Soundtrack for An Exhibition
Soundtrack composed by/composée par Susan Stenger [Band of Susans] with contributions by/avec des contributions de Robert Poss [Band of Susans] , Alan Vega [Suicide], Alexander Hacke [Einstürzende Neubaten], F.M. Einheit [ex Einstürzende Neubaten], Will Oldham [Palace Music, Bonny Prince Billy], Kim Gordon [Sonic Youth], Mika Vainio [Pan Sonic], Bruce Gilbert [Wire], Ulrich Krieger, Warren Ellis [The Dirty Three, The Bad Seeds], Jim White [The Dirty Three], Jennifer Hoyston [Erase Errata], Andria Degens (Pantaleimon), Spider Stacy [Pogues]
- Paintings by John Armleder, Steven Parrino
- Feature film by Kristian Levring
- An exhibition by Mathieu Copeland
8th March until 11th June 2006 - Musée Art Contemporain Lyon
THE TITLE AS THE CURATOR’S ART PIECE*
A SUMMER SHOW BY MATHIEU COPELAND
*Show title #347, by Stefan Brüggemann
A painting exhibition with Jaroslaw Flicinski & Claude Rutault
A spoken word exhibition with Douglas Coupland, Nick Currie (aka Momus), Karl Holmqvist, Tomas Vanek, Lawrence Weiner & Ian Wilson
The Title As The Curator’s Art Piece* acts as a multi-layered exhibition, a series of successive exhibitions in one given space, at a given time. A neutral ‘all over’ curating, constantly expanding in time, two independent exhibitions within a concomitant space are unified by the time of the exhibition.
If in the title the whole program of an exhibition is revealed, the show title by Stefan Brüggemann–which cancels itself by stating a title as curator’s piece as an artist’s piece—illustrates the exhibition’s concerns with self-referentiality and denial. An exhibition where what is is not what one approaches, but what constitutes the space as a series of successive exhibitions in a given space, at a given time.
more at http://www.mathieucopeland.net/
The Show Will Be Open When The Show Will Be Closed
...is an exhibition of separate, yet interconnected parts, that applies the concept of deterritorialisation to that of exhibition making. A number of international artists have been invited to conceive a work in poster format, each of which will subsequently be placed on the shutters and doors of several London based galleries. Consequently, the show will only be revealed and become visible in the evenings, nights and early mornings when each gallery is normally closed. The common setup of 11am – 6pm will be transposed to 6pm – 11am.
Serving as a central component for the exhibition, the installation at STORE [gallery] will comprise a map of the exhibition outlining the location of each participating gallery and artist’s work. As an object available to take away, the map will enable visitors to seek out and discover each artist's piece. The various routes available aspire to encourage a collective or individual form of exploration, allowing new ways of seeing and mapping the city driven by a new incentive. The exhibition, spatially unbound, bypasses the four walls of the host gallery and instead is articulated in various participating locations. The Show Will Be Open When The Show Will Be Closed unites these usually disparate galleries, at least on a conceptual level, albeit whilst they are closed. By not interfering with the operational structure of each gallery, the project intends to work in the opposite time zone to when exhibitions are commonly viewed thereby propagating another outlook in which art can be experienced. In addition to the viewers who deliberately encounter the exhibition aided by the map, the exhibition will be seen, at least in part, by passers-by who might not have any interest in seeking out an art experience. The works in this show shade almost imperceptibly into the fabric of the city, effecting a small but definite shift in our perceptions of everyday life.
Curated By Adam Carr
http://storegallery.co.uk
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Martí Anson, Ryan Gander, Tue Greenfort, Jens Haaning, Flávia Müller Medeiros, Jonathan Monk, Rivane Neuenschwander, Kirsten Pieroth, Superflex, Ron Terada, Mungo Thomson, Aaron Young PARTICIPATING GALLERIES: Cubitt, Dicksmith Gallery, FA Projects, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Hotel, IBID Projects, Lisson, Victoria Miro, STORE, The Reliance, Parade, Peer
July 7 - 31, 2006
Art After Dark
Art After Dark, produced by the Artist Network, NY, NY, is a talk show that speaks many languages, both literally and metaphorically. Part Charlie Rose meets Graham Norton by way of the analyst’s couch, Andy Warhol’s TV (1982) and Lucio Fontana’s Television Manifesto of the Spatial Movement (1952), Art After Dark serves more than a platform for exchange between host and guests and interviewer and interviewees. As hosted by independent curator and critic Raul Zamudio, Art After Dark is an exhibition of sorts in real time that appropriates the talk show format. It inverts the traditional function of the exhibition as repository of art objects in which a narrative is conveyed through curatorial selection, placement and so forth. For if the art object is an extension of the artist then the inverse must be as true as well: now the artwork manifests through the artist. Thus, Art After Dark reconfigures the interview genre as performance art in which dialogue, communication and interaction are framed symbiotically as artistic enunciations.
http://theartistnetwork.org/streaming06/Sindex.html
Also see:
http://raulzamudio.blogspot.com/
Living with Contemporary Art
"'Living With Contemporary Art' called for artists to make works for 10 Ridgefield residents willing to play patron and, for awhile, to live with the outcome, recording their reactions." "...Its purpose is to demystify contemporary art, assuming that this can be done without bringing down the entire structure. Word-of-mouth indicates, however, that the project is not only succeeding but also that it is shedding light on the artist-patron relationship from an anthropological point of view."
1995, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT)
quote from: NYTimes
Exhibition project curated by Harry Philbrick.
Berlin Biennial
This edition of the berlin biennial will take place in both public and private spaces, all located on one street, Auguststraße, in Berlin’s Mitte district.
Literally stretching from a church to a cemetery, the show occupies private apartments, offices and other common places where people go about their daily lives, eating, working, playing and praying, “Of Mice and Men” is a journey across time and space, in which viewers are invited to experience art and the contexts in which works are presented, as if opening a series of time capsules. Each venue also projects a distinct image with which the artworks are then layered upon, building up a three-dimensional collage.
