seminar 1 - notes for Students

Notes for students

Context Responsive Curating: The organisation of dirt

Seminar 1 Redux and the organisation of dirt

www.reduxprojects.org.uk
www.slashseconds.org
www.isolartcenter.org/
www.orchard47.org/
www.alandunn67.co.uk/revolutionmp3.html
www.themetropolitancomplex.com/index.php?id=redux
www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/001/articles/jpolak/index.php
http://www.iraqpavilion.com/








This seminar presented a broad look at the work of an alternative space [with a focus on Redux Projects, London] with some examples of particular experimental approaches to curating that were developed over a period of three years at the space at Commercial Street. Examples included installed works by artists Giorgio Sadotti, Bob and Roberta Smith [within the group show ‘Sir Eel’] and the curator Paul O’Neill.










Dinner Party was originally held at Cubitt Street Gallery in 1996. The reconstruction at Redux hosted works by Giorgio Sadotti, and Elizabeth Wright and musicians from Los Angeles. ®edux re-presented the event with different guests and performance, in a setting whereby the guests were part of the performance. The unnerving quality of these power brokers in an alternative ‘dirty’ space, set the agenda for subsequent events, and a radical approach to how exhibitions are set in terms of art world etiquettes of behaviour.

Guests included Penelope Curtis, Director, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds [Director Tate Britain ] Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Art Gallery;.formally Chief Curator, Tate Modern, Kier McGuiness, Chairman, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Patrons of New Art, Tate Gallery, David Batchelor, Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, Annie Ratti, Director, Antonio Ratti Foundation, Como.


It referred this work in a trajectory from earlier avant-garde models from Dada, such as Kurt Schwitters 1933 ‘Merzbau’ and Marcel Duchamp’s 1942 ‘Mile Of String’. The website was used as a way of showing how a series might be hosted in one space, and how those events could be documented with the tools of writing and photography; how the website itself performed as a simple navigational tool to represent events, to collect archive material in a complementary relation to the material presentation of work. How the design in turn reflects the non-institutional manner of these presentations. [Compare a museum website which is corporate with an independent curatorial project such as Redux or the Metropolitan Complex] Various curatorial ‘conceptual’ approaches may remove curating from a museological method of scholarship, yet, by their innovatory orientation and unorthodox construction and focus, influence a museum’s assumptions of what and how to absorb changes in aesthetics and contemporary art’s agendas. These conceptual strategies were introduced, for example inviting artists to respond to a ‘collection’ [in Sir Eel, specifically, to the curators collection of suits], which were reassembled in the context of the exhibition of a ‘mile of string’. The string both referenced and reconstructed the Andre Breton exhibition, and provided a display structure for works by artists.

In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to play ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings. Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String 1942, New York




Redux, as a title, was explained as a ‘return to health’ to what has been arguably overlooked in a period, if assuming that the market has recently clouded the work of avant garde historical models and their relevance to contemporary modes of address. It rests in a matrix of like-minded operations internationally. The programme eschewed solo exhibitions in favour of thematically, conceptually, and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represented a commitment to historically based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment was reflected in the parallel activity of a New York project, also a three-year enterprise without commercial aspirations. Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser-known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices mirrored Redux. Various contrasted but unified practices were nominated to introduce a common undertaking of re-addressing the contemporary situation: the work of Orchard Gallery, New York; Sarah Pierce’s The Metropolitan Complex; Jeffrey Vallance’s Clown Museum, at Ron Lee’s World of Clowns; historically, Mies van der Rohe’s New Museum in Berlin, where the difficulty of the space presented challenges to installing works and with Alexander Dorner’s pivotal work in Hanover Museum, of establishing laboratory spaces, that followed the work of artists’ groups in the pre-war era.




[Dorner joined the State Museum (Landesmuseum) in Hannover as a curator in 1923, rising to director in 1925 (one of the youngest in Germany). As such, he was responsible for many smaller museums in the Hannover area. His appointment coincided with Walter Gropius' foundation of the Bauhaus a short distance away in Weimar. Dorner was one of the early and great leaders of avant-garde art collecting in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s concentrating in Constructivist art for the collection focusing on Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo, Kazimir Malevich, and El Lissitzky. With the collaboration of Lazlo Moholy Nagy, Dorner built a special room to display this art, the "Abstract Cabinet," designed for the viewer's perspective, including film projection and sound. Dorner taught as an assistant professor at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover, beginning in 1928 (through 1936), contributing to the journal Museum der Gegenwart (The Museum of Today) from 1930 to 1933. As a director, Dorner juxtaposed art with other objects of different periods in his installations, a new method for art museums. His progressivist art policies put him in direct opposition with the Nazi party, who assumed power in Germany in 1933. Dorner led the fight against the Nazi "Entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) exhibition of modern art in 1936].

