art institutions and their professed material and social values; currency and the flow of value; strictures that guide and control the body; language, measurement, and geometry; technology and nature; and mythology, the cosmos, and the unknown.
A catalogue published jointly by The Warehouse and Monacelli Press will accompany the exhibition. The publication includes a conversation between Thomas Feulmer and Lisa Le Feuvre, plate images, and a Value Systems Reader with over 50 texts selected by artists in the exhibition and the curators.
Artists in the Exhibition: Birgir Andrésson, Eleanor Antin, Pia Arke, Conrad Bakker, Alighiero Boetti, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, André Cadere, Judy Chicago, Hanne Darboven, Simon Denny, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Ditte Ejlerskov & Evamarie Lindahl, Andrea Fraser, Tom Friedman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Renée Green, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Hayes, Minoru Hirata, Jenny Holzer, Michio Horikawa, Sanja Iveković, Christian Jankowski, On Kawara, Devin Kenny, Ed Kienholz, Soun-Gui Kim , Ed Krasinski, Agnieszka Kurant, John Latham, Annette Lawrence, Seung-taek Lee, Lee Kun-Yong, Simone Leigh, Sherrie Levine, Roelof Louw, Lee Lozano, Jill Magid, Mangelos, Piero Manzoni, Corey McCorkle, Steve McQueen, Cildo Meireles, Mario Merz, Gustav Metzger, Sarah Meyohas, Jeremy Millar, Tony Morgan, Ivan Moudov, Bruce Nauman, Lorraine O’Grady, Giulio Paolini, Lygia Pape, Julia Phillips, Howardena Pindell, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Charlotte Posenenske, Elizabeth Price, Walid Raad / The Atlas Group, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Sherrill Roland, Martha Rosler, Cameron Rowland, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Ruff, Tino Sehgal, Jiro Takamatsu, Cheyney Thompson, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Antonio Vega Macotela, Mark Wallinger, Amanda Williams, Nico Williams, Fred Wilson, Yukinori Yanagi, and Carey Young.