This approach to curating a biennial is loosely inspired by the tendency in Berlin to turn apartments into galleries and use temporary spaces for impromptu exhibitions and events. In combination with the artworks, the venues also reflect the atmospheres and tensions recurring throughout the exhibition. “Of Mice and Men,” in fact, tries to capture a sense of darkness and malaise, gravitating around questions of birth and loss, death and surrender, grief and nostalgia. Many of the places also evoke intimacy and reclusive states of mind, where collective history overlaps with personal traumas.
http://www.berlinbiennale.de/eng/index.php?sid=bb_11_02
GUK
Founded in May 1999. GUK invites artists to exhibit in four spaces at the same time: - A garden in Selfoss Iceland, a Yardhouse in Lejre in Denmark, a kitchen in Bremen Germany and on a travelling laptop computer screen that was added in January 2002. The exhibition place is run by four artists and is located in and around their homes. Each exhibit lasts for 3 months.
"udhus" ...one of the four 'space'
http://www.simnet.is/guk/index.htm
The Wrong Gallery
The Wrong Gallery is the smallest exhibition space in New York, located at 516A1/2 West 20th Street in Chelsea. The non-profit venue has 1 square meter of exhibition space. The tiny gallery's exhibition program and artistic experimentations are conceptualized and directed by Maurizio Cattelan, Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni, and so far they have organized over 30 exhibitions featuring works by Lawrence Weiner, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul McCarthy and many more. As the wrong dealers say, "The Wrong Gallery is the back door to contemporary art, and it's always locked".
Drinks By
French artist Matthieu Laurette combines bottles and cans (marketed material culture) by artists from the 20th century to the present day. The archive has been built up by donation which seems to suggest a stock pile of booze that may one day be consumed. There's a project site that includes many images:
Opsound
"Opsound uses the form of an experimental record label and open sound pool to explore the idea of social architecture as artwork. It is a kind of laboratory for looking at how artists can release music in a manner synergistic with the internet's capacity to encourage communication and sharing. Opsound explores the possibilities of developing a gift economy among musicians, borrowing from the model of the open source software community.
"Anyone is invited to contribute their sounds to the open pool using a copyleft license. Work in the open pool is available to be listened to, reconfigured, recombined & remixed, and also released by Opsound (and other) microlabels both on the internet and in the physical world."
Third Street Hard Knox Fat Famous Dog Patch Show
Organized by John Rubin and Tim Sullivan, the exhibition project involved an exchange between the SWELL gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and four restaurants in the neighborhood around the gallery. Everything in the restaurants not used for functional purposes was relocated and displayed in the SWELL gallery. In exchange, SFAI student work was juried by the restaurant owners and presented in their establishments.
The show ran from February 9th - 20th. There was a round robin restaurant-hop reception starting at the SWELL gallery and stopping at each establishment, ending at the Dogpatch Saloon.
Browser
Curated by Kitty Scott and Andrew Renton, Browser is an exhibition constructed as an archive or an archive constructed as an exhibition. Artists have submitted work to the project with the sole limitation that it should be storable within a standard Hollinger archival box. In this way every artist, whether established or less well known, has equivalent representation within the project. The boxes do not only contain artworks, but other material which might indicate how artists work. Project organized for Artopolis '97, Vancouver BC.
Browser is not a fixed exhibition, rather it is an assembled archive-like resource which can be explored, analysed and reconfigured by its audience. The audience is invited to make journeys through the wealth of material, to discover artists and to search for common threads between one form of artistic practice and another.
Browser has emerged from the important local, yet short history of large, inclusive exhibitions and smaller, selected exhibitions. It is an attempt to provide a structure which is able to be as inclusive and representative as is possible. Every working artist in British Columbia was welcome to participate. However, no extended experience of any exhibition can function interestingly without a selective, critical faculty. With Browser, we hope that the audience will be the ones actively engaged in this way.
There are many ways to approach Browser. The audience may search the database on the Browser CD, talk with the Browser staff, or simply wander through the exhibition space.
If you choose to search the database you may do so in two fundamental ways: by an index of words which includes artists' names or subject terms; or by searching the descriptions of the artists' works and collections. Each standard description contains: a consignment number which is also the container number; the name or names of the creator/s; the title; physical description (how much and of what kind it is); a brief biographical statement; a note on scope and content of the material describing in a little more detail the content of each box; notes about statements by artists or unusual aspects of the material; as well as a photograph of the content of each box.
The Browser CD presents a record of artists who have chosen to participate in Browser, to the date of this CD production. Although what is presented gives a very large indication of material received prior to the moment of going to press with this CD, it is not necessarily representative of all that is accepted into the exhibition.
The Browser CD has been assembled according to an established archival standard and stands as a record of the exhibition. The database it contains was assembled by an archivist who assisted in the preparation of a system to receive and describe the Browser Collection.
Text from: http://www.celinerich.com/artropolis/curatorial.html
(presented at the Roundhouse Community Centre from October 25 to November 23, 1997).
Ice Cream Social
David Robins' first social was held at a local Baskin-Robbins. For it, the artist used the company's trademark pink and brown logo colors in his work. Over the following decade, he expanded the project into live events in other cities (complete with free ice cream), a TV pilot, and a feature movie script. These derivations, together with digital designs ... and a novella from 1998, map the full extent of this idiosyncratic exhibition model, in which Robbins seeks to extend "art context attitudes" and experimentation into the mainstream.
Text from: http://www.artbook.com/2940271550.html
Spinning the Web
Held at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (MMK), the "Spinning the Web" exhibition combined artworks from the MMK Collection with 221 objects that had been bought through eBay auctions.
"eBay is not only a place where goods change hands, but also an Internet portal, a communications system, a search engine and a global network. Once you're logged in, you can move by entering key words from one article to the next, just as if you were looking things up in an encyclopedia. This was the path taken for selecting the objects for the exhibition, too: Depending on the variation and combination of key words, items relating to individual artworks were found as were artworks to fit the respective objects on offer in eBay. Some are clearly connected to each other, while for others the link is more a matter of association, but in all instances the new configurations bring added meaning to both the objects and the artworks. In other words, a track is laid that the viewers can but must not necessarily follow - and as you move down it, repeatedly new individual forms of signification can arise.
"How does a museum change things that are placed within its walls? This has been one of the fundamental questions tackled by modern art ever since Marcel Duchamp submitted an urinal - placed flat on its back, signed R. Mutt and entitled ›Fountain‹ - for a non-juried exhibition in New York in 1917. And it is this issue that is being rejuvenated for this joint presentation of art and non-art here; and we are foregrounding the imaginative potential concealed behind the transformative powers of the museum as an institution. In this sense, Spinning the Web - the eBay Connection is a journey to things and through the worlds of the imagination, history and present. It is an exhibition about exhibiting itself: What is already innate in the combined presentation of MMK artworks is intensified and radicalized by the expansion to include non-artworks."