The references were intended to contextualise the experimental approaches of Redux. The works presented show how groups can author exhibitions, and how their performance [which included DJ, night club counter culture, punk, ‘live’ art, hosting other curators, using public spaces, such as bowling alleys, shops] could attest to the continuation of these earlier practices. There was a point to be made concerning the difference between these attitudes to performance and the work of the emerging 1960s ‘white cube’ dealer / market ideology of a neutral space cut off from reality, where the work might be vetted by a certain theatricality and transcendental ether, or where the ‘dirty’ aspect of the everyday, domestic ‘interference’ with perception of an autonomous art object. It was discussed that there was also a difference marked out in how the market has also interfered with purist notions of artistic practice, and how globalisation, the biennale and the art fair have colluded to change the manner of art’s social agendas, and how we view the institution of art. Questions of democratisation arise. Can the institution be reformulated by alternative strategies? How does the absorption of strategies by museums differ now from say Alexander Dorner’s museum experiments? What has happened to the avant garde as a form of resistance? Is the free market, more money, more collectors, a good or bad indicator of this democratic change? What happened to the Situationist International? What are its inheritances, and what differences might be recorded through an enquiry in the social milieu in which it was embedded?

We also looked at an online curatorial project, www.slashseconds.org, a website that operates by inviting such questions, and collating contributions to form an issue three times a year. Each issue is ‘themed’, but written as an open invitation to consider personal, tangential, approaches to an ambiguous subject, connoted without determining answers; these might wander from an academic analysis, and support more idiosyncratic and discursive approaches. The work of Alan Dunn was selected as an interesting online project within seconds, itself a website, concerning ‘revolution’. Jenny Polak’s designs for an alien protection [refugee] also gave an idea of the range of social/ urban space interventions that are being developed as alternative architectures and art forms. We looked briefly at Isola Art Center, Milan, and the key work of Bert Thies that maintains a strong political agenda to the urban regeneration of vernacular spaces, and their insipient destruction of Milan communities. How does art function in terms of a socio-political platform? How has Isola been absorbed by, say, a fallacious ‘relational aesthetics’ and, by its recuperation, neutralised? Is a radical form, through the organisation of dirt, or alternative and resistant activity always to be exploited by hegemonic structures in the art world?

The online magasine functions as a ‘work’ or provides the laboratory in assembly of discursive formations [Foucault], or as a cinematic bricollage, of many visual and literary components and visual devices, to make each issue extensive in its range of arguments. It does not perform as ‘net art’ which invades the telephonic space of the Internet by using tactics of simulation, but does offer a platform for a global constituency as a network.

Another project was identified, where practical concerns were described, and to show how the curator often works with outside agencies, whose other agendas form a difficult and sometimes antagonistic situation. The social interface, working, for example, in poor urban areas will undoubtedly reveal these difficulties to the artists and publics alike. The Birmingham project ‘Under a New Sky’ presented works by Dan Graham and Yona Friedman, Goshka Macuga, Runa Islam, witth Iranian artists Reza Aramesh and Nooshin Farhid, and Iraqi Al Fadhil, within an Asian inner city space, with immediate consequences, forcing a question of the reactive conditions in which it occurred.

Practicum

Of the many kinds of output available for consideration as a practical project that brought together students in fine art, museum studies and art history, it would be necessary to discuss how a group would be able in a short time scale, produce an exhibition, in the terms of the remit which interrogates alternative practice and curatorial form. It was argued that the assessment therefore needed to be adjusted in the case of a large mixed group, whereby an arena or umbrella concept should be agreed upon. The seminar used some of its time preparing ground for such an umbrella, so that understanding the required outputs would also come together to coincide a curated outcome. Since the group is 44 members, the website it was felt could provide this, but it needed to be discussed as to how and when the assessments took place and whether fine artists worked more on works and historians on texts et cetera.

