Showing posts with label exhibition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exhibition. Show all posts
Come Spring: Paul Chan & Hito Steyerl
Label:
contemporary art,
essay,
exhibition
Sean Snyder: No Apocalypse, Not Now
For a small catalogue/brochure that visitors can purchase at the Kunstverein for one euro, I have adapted and updated an unpublished article on Snyder from 2009, "Two or Three Things I Think I Know About Sean Snyder." At the time, I regarded the text as an attempt to state some "basic banalities" about an artist whose reception, I felt, was still in its infancy. While things have not really moved forward in the meantime, the show in Cologne might help change his. It certainly convinced me that one of these days I have to write an entirely new text that more fully reflects my current thoughts on Snyder's practice.
Label:
contemporary art,
essay,
exhibition
This Is Television
Label:
contemporary art,
exhibition,
history in motion
A Movie Without the Picture at The Movies
On 12 June, Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without
the Picture was non-screened at The Movies
in Amsterdam. In the case of the original 1979 version at the Aero Theater in
Santa Monica and in some later iterations of the piece, the movie shown was The
Misfits (1961); in 1983 in New York, it was
The Hustler (also 1961), preceded
by the Chuck Jones cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? In 2012, the film selection has progressed to the
late 1970s: as most audience members will have realized instantly upon hearing
the first notes of the soundtrack in the darkened theater, this time the film was Saturday
Night Fever (1977).
The piece’s anachronistic update was one subject of the conversation that I moderated
afterwards (in the cinema’s café) with Eric de Bruyn and Andrea Fraser—with Louise herself in the position of “fact checker.” Moving from the dying days of Old Hollywood to a rather remarkable hybrid of
gritty 1970s urban drama and neo-“cinema of attractions” blockbuster spectacle
that is almost contemporaneous with A Movie will be Shown Without the
Picture itself, Lawler gave us much food
for thought.
As Andrea rightly stressed, Saturday Night Fever teems with metaphors of psychological and social projection, and it brings a new form of precarious masculine performance into play. Meanwhile, what was noticeable across a range of audience reactions—from audible snoring, relaxed beer-drinking and talking to smartphone use—was the way in which the non-picture foregrounds audience performance. Andrea once remarked that you don’t simply look at a work by Lawler: you are addressed and interpellated by it. A Movie spawns forms of audience performance without making grand claims about activating or emancipating the spectator.
While the piece can obviously related back to various avant-garde attacks on the cinema and the filmic image, as a performative intervention in the cinematic apparatus it can also function as an anticipatory critique of much later relational and “social” art practice. Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn allegedly once bowed out of a project with the malapropism “Include me out!”, and the paradoxical effect of A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture is that it does indeed include the spectator out. Or does it exclude her in? If, referencing Louise’s phrase Why Picture’s Now?, we ask “Why A Movie Without the Picture now?”, this gently insidious quality would certainly have to be part of the answer.
Eric raised the issue of the term picture itself, which is obviously both very specific and heavily connoted in the context of late-1970s art practice. Why the “picture” (as opposed to, say "image") in A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture? We did not get around to fully addressing this, and as usual a lot of loose ends remained. I will continue to work on this piece and the aim is to end this “Performance in Residence” project with a small publication. Many thanks to Louise, Andrea, Eric, Frederique Bergholtz, Tanja Baudoin, Ann Goldstein and the Stedelijk staff members and everybody else who made this possible—including the audience members.
The piece’s anachronistic update was one subject of the conversation that I moderated
afterwards (in the cinema’s café) with Eric de Bruyn and Andrea Fraser—with Louise herself in the position of “fact checker.” Moving from the dying days of Old Hollywood to a rather remarkable hybrid of
gritty 1970s urban drama and neo-“cinema of attractions” blockbuster spectacle
that is almost contemporaneous with A Movie will be Shown Without the
Picture itself, Lawler gave us much food
for thought. As Andrea rightly stressed, Saturday Night Fever teems with metaphors of psychological and social projection, and it brings a new form of precarious masculine performance into play. Meanwhile, what was noticeable across a range of audience reactions—from audible snoring, relaxed beer-drinking and talking to smartphone use—was the way in which the non-picture foregrounds audience performance. Andrea once remarked that you don’t simply look at a work by Lawler: you are addressed and interpellated by it. A Movie spawns forms of audience performance without making grand claims about activating or emancipating the spectator.