From e-flux announcement: http://www.e-flux.com/displayshow.php?file=message_1128306028.txt
or
MMK website: http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/
e-flux video rental
E-flux video rental (EVR) is a project by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda comprised of a free video rental store, a public screening room, and an film and video archive. Its collection, selected in collaboration with a large group of international curators, consists of more than 550 art films and video works, and is available to the public for home viewing free of charge.
EVR started a year ago in a small storefront on the Lower East Side in New York. Since then it has traveled to venues in Frankfurt, Berlin, Amsterdam, Miami, and will soon appear in Vienna amongst other locations. For each of its new locations, EVR expands its inventory to include new selections by local curators invited jointly with the hosting institutions.
ext 17
The Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art has an extension on their voice message system dedicated to artist sound projects. "The S I aims to activate art in every corner and crevice of our gallery space at 495 Broadway, from our hallways to our library and down to our lobby window and onto the streets [and ostensibly the phones].
Call and find out + 1 212 925 2035 ext 17
More information including a list of past participants at: http://www.swissinstitute.net/
A Walk to Remember
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) featured a series of artist-led walks curated by Jens Hoffman (of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London). Titled “A Walk to Remember,” the exhibition brings together walks by LA-based artists John Baldassari, Jennifer Bornstein, Meg Cranston, Morgan Fisher, Evan Holloway, Paul McCarthy, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Allen Ruppersberg and Eric Welsey. Participants on each of the walks will be given a disposable camera with which to document the event, with the results being displayed in LACE’s exhibition space.
The descriptions of the walks hosted by LACE range from a leisurely walk below the Hollywood sign in Griffith Park (Bornstein and Wesley) to a trip to Sherman Indian High School, one of three remaining
off-reservation Native American boarding schools in the country (Cranston). Fisher and Ruppersberg set out to explore the intersections of personal and collective memory in the ever changing urban landscapes of Santa Monica and Hollywood, respectively. There are also “instruction” pieces, where walkers are asked to either photograph all the street signs from Baldassari’s studio or perform their own walk ten consecutive times, per McCarthy’s request.
Footnote: http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=17655&page=1
Visit the LACE website for full infos: http://www.artleak.org/
Sputniks
Refertilizing the ground for institutional critique via a simultaneously collaborative and critical framework where artists are both implicated and free from institutional contraint. Many of the projects acted upon the museum building or the staff directly.
Since the advent of institutional critique, a number of artists have gone so far as to make the relationship between the artists and the institution their main focus. The American critic Douglas Crimp argues that the institution has replaced the subject as the focal point for the critical-theoretical discourse of the last two decades. Some people claim that taking artists on board an institution disarms their critical potential in that they get contaminated and end up as accomplices when they interact too closely and intensely with the commissioner. Following the principle that you don't bite the hand that feeds you, they end up no longer using their teeth. While there is definitely a risk of 'disarming', the situation is more complex and there is not a strict dichotomy between the institutions and the artists. The idea of the so-called 'sputniks' at Kunstverein München is based on another, more collaborative approach. Although proximity can certainly be compromising, it can just as easily stimulate a kind of exchange which allows for the system to be challenged. When this is the case the challenge is carried out from a position that is simultaneously outside and inside, both implicated and distant. Or as the sputnik Carey Young has formulated it in relation to her own practice: "If a resistant ethos becomes hip, it will be marketed back to us as style: a sort of win-win proposition for those consumers who want to associate themselves with bettering the state of the world, but who don't want to think too hard. Right/wrong or inside/outside binaries seem ever more outmoded. To me, it is a question of credibility: a singular stance does not seem credible anymore. This is not to say that moral slippage is acceptable, but I don't make work which moralises, and my reference to my own identity as a business person within my works is intended to say this most clearly, in that what ever commercial process or system I expose or make projects within, I still reveal myself at the same time to be included within that mechanism. It is not oppositional in a traditional sense."
When I began working at Kunstverein München I had the opportunity to form a new team, including a curator and an assistant curator, in which everybody was invited to come with input. It is not a flat structure; neverthelesswe have to a large extent developed the program in collaboration. A Kunstverein is a type of institution typical for the German-speaking region. It is a membership organisation - Kunstverein München has around 1000 members - which is both private and public. Legally it is considered the same way as a private company but most funding comes from public sources, in our case the city of Munich. When we started our program at Kunstverein München in Spring 2002 we invited 16 people to be our sputniks for a period of three years. Together they form a sort of think tank for critical engagement with this institution of contemporary art. In Russian the word originally meant 'travelling companion' and that is precisely what our sputniks have been asked to be. They are artists, critics and curators who accompanyour activities and give us input into what an institution for contemporary art like the Kunstverein can, and also should, be.For our part, we are trying to take their comments, questions and criticism into accountwhen we run the institution. Each of them is also invited to realise something, a so-called sputnik project - a book, a series of talks, a new work, etc. - depending on the character of the work of each sputnik. We show our interest - but we don't want to pursue (monitor) the sputniks (throughout the process).
So how does it function on a practical level? All the sputniks were invited to Munich in February 2002 to get to know the institution, its team and to meet each other. All but two people attended. Thereafter the type of interaction has varied from close and regular to distant and rare. Beside mail rounds describing and discussing our current program and situation every three months, we have mostly been in touch with each sputnik on an individual basis, mainly for pragmatic, financial reasons. There was an informal dinner at the opening of the Venice Biennale when many of the sputniks happened to be in the city. While some of the sputniks have used their 'sputnikship' in order to develop projects that go beyond their usual practice, others have felt uncomfortable with the openness of the invitation. From the beginning one important aspect has been reciprocity: the invitation to interact is there and the sputniks who are interested in interacting can and should do so.
From Site Magazine Issue 9-10.2004
http://www.sitemagazine.net/eng/9.htm
Moving Collection
Moving Collection is a discrete and sustainable international contemporary art exhibition. Over thirty artists from around the world have contributed small scale works which are shown in different places at different times. Gathered and kept in Tokyo by Roger McDonald, the initiator of the collection, Moving Collection is an ongoing experimentation into ecological ways of exhibition making. This website introduces The Moving Collection and acts as an ongoing online NODE for information and research concerning the collection.