Additional reading / references

1 Jeffrey Vallance

http://bombsite.com/issues/56/articles/1960

Re The Clown Museum at Ron Lee’s World of Clowns
Jeffrey Vallance Interview excerpt:

JV Yeah, but they weren’t your official nice clown things, they were a little bit perverted. I was taking clowns to a place where the clown museum would never normally want to go. Every five minutes, busloads of tourists pulled up, they’d all get out, and were totally primed to have a clown experience. And they’d walk in and see the regular show, and then they’d see our clown artwork. But it didn’t stop them for a second. They didn’t look at it and say, “Whoa. This clown is too weird…” They expected to see clowns and so every clown they saw made total sense. If you’d taken the clown show and put it in a gallery, then they might have gone in and been upset, because they wouldn’t be expecting a clown experience, they’d be expecting art. But in the clown museum it seemed perfect. As far as they knew, the paintings were always there.

2 The Orchard Gallery

Gallery Hours: Thurs–Sun 1 to 6

contact@orchard47.org
Rhea Anastas
Moyra Davey
Andrea Fraser
Nicolás Guagnini
Gareth James
Christian Philipp Müller
Jeff Preiss
R.H. Quaytman
Karin Schneider
Jason Simon
John Yancy, Jr.
Anonymous

Past Exhibitions:

Spring Wound
From One O to the Other
11 Sessions
Cookie Cutter
Calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones
Image Coming Soon
Form of a waterfall. Sadie Benning
detourism
On The Collective For Living Cinema
Jef Geys
I Like You and You Like Me
Sylvia Rivera Law Project Art Opening
Around the Corner: Zoe Leonard, Petra Wunderlich, Christian Philipp Müller
Nicolás Guagnini: The Middle Class Goes to Heaven (2005–06)
Dan Graham: Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986–2005)
Reality/Play
Vera
Heard Not Seen
Having Been Described In Words
Painters Without Paintings and Paintings Without Painters
Small Works For Big Change
Michael Asher, film screening
Stephan Pascher, Lucky Chairs
Martin Beck
September 11. 1973.
Part Three, "Last Minute"
Polish Socialist Conceptualism of the 70s
Part Two
Part One

Orchard was a cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York's Lower East Side. The gallery was run by twelve partners of a for-profit limited liability corporation founded for the project. The partners include artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators, with several combining these activities in their practices. The partners of Orchard have been associated variously with New York experimental film and video scenes, institutional critique, 90s non-yBa practices in Britain, and political conceptualist traditions in North and South America. The partners do not have a univocal position in terms of their working methods or views on art. Instead, Orchard's cooperative framework was intended to put the diversity of its members' practices into discursive motion. The resulting exhibition program reflected these dialogs and the social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions of the positions taken within them. Orchard's program largely eschewed solo exhibitions in favor of thematically, conceptually and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represented a commitment to historically-based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment was reflected in Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices. Since opening in May 2005, Orchard has restaged or produced unrealized projects by Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser with Allan McCollum, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner. Orchard has also presented historical works by Daniel Buren, Luis Camnitzer, Juan Downey, Hans Haacke, Roberto Jacoby, Adrian Piper, Anthony McCall and Martha Rosler, as well as new works by Merlin Carpenter, Nicolás Guagnini, Jutta Koether,Josiah McElheny, Lucy McKenzie, Blake Rayne, Stephan Pascher, Jeff Preiss, R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, and Jason Simon, among others. Orchard was a three-year project which was completed on May 25, 2008.


3 Merzbau

Kurt Schwitters is best known for his collages and assemblages and for his association with the dada art movement in the 1920's and thirties. But his most important work is less well known. Starting in the 1920's and continuing until he fled Germany in 1936 he constructed an enormously ambitious work of art in his Hannover home. The Hannover Merzbau was a vast architectural construction. There is no doubt that he was influenced by the constructivist concept of the total environment where the architecture, furniture, art etc of a room are integrated to create the total arrangement and structure of the space. In 1921 his friend the constructivist artist Erich Buchholz had transformed the interior of his Berlin apartment in this fashion. Schwitters undoubtedly saw, and was influenced by this. However he went a little further. Ernst Schwitters, his son, has said that it started with his father's interest in the relationship between the pictures he hung on the walls and the sculptures on the floor. He started by tying strings to emphasis these interactions. These in turn became wires then were replaced by wooden structures, which, in turn, were joined with plaster. The merzbau grew and grew, eventually filling several rooms on various floors of the house. As the construction grew grottos and caves appeared in its internal space, each of which had their own independent life. These grottos were often very personal and almost fetishist, with many being devoted to his friends. These are mentioned in many contemporary accounts as he often stole his friend’s belongings to fill these.