While the piece can obviously related back to various avant-garde attacks on the cinema and the filmic image, as a performative intervention in the cinematic apparatus it can also function as an anticipatory critique of much later relational and “social” art practice. Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn allegedly once bowed out of a project with the malapropism “Include me out!”, and the paradoxical effect of A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture is that it does indeed include the spectator out. Or does it exclude her in? If, referencing Louise’s phrase Why Picture’s Now?, we ask “Why A Movie Without the Picture now?”, this gently insidious quality would certainly have to be part of the answer.
Eric raised the issue of the term picture itself, which is obviously both very specific and heavily connoted in the context of late-1970s art practice. Why the “picture” (as opposed to, say "image") in A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture? We did not get around to fully addressing this, and as usual a lot of loose ends remained. I will continue to work on this piece and the aim is to end this “Performance in Residence” project with a small publication. Many thanks to Louise, Andrea, Eric, Frederique Bergholtz, Tanja Baudoin, Ann Goldstein and the Stedelijk staff members and everybody else who made this possible—including the audience members.
Label:
contemporary art,
exhibition
Abstract Possible
It is an excellent selection of texts by authors including Ina Blom, Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, Brian Holmes and Gerald Raunig. Meyer Schapiro's classic text "Nature of Abstract Art" is also part of the mix, as is my less classic essay "Living With Abstraction" (the version from Texte zur Kunst, not the longer book chapter from Idols of the Market). The book's design has negative effect on the readability of the English texts, which have been relegated to rather narrow colums, but no doubt the book is mostly aimed at Spanish-speaking (and, more to the point, Spanish-reading) audiences.
http://abstractpossible.org/
http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/8789
Label:
essay,
exhibition
The Marx Lounge
Idols of the Market is among the books in the Dutch version of Alfredo Jaar's The Marx Lounge, which is on view at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam until 5 June. The project involves a great number of lectures, seminars and other events - including a screening of Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's film The Forgotten Space on the 19th of May, which I will introduce. [Edit: the screening has been moved to May 24, and co-director Noël Burch will participate.]
http://www.smba.nl/
Label:
book,
exhibition
Update: Books and Exhibitions
My upcoming book Idols of the Market has been slightly delayed, mainly because the original editor decided to prioritize her son's budding career as a child actor, but it is now entering the final stage of prod
uction. The related exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm at BAK in Utrecht closed on March 1, 2009.The project The Return of Religion and Other Myths, of which The Art of Iconoclasm was one part, will be completed this summer with a "critical reader" that collects lectures delived in the context of The Return of Religion, as well as some new contributions. But while this closes the BAK project, a version or a sequel of The Art of Iconoclasm may be shown early next year in New York - funding permitting.
Interesting reviews of The Art of Iconoclasm have appeared in, among others, Springerin and Texte zur Kunst. Whereas the Springerin review seems to be print only, the The Texte zur Kunst review has only been published on their web site, and can be found here:
http://www.textezurkunst.de/daily/category/gesehen-und-bewertet/
Label:
book,
exhibition,
iconoclasm
The Art of Iconoclasm
Until 1 March 2009, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht is showing my exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm as part of the project The Return of Religion and Other Myths, which is related to my book Idols of the Market. The Return of Religion and Other Myths also includes a series of lectures and presentations in early 2009, from January 11 to March 1, with speakers ranging from theorists such as Jan Assmann, Silvia Naef and Marc De Kesel to some of the artists in the exhibition. Their contributions, as well as other texts, will figure in the critical reader that will close the project later in 2009. As usual, reviews in the Dutch press are a pile of populist bile, with critics (Jip, Janneke, and the rest) screaming blue murder over a show that dares to posit an and emancipated viewer. The most absurd case was that of a glorified intern writing for the protestant daily Trouw who spent weeks working on a piece, talking to me for hours on the phone in the process, only to devote half her piece to the rantings of an employee of the Museum for Religious Art in the tiny town of Uden, who was predicably enraged by the whole project. I must be doing something right.
This is the text on the show in the project guide:
"The news of God’s death appears to have been premature. Religion is everywhere in contemporary politics and in the media; it has returned on the scene as a politicized media phenomenon creating controversies around righteous beliefs and their images. Religion is increasingly a matter of media controversy, of “image wars,” rather than daily observance or sophisticated theology.