This web site documents the exhibitions of Moving Collection until December 2002. Since February 2003 Moving Collection has been 'paused'. Many of the art works have been returned by mail to the artists.
http://www.a-i-t.net/eg/mad_e/mc/index.html
Making the Making
Making the Making was an exhibition involving twenty-five international artists that explored the things that artists make in order to help them make their work. The exhibition was organized in 2001 at Apex Art in New York City.
http://www.charlesgoldmanwork.com/
The Materialization of Life into Alternative Economies
"A curated project [by Ben Kinmont, originally at Printed Matter in 1996] with different people, this time from the art world, showing different notions of economy and distribution: Paula Hayes/Wild Friends for collaborative economy, Joseph Grigely for information economy, On Kawara for gift economy, Gordon Matta-Clark for business economy, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles for maintenance economy. My reasons were to offer another reading of Lippard's idea of conceptual art as a dematerialization of the art object and, instead, suggest that perhaps, for some, it was actually not so much about the art object but about life, about a materialization of life."
"Paula gave away seed packets entitled "CATS DIG GRASS;" Carol Goodden (Gordon's collaborator) provided recipes from the restaurant Food, which we gave away photocopies of; and Mierle gave away copies of her Maintenance Manifesto from 1969."
See images at: http://www.benkinmont.com/
Dreamland Artist Club
Offering an alternative to existing revitalization strategies the "Dreamland consists of more than twenty-five emerging and established artists who have repainted rides and created custom signs, murals, and scenic backdrops for a range of Coney Island attractions."
June - September 2004
Named for one of the famous amusement parks of Coney Island's heyday, The Dreamland Artist Club began in the spring of 2003 when artist Steve Powers and Creative Time, with the help of Mayor Dick Zigun of Coney Island USA, invited a group of artists and local businesses in Coney Island's amusement area to work together. Dreamland consists of more than twenty-five emerging and established artists who have repainted rides and created custom signs, murals, and scenic backdrops for a range of Coney Island attractions. As a long-time admirer of the fading craft of sign painting, Powers had looked for inspiration in the tradition of colorful, hand-painted signage and advertisements that date back more than a century in the community. "Coney Island," he said, "is the most beautiful place in New York City, and we are dedicated to keeping it that way." Like Powers, each of the participating artists has a personal, social, or aesthetic interest in the visual culture of the area; many live in Brooklyn or greater New York, though some have come from Chicago and Los Angeles to participate. The project makes no distinction between "fine artists" and "commercial artists" categories that hold little value in this playground for the people. With few exceptions, the pieces comprising Dreamland have been created in the service of advertising for their host businesses, lending a new context to many of the artists whose works are usually viewed in galleries and museums. With a dramatic range of styles and practices, The Dreamland Artist Club offers a sampling of this era's artistry and imagination to Coney Island, and proposes a new model for creative urban revitalization strategies that both compliments and builds upon the existing character of this legendary New York neighborhood.
Text from: http://www.creativetime.org
The Hall of Fame, Hall of Fame
This exhibition collected wildly divergent histories, in the form of material culture, from over 50 different halls of fame. From the established Museological standards like the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in Cleveland, OH to the more lighthearted or grass-roots institutions like the Hot Dog Hall of Fame in Fairfield, CA, the project created a meta-collection, full of artifacts and recorded moments from popular american memory.
The exhibition was held from Nov, 1996 through February 1997 and was curated by Renny Pritikin, then Chief Curator, for Yerba Buena center for the Arts. There was a catalog published for this exhibition by Smart Art Press.
Budget Gallery
Budget gallery operates under the premise of exhibiting publicly - an exhibition as intervention - and requesting works that will never been seen again by the artists who submit them. The works are displayed during the opening weekend and then left to be sold on the honor system, stolen or eventually destroyed.
"We set up our gallery in co-opted public spaces like vacant walls and fences. The shows are carefully co-ordinated, prepared, and publicized...[like a traditional gallery]"
"...it's all taking place on the sidewalk. In the end it's a blend of all the greatest things about attending an art show, a garage sale, and a block party rolled into one."
Text from: http://www.budgetgallery.org/
DSLR
"DSLR (The Department of Space and Land Reclamation) was a weekend campaign [held on] April 27, 28, and 29th, in 2001 that attempted to reclaim all the space, land and visual culture of Chicago back to the people who work for it, live in it and create it. Reclamation projects, those that actively trespass with the intent to resist, are taking place across the city and throughout the weekend. Whether they are spilling out of the sewers, taking the parks, invading the steps of City Hall, scrambling up trees or cramming the sidewalks, these projects are actively engaging everyday life."
"As the movement to resist capital and control grows to global proportions, artists/activists/radical citizens have once again found common ground. The umbrella term, reclamation, seems to encompass the wide array tactics in use. Whether this is through squatting, guerilla gardens, pirate radio, graffiti, hacking, billboard manipulation or performative public interventions, these practices all resist the encroachment of top down centralized control and private capital. "
Text from: http://www.counterproductiveindustries.com/
Nasubi Gallery
in 1993 in front of the "Nabisu Gallery" in Ginza, Toyko, Japanese artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa opened a small portable gallery space. It was named the Nasubi Gallery (Nasubi means eggplant) and was made in response to galleries like the Nabisu who were charging artists to present their works (rental galleries). Ozawa's Nasubi gallery appropriated an out-moded milk-box structure which was used in Japan for receiving milk at a private residence. The blue box was given a white interior (to look like the conventional white gallery) and has exhibited many artists not only on the street in Tokyo but in bookshops, biennials and other exhibitions internationally. (the Nasubi gallery was included in the Cities on the Move project curated by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist)
Images at: http://homepage2.nifty.com/otafinearts/works/works-ozawa/ozawaworks-nasubi.htm
Scream
10 artists x 10 writers x 10 scary movies / Anton Kern gallery in Jan-Feb 2004. The exhibitions starts with 10 artists, who each select one movie. I couldn't tell wether the movies were actually screened during the run of the exhibition, but the catalog lists each movie with a brief synopsis. Each writer is then matched up with one of the artists. They write a short text - 3 or 4 paragraphs, around 300-500 words, related to the work which appears in the show. The catalog, which contains all 10 texts and a few images from each artist, is made available on the gallery website as a downloadable pdf. Curated by Fernanda Arruda and Michael Clifton.
http://www.antonkerngallery.com/exhibitions/04_scream/scream.php4
Musée Précaire Albinet
In 2004 Thomas Hirschhorn, on invitation of the Laboratories d' Aubervilliers, Hirschhorn created a temporary museum, which ran from April through June. Built in front of a public housing complex, Cité Albinet, with the help of his neighbors in Aubervilliers (where the artist lives and works), the project included the exhibition of artworks by Marcel Duchamp, Kasmir Malevic, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dalí, Joseph Beuys, Le Corbusier, Andy Warhol and Fernand Léger. The work of each artist - on loan from the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, and the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain - were exhibited for one week. A variety of activities including: an opening reception, conferences, debates, workshops for children and for adults, common meals once a week, a library of books about each artist and a snack bar, were all organized with in collaboration with the community.
Hirschhorn steers away from the all too familiar condescending matrix under which most art for community projects operate "I hate volunteerism in the art world. . . Bataille Monument [the project done at Documenta 11 - just prior to the Musée Précaire Albinet] was an art project and not a social project or a social artwork. I wanted to build the monument with the residents. . . I could not complete the work on my own. Throughout the entire project it was clear to me that I am an artist, not a social worker. The question was not 'Can I help you? [or] What can I do for you?' it was rather 'Can you, and do you want to help me?'
text from Tema Celeste #105 Sept/Oct 2004 pg 66/68
Unconvention - Jeremy Deller
Street Level Gallery, Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff
20 November 1999 - 16 January 2000
Unconvention is an exhibition of paintings, photographs and artefacts inspired by the interests of the Manic Street Preachers, the internationally acclaimed Welsh band. It brings together artists, war photographers, poets, musicians, political activists and social organisations who have influenced and been referenced by the band.
Unconvention is curated by Jeremy Deller, a London-based artist whose projects have often made surprising and enlightening relationships between areas of culture normally thought of as incompatible. Some of his work has been concerned with the modern phenomenon of celebrity. His earlier work around the Manic Street Preachers, The Uses of Literacy (1997) assembled powerful artworks and writings by fans of the band. It highlighted the intense relationship between icon and fan.
The Manics have referred to many modern artists and art movements in their lyrics, album art, interviews and dress sense, from Edvard Munch to Martin Kippenberger. This has created a teenage audience for ideas beyond the scope of formal education. Unconvention brings together important examples of work by Munch, Picasso, Bacon, Pollock, de Kooning, Warhol, Situationist International, Weiner, Kippenberger and Saville drawn together through a concern with self portraiture, celebrity, suffering, war, love and political revolt.
By drawing on the references of pop stars with en extensive and self-taught knowledge of modern art, the exhibition places artworks outside normal gallery frameworks. Documentary photography by Capa, Carter, McCullin and Namuth link paintings to a historical and political context that includes South Wales mining communities, eastern Africa, the Spanish Civil War and Vietnam war. A section dedicated to the Situationist International provides a bridge between Asger Jorn, the Paris student uprisings of May '68 and the Sex Pistols.
One over-arching theme of the exhibition is the analogous relationship between aesthetic and political revolt, a relationship epitomised in the Manics' image: their dress sense has combined cosmetics and political slogans. Their political beliefs stem from their upbringing in the working class Welsh Valleys, while their make-up and effeminate clothing marked them out in what was a tough, conformist community.
The exhibition opens with a lively weekend of free live events. Like the annual Eisteddfod (the celebration of Welsh arts and culture) or a Freshers' Fayre, various organisations will run information stalls. The range of organisations represent both the band's concerns and Wales's local and international perspective. They include Amnesty International, Blaengarw Workmen's Hall, the Welsh Language Society, Spillers Record Shop, Gwent Tertiary College, Reclaim Our Rights, the Samaritans and Manic Street Preachers' fanzines. On Saturday evening the hundred-strong Pendyrus Male Choir will give a special concert of music chronicling the experience of the Welsh mining community and the miners' participation in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
The spirit of the weekend will continue for the duration of the show with the participating groups' literature on display, a slide carousel documenting the event and a series of talks and live events including talks by Emyr Lewis, Bard of the Eisteddfod; Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers; Jeremy Deller and Amnesty International.
Library Project by Temporary Services
Temporary Services added 100 new books and artists' projects into the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago (the largest municipal, public, circulating library in the country). The library has not been told about the gifts they are going to receive. Every title has been checked against Harold Washington's catalog to verify that each book is not already owned by the library. Several books that are already in the collection, are being added in creatively altered new versions. We are giving the Library books that it has not acquired on its own. We believe these are books that it will probably want to keep. Nearly all of the books are brand new and most of them were published or created within the last few years.
Though composed almost entirely of books by artists, this gift will infiltrate all of Harold Washington Library and not merely the floor devoted to Visual and Performing Arts. Creating new juxtapositions of materials not normally possible in common library practice is one component of this project. Another major goal is to bring obscure, subversive, self-published, hand-made, or limited edition works by underexposed artists to a wider audience.
Every reasonable effort has been made to make the donated books look like they already belong to Harold Washington Library. They have call numbers on their spines, manila cardholders that are ready for the due date cards provided at the circulation desk, Reference stickers, and facsimiles of other Chicago Public Library stamps and markings. Supplies have been purchased from the same mail order outlets that most libraries use. In some cases, books that were originally discarded by HWL were purchased from the library's store for their bindings or stamped forms and cardholders. These tactics have been used to properly integrate the artists' works using the library's preferred methods. It is our hope that this effort will encourage the library to retain these books so that they can actually circulate or remain in the building as reference material. Ironically, due to the Library's security measures, which include book and bag inspections upon exiting the building, we anticipate that it will be easier to add a book to the collection without permission, than it would be for someone to steal a book that we have surreptitiously donated.
Putting these books in Harold Washington is not meant as an act of aggression toward the library. None of the library's current holdings have been damaged or altered in any way. We are only adding books and objects, not taking away or changing anything that was already there. The project and some of the books it includes may cause a little confusion on the part of patrons. The clerks that reshelve books or work the circulation desks may discover a few genuine oddities and surprises.
full text at http://www.temporaryservices.org/library_project_essay.html
Underwater broadcast in Malmö
In August 2004 Alison Gerber curated an underwater broadcast of audio works for the beach at Västra Hamnen in Malmö. The broadcast was part of the project karta/terräng initiated and organized by the cultural organization Laika.