"In a way, this development can be understood as consequential: monotheism was always deeply concerned with appearances, with images—after all, it was defined by the rejection of idols. In many religious teachings false gods, worshipped in the guise of “graven images,” are defined in visual terms. In the Christian tradition, the Second Commandment dictates that of the true God no images must be made. Visibility is the realm of the false gods. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation further mitigated this ba
n on representing God, since in Jesus God had taken on the form of a mortal man; however, the representation of Christ remained potentially contentious, as various episodes of iconoclasm show. On the other hand, while Islam is exceedingly strict in its ban on images (tasweer) that may lead to the idolatrous “association” (shirk) of other deities with Allah, it also has a history of depictions of the Prophet, including a still-living tradition of popular images in Shiite Islam. As much as demagogues would like us to believe otherwise, no religion is monolithic, and nothing is more unstable and contested than the definition of idolatry.
"With the rise of fundamentalist movements, many authors have come to see monotheism itself as pathological or evil. From the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas and 9/11 to the murder of Theo van Gogh over the film Submission, the Danish cartoon riots and the “Muhammad the Bear” affair, it is Islam that is often singled out for attacks; others, however, blame monotheism as such. Renowned Egyptologist and scholar of religion Jan Assmann has sparked fierce debates with his assertion that the “Mosaic distinction between the true God and idols created a kind of intolerance and violence not known before.” In the context of today’s images, monotheism and the rejection of idols are often presented as inevitably leading to intolerance, iconoclasm, and violence. This grim portrayal is one of the dominant contemporary myths about religion.
"Since Roman times, the “Greek” critique of mythic narratives and the “Jewish” critique of idolatrous images have become entwined in numerous ways. On the one hand, the Christian church adopted the philosophical critique of myths for their attacks on “idolatrous” religions; on the other hand, since the Enlightenment monotheism itself came to be criticized as being riddled with myths, as modern thinkers such as Feuerbach and Nietzsche appropriated monotheistic iconoclasm and Greek philosophy and turned it against religion itself. Originated in the wake of the Enlightenment, modern art was always a deconstruction of the rules of representation and of the images of Christian and other gods. There is not one single history of iconoclasm, but various interlinked and overlapping genealogies. While secularists create a radical distinction between “the secular West” on the one hand and religion (especially Islam) on the other, modern culture is profoundly indebted to religion; it sets free the secularizing impulse inherent in monotheism itself. The rejection of idolatry can be seen as a criticism of images that, while still dogmatic, was radicalized in modern thought and art.
"In refusing to regard iconoclasm merely as a pathological phenomenon associated with the religious other, this exhibition offers a counter-myth of iconoclasm. If both the narrative of secularization and that of the return of religion can be characterized as myths, this does not mean that they are simply untrue; according to a contemporary understanding of the term, myths are not just imagina
ry stories, but narratives that give historical events a contemporary meaning and can thereby, to some extent, shape reality. Rather than as “iconophobic” vandalism, iconoclasm at its most interesting can be seen as an attempt to redefine and re-imagine the image and to question what passes for visual culture—a culture whose images, including the images of religious confrontations that we are fed on a daily basis, may in fact be insufficiently visual. Do they not seem to be designed to obscure rather than reveal those processes that engender hatred and justify violence?
"In seeking to go “beyond the image wars,” the 2002 exhibition Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe disparaged iconoclasm as such in favor of an “iconoclash” that amounts to a questioning and examination of images that suspends the urge to smash them. However, iconoclasm was always more than mere image-smashing, and amidst today’s spectacular battle over images it is crucial to reclaim iconoclasm—and religion—from its fundamentalist appropriators. As a criticism of images, the monotheistic discourse on idolatry also paved the way for modern critiques—of tradition, of religion itself, of the com-modity, and of capitalism. Regarding religious criticism and secular critique as being of the same ilk, Iconoclash co-organizer sociologist Bruno Latour goes so far as to say that “suspicion has rendered us dumb.” Governments from Washington to Teheran must rejoice at such prose. The efficacy of critique in the face of terror and counter-terror is indeed doubtful, but rather than a disparagement of it as such, what is needed is a reexamination of our cultural and political deadlock, in which critique is either institutionalized and neutralized, or equated with dangerous political dissent and terrorism.
"This show is conceived as a three-dimensional essay in two parts, which stages a confrontation between various kinds of iconoclasm in order to chart the (im)possibilities of contemporary iconoclasm in art, theory, and cultural and political practice in general. These notes indicate some of the possible relations between the images and non-images in the show, without presuming to curtail their interplay.