Gerber invited artists to make sound works for an underwater broadcast in the ocean between Sweden and Denmark. For two days bathers at Västra Hamnen in Malmö were able to listen to works made especially for the event.
The sounds were broadcast underwater using the Swedish national synchronized swimming team's equipment. Swimmers could hear sounds clearly through bone conduction so long as their heads were at least partially submerged. The audio from the recordings mixed with the sounds of passing boats and the splashes of other swimmers. The event took place during the hottest days of the Swedish summer.
Artists included in the broadcast: Abinadi Meza, Ann Rosén, Enrico Glerean, Johan Sandsjö, Jon Eriksen, mAggIE mAYhEm, Mathias Kristersson and Trygve Luktvasslimo, Petri Kuljuntausta, Plakto Needs Lint, Rich Barlow, and Sten-Olof Hellström
http://www.hostelprojects.org/pastundervatten.htm
Copy-art.net
Copyright Free artwork distributed via the web: www.copy-art.net "you are free to download, copy, use, change, display and distribute all works."
With seed projects by: Anna Best, Bigert & Bergström, Colectivo Cambalache, Critical Art Ensemble, A K Dolven, Ella Gibbs, House of O'Dwyer, Per Hüttner, juneau projects, Miltos Manetas, Matthieu Laurette, N55, Elizabeth Price, Szuper Gallery, Thomson & Craighead, Gavin Wade, SAK, Peter Coffin, Doug Fishbone, Beltran Obregon, Reza Aramesh, Carey Young, Abigail Reynolds, Richard Crow
Jacob Fabricius "Sandwiched"
Los Angeles - February, 2003
"Many structures and relations within the art world and society in general are extremely hard to penetrate, so with this project I would like to do a very simple exchange of labour. Artists will do sandwich-board signs, which in exchange the curator will stand and display. I will wear each artists sandwich-board for 2 days at the Hollywood/Sunset/Virgil junction. I will be standing there between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m."
Participating artists:
Lisa Anne Auerbach/Daniel Marlos, Morgan Fisher, Marc Grotjahn, Marc Herbst, Evan Holloway, Oliver Ressler/David Thorne, Stephanie Taylor, Mungo Thomson and Christina Ulke.
New York - September, 2003
Wrong gallery and Public Art Fund invited me to do a new version of sandwiched (in New York).
Participating artists :
Bernadette Corporation, Leon Golub, Sharon Hayes, Ben Kinmont, John Miller, Aleksandra Mir, Adrian Piper, Julia Scher, Michael Snow and Valerie Tevere.
Public Art Fund Site
Pork Salad Press Site
Per Huttner "I Am A Curator"
Swedish artist-curator Per Huttner is conducting an "experiment in democratising the curatorial process." He had a team choose a stockpile of artworks by 57 artists. He then arranged for a selection of these items to be installed during gallery hours by one volunteer member of the public each day (for the run of the exhibition). The faster the daily curators take their choice of items out of the box and install them in the gallery, the longer the visible exhibition in its 'resolved' form is viewable for the visiting audience.
There is also a handy modular storage-system (the 'box' mentioned above) and a support staff to help the process along. . .and pack up at the end of each days process.
text paraphrased from Fergal Stapleton's review in C Magazine Issue #80 Winter 2004
The exhibition took place at Chisenhale Gallery, London.
Phantom Galleries
Temporary art exhibits occupying vacant storefronts in downtown San José. "The project aims to provide local artists with an opportunity to exhibit their work, while fostering economic development by drawing attention to available retail space. Our vision is to prove the importance of collaboration between the city and local artists, creating a future of support between both."
http://www.populuspresents.com/main/pg/
Americana
"Americana...engaged critically with notions of what American culture is and how curatorial practices have supported a monolithic notion of American art. Group Material decided to make a model of our own biennial, a salon des refuses, of what was significantly absent, excluded through curatorial business-as-usual from the Whitney Museum. . ."
"Americana took issue with the exclusivity and white-washed picture of American art proposed and supported by dominant cultural institutions such as the Whitney, and in a non-didactic manner opened curatorial practice to scrutiny. Americana included work by overtly socially engaged artists many of whom were women and artists of color, and popular "commercial artists" as well as store-bought objects from so-called low culture. One goal was to schematize some problematic relations with the art industry. Another was to link choices people might make when shopping with the decisions curators make when shopping on a grander scale for the museum's collection. The boundaries between "high" and "low" culture were symbolically dislodged in Americana. The exhibition aimed to be a catalyst for thinking about the function of cultural representation and icons and hierarchies of cultural production."
from: http://www.thephotographyinstitute.org/www/journals/1998/community_as_context.html
Uncommon Sense
Curated by Julie Lazar and Tom Finkelpearl, Uncommon Sense allowed a number of artists to realise projects not normally supported in traditional museum programming. It is an exploration of the relations between artist, institution and public communities both as participants and viewers.
. . . the exhibition sought "to create a public dialogue within a space that is historically hostile to this sort of endeavor." ("Uncommon Sense" catalogue, p. 32) Finkelpearl cites projects that take art audiences away from galleries and museums into cities and communities (such as "Places with a Past"), but he also advocates for "fostering interaction" in the museum. (Ibid.) Lazar references Joseph Beuys's ideas on art and teaching. She asks: "How can a museum, which produces (one-way) transmissions of curatorial theses, become engaged in sympathetic dialogues or debates with artists and audiences?" (Ibid., p. 40) She also cautions that the "projects may not look like art at all." (Ibid., p. 41)
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/visarts/globe/issue5/zstxt.html
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag98/phllps/sm-phlps.htm
nVisible Museum
The nVisible apparently involves the installation of works from a single collection in various public, semi-public and private sites. "...what makes this unique institution truly invisible is not its collection, but the fact that it lacks all the tangible characteristics of the average museum. Possessing neither a physical nor a bureaucratic structure, it functions with the admirable economy of a virus, coming to life only when it finds an appropriate host. The rest of the time, the nvisible's collection is dispersed in a network of friendly loans made to artists, curators and various acquaintances in London and New York, whose homes essentially function as the museum's displaced galleries."
While its name suggests it might be difficult to find, the nvisible Museum (the 'I' has evidently already vanished) is showing up all over the place. In the last several years, exhibitions of the nvisible's collection have appeared in art venues from Kiev to Toronto, Edinburgh to Birmingham, Alabama, and from the island of Madeira to San Francisco. Its latest show, 'Ghosts', opened on Halloween in Memphis, Tennessee, and will soon be followed by exhibitions in Cairo and Kyoto.
Founded in 1987 by an anonymous London collector with a shrewd eye for spotting emerging talent, the museum's permanent collection boasts seminal works by some 40 international artists, among them Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Steve McQueen, Gabriel Orozco and Cady Noland. Most of these works of art are eminently visible, although a few pieces in the Memphis show play with the idea of disappearance, including a nocturnal landscape by Paul Morrison that is cut into black rubber so that the image is impossible to see from certain angles.
http://www.eyestorm.com/feature/ED2n_article.asp?article_id=181&caller=1
A Show That Will Show That a Show is Not Only a Show
Exhibition by Jens Hoffman
"Each day the large space of "The Project" (Los Angeles) was filled with more and more art work found while doing research. Consequently, the research will in fact be the exhibition and the exhibition the research. Besides the works of art, that will be the central element of the show, the exhibition will include, in an interdisciplinary manner, various other forms of artistic articulation such as performances, lectures, concerts, etc. and some that are not even necessarily part of the exhibition in the space but formulate extensions into the real space of the city"
"i.e. other exhibitions, TV or radio stations, art schools, etc. The opening of the show is therefore practically every day a new work is installed or a new element taken in. By conceptualizing the making of an exhibition, the show tries to propose a different notion on how exhibitions can gain form: growing over the period of several weeks the show emphasizes the dynamics of time and advocates an artistic and curatorial practice that privileges process over finished product."
"The exhibition becomes an active place, a site for development and change rather then a set of fixed and predetermined positions mirroring the situation of a postmodern metropolitan city such as Los Angeles. At the same time the project encourages the concept of an authored exhibition that involves a strong creative and vital collaboration between artist and curator. An "instant" publication will document the development of the exhibition and the curatorial research in form of a dairy made in collaboration with the participants of the exhibition, the staff of The Project and the curator of the exhibition. A reception will be held during the last week of the exhibition and a second press release will be send with the exact names of the participants of the exhibition. "
text from: http://www.likeyou.com/archives/show_project_la.htm
Jeffrey Vallance
Curated exhibition/interventions within or beside the existing displays of collections of the The Liberace Museum, Debbie Reynolds Casino-Museum , Ron Lee's World of Clowns Museum, the Magic and Movie Hall of Fame, the Cranberry Museum, and the Barbara Streisand Museum.
"With ample humor and a surprising degree of earnestness, Vallance reveals the interpenetration of cultures across borders, emphasizing the heavy influence of mass media and communications on that transformation. The hybridity he explores is mirrored in his interdisciplinary practice that is simultaneously respectful and irreverent as it addresses faith, media, and cultural history."
from: http://www.insite2000.org/testweb/artist_projects/Vallance/bio-e.html
TIMELINE:
1995 "Liberace! A Visual Tribute to Mr. Showmanship" at The Liberace Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada
1995 "Clown Oasis" at Ron Lee's World of Clowns Museum, Henderson, Nevada
1996 "The Magic Show" at the Magic and Movie Hall of Fame, O'Shea's Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada
1996 "The Cranberry Show: An Exhibition of Good Taste" at the Cranberry Museum, Henderson, Nevada
1998 "Hello Gorgeous" at the Barbara Streisand Museum, San Francisco, California
In a Different Light
An exhibition at the Berkley Art Museum, January - April 1995 / co-curated by Nayland Blake and Lawrence Rinder. This exhibition was 'co-curated by an artist' allowing certain - normally unavailable- options possible. It also incorporated pop culture imagery (incl. records sleeves, images cut out from catalogs), multi-generational artists/artworks, and a social structuring system. . .
"In a Different Light was developed by imagining groups of objects and images that, through their juxtaposition, might engage in refreshing and provocative dialogue. These online images represent a sampling of the groups. We titled these groups: Void, Self, Drag, Other, Couple, Family, Orgy, World, and Utopia.
Their order in the exhibition suggests a trajectory of experience, moving toward ever greater degrees of sociability. However, the progression of groups in the exhibition is not a chronology, as each group itself contains works from a variety of historical periods. Culture in general, and gay and lesbian culture in particular, reads the past in terms of, and reconfigures it to be meaningful to, the present. In this exhibition we read history both ways, recontextualizing older works in terms of their present resonances and positing contemporary works in terms of their continuity with historical traditions and sensibilities.
The notion of "sensibility" we have employed in this exhibition is somewhat idiosyncratic. The groups are not based on aesthetic sensibility, but rather came together and are identified by social sensibility-- that is, the various conditions of being in the world in relation to other persons (i.e. Self, Couple, Orgy, Utopia). In this manner, the exhibition is structured in a fundamentally sociological, rather than art-historical, manner. Nevertheless, aesthetic sensibilities emerge in interesting ways throughout the exhibition."
text from: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/idl/dlhome.html
Three Day Weekend
. . "Dave Muller describes the 'Three Day Weekend' as an 'artist-run, nomadic project' that can occur in various types of settings, including galleries and even a freight elevator (as at the Frankfurt Art Fair in 2000). These events are collaborative endeavors, as Muller works with each artist to choose work for the show."
"Muller, who studied at Cal Arts, made his on-campus studio available to other students for exhibitions of their work. After graduation he continued this practice at his loft in downtown Los Angeles with the first Three Day Weekend in 1994. He invited artist friends to exhibit in his studio, providing a space, opening party, and refreshments. While traveling as an assistant to artist Mike Kelly, Muller began organizing Three Day Weekends in other cities, often carrying the artwork himself on the airplanes. He has since organized approximately 30 such events in cities such as London, Tokyo, Athens, and San Francisco, exhibiting works by Los Angeles artists and local artists whose work he encounters during studio visits in each city. "
text from: http://www.bard.edu/ccs/exhibitions/museum/muller/
Exhibitions of an Exhibition
exhibition at Casey Kaplan gallery NY in 2003
curated by Jens Hoffmann
http://www.caseykaplangallery.com
In recent years more and more group exhibitions began to be organized and set up by a simple formula. Curators started to choose a theme or topic and grouped a number of works around it that would represent the subject matter. Following the criticism expressed by many artists towards exhibitions in which art works are again and again emplyed to simply illustrate curators' personal fixations, Exhibitions of an Exhibition starts on the opposite end and does not state any concpet or overarching thought that ties the pieces and artists together. Rather it bringsthe worka nd the artists together in a way that leas one to consider the relationships that manigest themselves in the configuration of the works. The ininvited groups of artists representa an entirely subjective selection of works that i have appreciated for many years or only recently encountered and that i desired to bring together for the first time. In reversal of common curatorial methods, four curators have been invited to reflect on the selection anf to write a short thesis answering the question of how they see the works and the artists in relation to each other. By doing so, each curator, necessarily, begins to curate his or her own exhibition. Despite including the exact same artists and works, the results will be four different exhibition concepts based on a prearranged selection of artists. . . .