Part 1: From Idol to Artwork (BAK)
"While iconoclasm is often equated with the destruction of art, it has, more interestingly, produced art. This part of the exhibition reflects on this process and on its consequences. Iconoclastic erasures can even come to function as an integral part of an artwork. Furthermore, the critique of cult images as idols stimulates their recontextualization as art: after centuries of neglect, from the Renaissance onward Apollo finds a new home in the museum, as fallen idols are reborn as art. By questioning cult images and removing them from their sacred context, monotheism facilitated their eventual transformation into objets d’art with a secularized aura. Certain objects associated with monotheism—medieval Madonnas, Persian illuminations—even came to be regarded primarily as priceless works of art. In the museum, one could say that Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad exist on the same abstract plane (even if didactic wall texts or visitor guides may treat them differently). At the same time, some critics have argued that the work of art remains ever in the service of “cult value.” Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish was based in part on eighteenth-century writer Charles De Brosses’s notion of African fetishism, which in his view was a worship of random objects that constituted a “primitive” prelude to idolatry; as the commodity fetish par excellence, is the modern artwork not just a barely secularized idol? If we look to the recent history of modern art, iconoclastic attacks on Greek and Roman idols-turned-art and the critique of representation in general led—among other things—to abstract paintings that seem to obey a secular Second Commandment, banning representation not because of a religious dogma, but as a consequence of a critique of art and its conditions.
"Even if artists such as Piet Mondrian had long abandoned the faith in which they were raised by the time they made their mature work, this rejection of representation mirrors the old monotheistic condemnation of idolatry, which has become an integral part of modern critical thought. In the current context, however, abstraction often comes to be associated with Islam: think for example of last year, when Cologne’s Cardinal Meisner complained that Gerhard Richter’s new abstract stainedglass window for his cathedral would be better suited for a mosque, or how full-body veils are seen by some as symptomatic of Islam’s abstract rejection of western “visual culture.” But then, is the “spectacle” of our media-saturated society not itself abstract to the core, programmed as it is by digital codes? Just how visible is our “visual culture”?
Part 2: Attacking the Spectacle (CM Studio)
"The second part of the exhibition, Attacking the Spectacle, focuses on the political contestations of what philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have characterized as the “Empire” of global capitalism. Here again the religious and the secular are in dialogue with each other. Modern theory and activism contain secularized traces of the Christian attack on Roman spectacles. For the early Christians, the Roman Empire was the paradigmatic idolatrous society. The early Christian rejection of spectacles remained a potent trope in western culture, ready to be reactivated, for instance by Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This “anti-spectacular” discourse was transformed and radicalized by modern theorists and artists; building on Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism for example, filmmaker and theorist Guy Debord attacked capitalism as a “society of the spectacle” whose images barely disguised that it is a system of exploitation and living death.
"Such critics may be truer descendants of monotheistic thinking than current fundamentalist terrorists who seem to outdo each other in the embrace of today’s spectacle of the media, and whose strategies are shaped by modern terrorism. Rather than resolutely rejecting the capitalist spectacle, fundamentalists transform it into a spectacle of their own, dominated by dualistic clashes between good and evil and effects-laden scenes, of which the images from 9/11 are the most famous example. How can we imagine forms of theory and practice that break the deadlock created by the war of images and counter-images, of terror and counterterror?"
Artists: Carl Andre, Carel Blotkamp, Guy Debord/Jean-Léon Gérôme, Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy, Hans Haacke, Arnoud Holleman, Imi Knoebel, Gert Jan Kocken, Krijn de Koning, Willem Oorebeek, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Haim Steinbach, Rosemarie Trockel, and Lidwien van de Ven.
http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/?click[id_projekt]=59
This is the text on the show in the project guide:
"The news of God’s death appears to have been premature. Religion is everywhere in contemporary politics and in the media; it has returned on the scene as a politicized media phenomenon creating controversies around righteous beliefs and their images. Religion is increasingly a matter of media controversy, of “image wars,” rather than daily observance or sophisticated theology.
"In a way, this development can be understood as consequential: monotheism was always deeply concerned with appearances, with images—after all, it was defined by the rejection of idols. In many religious teachings false gods, worshipped in the guise of “graven images,” are defined in visual terms. In the Christian tradition, the Second Commandment dictates that of the true God no images must be made. Visibility is the realm of the false gods. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation further mitigated this ba
n on representing God, since in Jesus God had taken on the form of a mortal man; however, the representation of Christ remained potentially contentious, as various episodes of iconoclasm show. On the other hand, while Islam is exceedingly strict in its ban on images (tasweer) that may lead to the idolatrous “association” (shirk) of other deities with Allah, it also has a history of depictions of the Prophet, including a still-living tradition of popular images in Shiite Islam. As much as demagogues would like us to believe otherwise, no religion is monolithic, and nothing is more unstable and contested than the definition of idolatry."With the rise of fundamentalist movements, many authors have come to see monotheism itself as pathological or evil. From the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas and 9/11 to the murder of Theo van Gogh over the film Submission, the Danish cartoon riots and the “Muhammad the Bear” affair, it is Islam that is often singled out for attacks; others, however, blame monotheism as such. Renowned Egyptologist and scholar of religion Jan Assmann has sparked fierce debates with his assertion that the “Mosaic distinction between the true God and idols created a kind of intolerance and violence not known before.” In the context of today’s images, monotheism and the rejection of idols are often presented as inevitably leading to intolerance, iconoclasm, and violence. This grim portrayal is one of the dominant contemporary myths about religion.
"Since Roman times, the “Greek” critique of mythic narratives and the “Jewish” critique of idolatrous images have become entwined in numerous ways. On the one hand, the Christian church adopted the philosophical critique of myths for their attacks on “idolatrous” religions; on the other hand, since the Enlightenment monotheism itself came to be criticized as being riddled with myths, as modern thinkers such as Feuerbach and Nietzsche appropriated monotheistic iconoclasm and Greek philosophy and turned it against religion itself. Originated in the wake of the Enlightenment, modern art was always a deconstruction of the rules of representation and of the images of Christian and other gods. There is not one single history of iconoclasm, but various interlinked and overlapping genealogies. While secularists create a radical distinction between “the secular West” on the one hand and religion (especially Islam) on the other, modern culture is profoundly indebted to religion; it sets free the secularizing impulse inherent in monotheism itself. The rejection of idolatry can be seen as a criticism of images that, while still dogmatic, was radicalized in modern thought and art.
"In refusing to regard iconoclasm merely as a pathological phenomenon associated with the religious other, this exhibition offers a counter-myth of iconoclasm. If both the narrative of secularization and that of the return of religion can be characterized as myths, this does not mean that they are simply untrue; according to a contemporary understanding of the term, myths are not just imagina
ry stories, but narratives that give historical events a contemporary meaning and can thereby, to some extent, shape reality. Rather than as “iconophobic” vandalism, iconoclasm at its most interesting can be seen as an attempt to redefine and re-imagine the image and to question what passes for visual culture—a culture whose images, including the images of religious confrontations that we are fed on a daily basis, may in fact be insufficiently visual. Do they not seem to be designed to obscure rather than reveal those processes that engender hatred and justify violence?
"In seeking to go “beyond the image wars,” the 2002 exhibition Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe disparaged iconoclasm as such in favor of an “iconoclash” that amounts to a questioning and examination of images that suspends the urge to smash them. However, iconoclasm was always more than mere image-smashing, and amidst today’s spectacular battle over images it is crucial to reclaim iconoclasm—and religion—from its fundamentalist appropriators. As a criticism of images, the monotheistic discourse on idolatry also paved the way for modern critiques—of tradition, of religion itself, of the com-modity, and of capitalism. Regarding religious criticism and secular critique as being of the same ilk, Iconoclash co-organizer sociologist Bruno Latour goes so far as to say that “suspicion has rendered us dumb.” Governments from Washington to Teheran must rejoice at such prose. The efficacy of critique in the face of terror and counter-terror is indeed doubtful, but rather than a disparagement of it as such, what is needed is a reexamination of our cultural and political deadlock, in which critique is either institutionalized and neutralized, or equated with dangerous political dissent and terrorism.
"This show is conceived as a three-dimensional essay in two parts, which stages a confrontation between various kinds of iconoclasm in order to chart the (im)possibilities of contemporary iconoclasm in art, theory, and cultural and political practice in general. These notes indicate some of the possible relations between the images and non-images in the show, without presuming to curtail their interplay.