Each concept will be presented as a text near the gallery space along with the works of art. It is up to the viewers to decide which proposal the will read and which exhibition they will see. . or if they, without too much curatorial interference, directly encounter the works of art and leave the curatorial proposals behind.
text by Jens Hoffmann
Red 76 "DimSum"
The viewer arrives in the gallery to see the space set up as if they were in a restaurant. They are seated, drinks are served. There is a TV/VCR, and a CD player at each table. Red76 members, come around dressed as waitstaff and serve artworks chosen from a menu, just as if you were eating Dim Sum.
http://www.Red76.com
Dim Sum, a project first enacted in December 2002 in Portland, Oregon, archives the work of well over 100 artists from around the world. Art that can really be worked over. Work that can be held, listened to, looked at.
The viewer arrives in the gallery to see the space set up as if they were in a restaurant. They are seated, drinks are served. There is a TV/VCR, and a CD player at each table. We, Red76 members, come around dressed as waitstaff with material for the viewers to choose from that they might not have picked off the menu, just as if you were eating Dim Sum.
In Cantonese Dim Sum translates into "a little bit of heart". What better to focus on? Some may view the work shown at this exhibit as ephemera. Fuck that. Zines, chapbooks, CDs, videos, giveaway portfolios, scrapbooks, are the items that fuel ideas and spur growth. Most importantly these are the works of art that we see around us everyday. In our bookshelves, on our tables. These are works of art that you can pick up, sit down with, and call your own.
Bookmobile
Projet MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project is an annual touring exhibition of artist books, zines, and independent publications. . . housed in an Airstream Trailer.
http://www.mobilivre.org/en/index.html
Projet MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project is an annual touring exhibition of artist books, zines, and independent publications. Traveling by way of a vintage Airstream, the BOOKMOBILE visits a variety of venues in Canada and the US including community centers, schools, libraries, festivals and artist-run centers. A group of coordinators traveling with the exhibition facilitate a series of workshops, artist talks, and educational forums. The project has exposed thousands of visitors to a unique collection of independently produced book works.
The projet MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project explores the long held tradition of bookmobiles as traveling libraries that promote the distribution of information.The BOOKMOBILE travels across the United States and Canada in a vintage airstream trailer visiting a variety of communities. Our annual traveling collection of approximately 300 book works range from handmade and one-of-a-kind to photocopied and small press publications.
Hans Ulrich Obrist "Do-it"
"do it stems from an open exhibition model, an exhibition in progress. Individual instructions can open empty spaces for occupation and invoke possibilities for the interpretations and rephrasing of artworks in a totally free manner."
do it began in 1993 with a discussion among Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier, and myself in the Cafe Select, Paris. Both artists have been interested in various forms of instructional procedures since the early 1970s, and that evening they spoke of the instructions contained within their own work.
Since the 1970s Lavier has made many works that contain written instructions in order to observe the effects of translation on an artwork as it moves in and out of various permutations of language. Boltanski, like Lavier, is also interested in the notion of interpretation as an artistic principle. He thinks of his instructions for installations as analogous to musical scores which, like an opera or symphony, go through countless realisations as they are carried out and interpreted by others. From this encounter arose the idea of an exhibition of do-it-yourself descriptions or procedural instructions which, until a venue is found, exists in a static condition. Like a musical score, everything is there but the sound.
do it stems from an open exhibition model, an exhibition in progress. Individual instructions can open empty spaces for occupation and invoke possibilities for the interpretations and rephrasing of artworks in a totally free manner. do it effects interpretations based on location, and calls for a dovetailing of local structures with the artworks themselves. The diverse cities in which do it takes place actively construct the artwork context and endow it with their individual marks or distinctions.
It is important to bear in mind that do it is less concerned with copies, images, or reproductions of artworks, than with human interpretation. No artworks are shipped to the venues, instead everyday actions and materials serve as the starting point for the artworks to be recreated at each "performance site" according to the artists' written instructions. Each realization of do it occurs as an activity in time and space. The essential nature of this activity is imprecise and can be located somewhere between permutation and negotiation within a field of tension described by repetition and difference. Meaning is multiplied as the various interpretations of the texts accumulate in venue after venue. No two interpretations of the same instructions are ever identical.
Fred Wilson "Mining the Museum"
Mining the Museum 1992
"Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson" was organized by the then siteless art organization The Contemporary and sited at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD. Wilson carefully researched the holdings of the museum and developed a presentation from the collection to reveal the potent social/cultural histories attached to them.
"At the museum's invitation, he sifted through three centuries' worth of artifacts, from paintings to potholders, and assembled a show. This is, of course, standard curatorial procedure, putting objects together to tell a story. And because museums tend to be conservative places, the stories are frequently soft and predictable, telling us things we basically already know and like to hear. Mr. Wilson, however, chose unusual, often unpretty things, and made them even more unusual by the way he combined them. The results were, in their undemonstrative way, eye-opening.
"In one vitrine, labeled "Metalwork 1793-1880," he placed ornate silver goblets and pitchers and iron slave shackles side by side. Elsewhere, he tucked a vintage Ku Klux Klan mask into an antique baby buggy. And in an installation titled "Cabinetmaking 1820-1960" - reconstituted at the Studio Museum - he had four fancy parlor chairs attentively facing a cruciform wooden whipping post once used at a Maryland jail.
"'Mining the Museum' was far from the first show to engage critically, even subversively, with an institutional context. Hans Haacke had been doing such work for years, and the Center for African Art's 1988 exhibition "Art/artifact" offered a model from which Mr. Wilson might have learned much. But the Baltimore project, which focused on excavating and recovering a specific history, American racial history, from a specific range of existing materials, brought a bracing, investigatory spirit to contemporary art. Soon other artists started digging away.
from: http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news13/news630.html