Part 1: From Idol to Artwork (BAK)
"While iconoclasm is often equated with the destruction of art, it has, more interestingly, produced art. This part of the exhibition reflects on this process and on its consequences. Iconoclastic erasures can even come to function as an integral part of an artwork. Furthermore, the critique of cult images as idols stimulates their recontextualization as art: after centuries of neglect, from the Renaissance onward Apollo finds a new home in the museum, as fallen idols are reborn as art. By questioning cult images and removing them from their sacred context, monotheism facilitated their eventual transformation into objets d’art with a secularized aura. Certain objects associated with monotheism—medieval Madonnas, Persian illuminations—even came to be regarded primarily as priceless works of art. In the museum, one could say that Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad exist on the same abstract plane (even if didactic wall texts or visitor guides may treat them differently). At the same time, some critics have argued that the work of art remains ever in the service of “cult value.” Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish was based in part on eighteenth-century writer Charles De Brosses’s notion of African fetishism, which in his view was a worship of random objects that constituted a “primitive” prelude to idolatry; as the commodity fetish par excellence, is the modern artwork not just a barely secularized idol? If we look to the recent history of modern art, iconoclastic attacks on Greek and Roman idols-turned-art and the critique of representation in general led—among other things—to abstract paintings that seem to obey a secular Second Commandment, banning representation not because of a religious dogma, but as a consequence of a critique of art and its conditions."Even if artists such as Piet Mondrian had long abandoned the faith in which they were raised by the time they made their mature work, this rejection of representation mirrors the old monotheistic condemnation of idolatry, which has become an integral part of modern critical thought. In the current context, however, abstraction often comes to be associated with Islam: think for example of last year, when Cologne’s Cardinal Meisner complained that Gerhard Richter’s new abstract stainedglass window for his cathedral would be better suited for a mosque, or how full-body veils are seen by some as symptomatic of Islam’s abstract rejection of western “visual culture.” But then, is the “spectacle” of our media-saturated society not itself abstract to the core, programmed as it is by digital codes? Just how visible is our “visual culture”?
Part 2: Attacking the Spectacle (CM Studio)
"The second part of the exhibition, Attacking the Spectacle, focuses on the political contestations of what philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have characterized as the “Empire” of global capitalism. Here again the religious and the secular are in dialogue with each other. Modern theory and activism contain secularized traces of the Christian attack on Roman spectacles. For the early Christians, the Roman Empire was the paradigmatic idolatrous society. The early Christian rejection of spectacles remained a potent trope in western culture, ready to be reactivated, for instance by Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This “anti-spectacular” discourse was transformed and radicalized by modern theorists and artists; building on Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism for example, filmmaker and theorist Guy Debord attacked capitalism as a “society of the spectacle” whose images barely disguised that it is a system of exploitation and living death."Such critics may be truer descendants of monotheistic thinking than current fundamentalist terrorists who seem to outdo each other in the embrace of today’s spectacle of the media, and whose strategies are shaped by modern terrorism. Rather than resolutely rejecting the capitalist spectacle, fundamentalists transform it into a spectacle of their own, dominated by dualistic clashes between good and evil and effects-laden scenes, of which the images from 9/11 are the most famous example. How can we imagine forms of theory and practice that break the deadlock created by the war of images and counter-images, of terror and counterterror?"
Artists: Carl Andre, Carel Blotkamp, Guy Debord/Jean-Léon Gérôme, Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy, Hans Haacke, Arnoud Holleman, Imi Knoebel, Gert Jan Kocken, Krijn de Koning, Willem Oorebeek, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Haim Steinbach, Rosemarie Trockel, and Lidwien van de Ven.
http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/?click[id_projekt]=59
Label:
contemporary art,
exhibition,
iconoclasm
In This Colony/In Deze Kolonie
Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, 8 May - 26 June 2005
Co-curated by Maxine Kopsa and Sven Lütticken
Participating artists: Danai Anesiadou and Alexandra Bachzetsis, Sven Augustijnen, Maria Barnas and Germaine Kruip, Stan Douglas, Chris Evans, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Laura Horelli, Twan Janssen, Krijn de Koning, Gabriel Kuri, Sean Snyder, Roy Villevoye, and Barbara Visser.
The Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, near Amsterdam, is a former army barracks—an early concrete construction from the beginning of the twentieth century that had just been renovated.
Even while participating in the rampant transformation of non-art sites into spaces for artistic representation, In This Colony seeks to question such process of decontextualisation and abstraction, which turn history into decor.
Participating artists: Danai Anesiadou and Alexandra Bachzetsis, Sven Augustijnen, Maria Barnas and Germaine Kruip, Stan Douglas, Chris Evans, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Laura Horelli, Twan Janssen, Krijn de Koning, Gabriel Kuri, Sean Snyder, Roy Villevoye, and Barbara Visser.The Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, near Amsterdam, is a former army barracks—an early concrete construction from the beginning of the twentieth century that had just been renovated.
Even while participating in the rampant transformation of non-art sites into spaces for artistic representation, In This Colony seeks to question such process of decontextualisation and abstraction, which turn history into decor.
2007 Postscript:
In June 2007, Barbara Visser's former assistant received an e-mail from a Mr Wilmink, working at the Cruquiusgemaal, a nineteenth-century pumping station which is now a historicial monument and museum. Visser's series of postcards De Groeten uit Vijfhuizen, which display alternative uses for the fort, and which were diplayed in card racks in the central hall during the run of the exhibition, contains a photomontage of a fictitious theme park, "Mini Haarlemmermeer", in which a small replica of the building is situated right in front of the Fort. The real De Cruquius is situated in the vicinity of the musuem; both buildings stand at the edge of the Haarlemmermeer, a former inland lake reclaimed in the nineteenth century through use of the Cruquiusgemaal and other pumping stations. Mr Wilmink complained that Museum De Cruquius had not been contacted in order to clear any copyright issues, before moving on to trying to bully Visser into donating cards to the museum:
Recentelijk viel mijn oog op een ansichtkaart, die een foto-montage toont van fort Vijfhuizen en De Cruquius. Op zich een goede zaak, dat Museum De Cruquius opduikt in het werk van een kunstenaar; maar anderzijds vind ik het wel jammer dat drukker of uitgever van de ansichtkaart nooit heeft geïnformeerd naar het gebruik van het beeldmerk van v.m. stoomgemaal De Cruquiu
s. Uiteraard wil ik niet lastig doen, want in zekere zin is de kaart een promotiemiddel voor het museum. Wel stellen wij het op prijs, indien deze ansichtkaart tegen kostprijs ter beschikking gesteld zou kunnen worden aan onze museumwinkel. Indien u meer werk heeft waarop De Cruquius prijkt, hebben wij hier mogelijk ook belangstelling voor.
s. Uiteraard wil ik niet lastig doen, want in zekere zin is de kaart een promotiemiddel voor het museum. Wel stellen wij het op prijs, indien deze ansichtkaart tegen kostprijs ter beschikking gesteld zou kunnen worden aan onze museumwinkel. Indien u meer werk heeft waarop De Cruquius prijkt, hebben wij hier mogelijk ook belangstelling voor. Well, Mr Wilmink, one would assume that in so far as there still is a public domain to speak of, this nineteenth-century structure falls well within it, and there is little to stop Barbara Visser from integrating a photo she took into this montage. As pathetic as this little incident is, it is nonetheless indicative of the increasing legal constrains imposed on artists in a culture in which the notion of "intellectual property" is given an ever more ridig and fundamentalist interpretation, usually in the interest of those who can retain the services of expensive legal teams.
Images: exhibition poster using a still from a video by Sven Augustijnen; Barbara Visser, Groeten uit Vijfhuizen (2005), one postcard from a set of five.
Label:
"contemporary art",
exhibition
Life, Once More: Forms of reenactment in contemporary art
Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, Witte de With, Rotterdam, January 27 to March 27, 2005.
Participating artists: Mike Bidlo, Bik Van der Pol, Rod Dickinson, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Eran Schaerf, Catherine Sullivan, and Barbara Visser.
Life, Once More presents artistic approaches to reenactment, in particular new versions of performances by artists from the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of popular historical (war) reenactments—that contemporary form of historicism in action, in which the works in the exhibition intervene in one way or another.
Jackson Pollock already had the feeling that his existential “act” for the painting session filmed by Hans Namuth degenerated into “acting“ in the sense of theatrical performance – something he found insufferable. His filmed act has since been reenacted, in the film Pollock as well as by artists. In the realm of reenactment, media images and live performance are inextricably entangled. This is true as well for reenactments outside the art context. Fanatical hobby reenactors, who stage World War I or World War II Battles, are often critical of Hollywood’s depictions of history and of media representations in general. However, not only do reenactors make photos and videos during their staged battles, and appear as extras in Hollywood films, th
ey are also thoroughly influenced by the films they watch. In an attempt to fight repetition with repetition, to break open and activate the past, Life, One More couples examples of artistic reflection on such historical reenactments with (registrations of) reenactments of performances.
The exhibition takes up the top floor of Witte de With. While the works to the left of the entrance/staircase engage in a dialogue with this most visible form of reenactment, those on the right-hand side reenact performances (though not always "official" art performances) by artists from the past few decades. This, to be sure, is just a rough and insufficient division; the interplay between the various pieces is not necessarily constrained by it. A central corridor cutting through both parts contains photographs, single-channel videos and a video game as documentary supplements.
The accompanying publication contains texts by Jennifer Allen, Peggy Phelan, Eran Schaerf, Barbara Visser and myself. It seems the book is no longer available on Amazon; however, I do think there are still some copies left, so if you are interested, I suggest contacting Witte de With.
For more attention on the exhibition and the participating artists, see http://www.wdw.nl/project.php?id=36
2009 postscript: Perhaps the attempt to posit certain art practices as (potentially) critical interventions in our neo-historicist spectacle lead to an all too rhetorical opposition between "mainstream" and art reenactments, which could be misread as a conservative glorification of high art as a privileged realm of rarefied experience; apart from this, I think that Life, Once More was a good first attempt at showing and analyzing various forms of artistic reenactment in relation to a wider cultural context. After a cooling-off period of a number of years, during which others have merrily reenacted the exhibition, I am now ready to reinvestigate this field. More specifically, I am working on an essay that will be part of a projected book tentatively titled History in Motion, which brings together a number of studies on the representation and presence of history in the age of moving images.
Images from top to bottom: installation view of Bik Van der Pol, Past Imperfect (2005); installation view with Full Metal Jacket film stills and video game; installation view of Eran Schaerf, Scenario Data # 39 (2005).
Participating artists: Mike Bidlo, Bik Van der Pol, Rod Dickinson, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Eran Schaerf, Catherine Sullivan, and Barbara Visser.
Life, Once More presents artistic approaches to reenactment, in particular new versions of performances by artists from the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of popular historical (war) reenactments—that contemporary form of historicism in action, in which the works in the exhibition intervene in one way or another.Jackson Pollock already had the feeling that his existential “act” for the painting session filmed by Hans Namuth degenerated into “acting“ in the sense of theatrical performance – something he found insufferable. His filmed act has since been reenacted, in the film Pollock as well as by artists. In the realm of reenactment, media images and live performance are inextricably entangled. This is true as well for reenactments outside the art context. Fanatical hobby reenactors, who stage World War I or World War II Battles, are often critical of Hollywood’s depictions of history and of media representations in general. However, not only do reenactors make photos and videos during their staged battles, and appear as extras in Hollywood films, th
ey are also thoroughly influenced by the films they watch. In an attempt to fight repetition with repetition, to break open and activate the past, Life, One More couples examples of artistic reflection on such historical reenactments with (registrations of) reenactments of performances.The exhibition takes up the top floor of Witte de With. While the works to the left of the entrance/staircase engage in a dialogue with this most visible form of reenactment, those on the right-hand side reenact performances (though not always "official" art performances) by artists from the past few decades. This, to be sure, is just a rough and insufficient division; the interplay between the various pieces is not necessarily constrained by it. A central corridor cutting through both parts contains photographs, single-channel videos and a video game as documentary supplements.
The accompanying publication contains texts by Jennifer Allen, Peggy Phelan, Eran Schaerf, Barbara Visser and myself. It seems the book is no longer available on Amazon; however, I do think there are still some copies left, so if you are interested, I suggest contacting Witte de With.
For more attention on the exhibition and the participating artists, see http://www.wdw.nl/project.php?id=362009 postscript: Perhaps the attempt to posit certain art practices as (potentially) critical interventions in our neo-historicist spectacle lead to an all too rhetorical opposition between "mainstream" and art reenactments, which could be misread as a conservative glorification of high art as a privileged realm of rarefied experience; apart from this, I think that Life, Once More was a good first attempt at showing and analyzing various forms of artistic reenactment in relation to a wider cultural context. After a cooling-off period of a number of years, during which others have merrily reenacted the exhibition, I am now ready to reinvestigate this field. More specifically, I am working on an essay that will be part of a projected book tentatively titled History in Motion, which brings together a number of studies on the representation and presence of history in the age of moving images.
Images from top to bottom: installation view of Bik Van der Pol, Past Imperfect (2005); installation view with Full Metal Jacket film stills and video game; installation view of Eran Schaerf, Scenario Data # 39 (2005).
Label:
contemporary art,
exhibition,
history in motion