Sunday, March 29, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
.jpg)
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Public Art Discusion Piece
A Modest Proposal
The Sudbury Burlington Exchange project should explore an emergence into the "Public Realm" beyond the museum/gallery.
I have two main reasons for putting this suggestion forward, first, it offers the institutions greater flexibility in presenting the exhibition. The different characteristics of the exhibition spaces make two identical exhibitions logistically difficult. Second, as an artist engaged in this project I have not been subject to the standard curatorial visit and selection through the exercise of connoisseurship by the curators. This may be planned for the future of course, but the whole atmosphere of exploration seems to me to already have pointed us in a different direction. The experiences of visiting the "other" community and "hosting" in my own community have opened me to seeing both in new ways. The obvious connection of two of Canada's most notorious heavy/industrial planet changing installations has become parsed, examined in more nuanced units. Public Art fits into these nuanced appreciations of both communities.
In 1779 the museum Fridericianum was opened in Kassell. "It was the first museum on the continent of Europe that was open to the public." It reflected the new social reality of the wunderkammer a connoisseur's private collection influenced by the expanding banks of information about a newly unstable Baroque world. With the ascendancy of the public museum/gallery with a mandate for our edification, public art fell off its plinth. "The logic of the monument collapses with the ascendancy of the collecting museum". Over the years the public gallery has become a home, a safe haven, a bubble? for the anarchist artist who is ironically often accepted by the institution through a passive aggressive strategy of thumbing his/her nose at the museum's claims to gatekeeping. The frustrations of taxpayers and politicians and the institutions complicated love/hate, public/private, elite/antielite relationships with Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst all come to mind.
"Without the beating heart of resident living artists the body of culture will never be animated, without the seeing eye and listening ear of a community artists speak silently and grieve for their loss of voice" If I begin to parse the locations for the two exhibitions these are my first observations. The Art Gallery of Sudbury has a connection to a University "a collectivity embodying important branches of learning", The Burlington Art Centre over looks one of the world's greatest inland seas, Lake Ontario. My second observation is the Art Gallery of Sudbury is across a bridge from a depressed downtown neighbourhood, The Burlington Art Centre sits on Lakeshore Rd which blends into North Shore Blvd and a river of the well to do in cars pass it by everyday. The third, fourth etc observations can come from readers to the blog. As soon as these specifics of site are written down they suggest approaches to "public art strategies". For instance: partnerships with researchers at the University of Sudbury, shipwrecks in Lake Ontario, documents of the street, driving by and advertising message boards. And on and on "But so what? How does all this become new work or public art and who cares and why should we?"
We live in a world a lot like Baroque Europe: Explosions of available information, a vision of the world destabilized by a daily bombardment of discovery, frequent disaster,
Imminent financial ruin, new habits that change our world on an intimate scale, "the shallow recession of our homes and domestic scenarios, is moving and being constantly transformed." Pubic art today is not "the Monument" it is interventionist, playful, Baroque scenarios expand narratives infinitely creating complex multiple possibilities. This Public art carries an inherent process of audience engagement and does not fear interpretation but relies on interpretive drift. There is no longer a separation between the cultural bombardment of the mass media and the art of the avant garde, we are in an infinite polydimensional "matrix" of contemporary culture.
Here is one concrete suggestion for the group as a whole at the Burlington Art Centre. As part of the international "Inquiry Projects" I have done we always finish the project with a "public visual presentation". This is a relatively simple thing. We edit inquiry work daily and create or extract or perform documentation in digital form. All the documentation is edited to a manageable size by the participants and mentor. This material which, may also include images of completed projects, is put on a CD and projected in or to the outdoors at the Inquiry location. At The Burlington Art centre we could project more than one CD of images to fill the glass wall of the Shoreline Room. We would just have to line the glass with mylar film on the inside and the images would appear on that film from the outside to the people in cars driving by. This suggestion happens to include the whole group as well as interacting with a specific observation of "site".
As with most public projects it may also involve permission. This is another Baroque area of public art. But that would be another essay.
N.B. I have not given any citations for quotations in this piece... partly because I made them up, but not all of them, but it's a blog anyway. I would recommend the book, Neo-Baroque Esthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, by Angela Ndalianis, MIT Press 2004.
Vjane
Waterdown March 25
SO BSersWHAT DO YOU ALL THINK?
The Sudbury Burlington Exchange project should explore an emergence into the "Public Realm" beyond the museum/gallery.
I have two main reasons for putting this suggestion forward, first, it offers the institutions greater flexibility in presenting the exhibition. The different characteristics of the exhibition spaces make two identical exhibitions logistically difficult. Second, as an artist engaged in this project I have not been subject to the standard curatorial visit and selection through the exercise of connoisseurship by the curators. This may be planned for the future of course, but the whole atmosphere of exploration seems to me to already have pointed us in a different direction. The experiences of visiting the "other" community and "hosting" in my own community have opened me to seeing both in new ways. The obvious connection of two of Canada's most notorious heavy/industrial planet changing installations has become parsed, examined in more nuanced units. Public Art fits into these nuanced appreciations of both communities.
In 1779 the museum Fridericianum was opened in Kassell. "It was the first museum on the continent of Europe that was open to the public." It reflected the new social reality of the wunderkammer a connoisseur's private collection influenced by the expanding banks of information about a newly unstable Baroque world. With the ascendancy of the public museum/gallery with a mandate for our edification, public art fell off its plinth. "The logic of the monument collapses with the ascendancy of the collecting museum". Over the years the public gallery has become a home, a safe haven, a bubble? for the anarchist artist who is ironically often accepted by the institution through a passive aggressive strategy of thumbing his/her nose at the museum's claims to gatekeeping. The frustrations of taxpayers and politicians and the institutions complicated love/hate, public/private, elite/antielite relationships with Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst all come to mind.
"Without the beating heart of resident living artists the body of culture will never be animated, without the seeing eye and listening ear of a community artists speak silently and grieve for their loss of voice" If I begin to parse the locations for the two exhibitions these are my first observations. The Art Gallery of Sudbury has a connection to a University "a collectivity embodying important branches of learning", The Burlington Art Centre over looks one of the world's greatest inland seas, Lake Ontario. My second observation is the Art Gallery of Sudbury is across a bridge from a depressed downtown neighbourhood, The Burlington Art Centre sits on Lakeshore Rd which blends into North Shore Blvd and a river of the well to do in cars pass it by everyday. The third, fourth etc observations can come from readers to the blog. As soon as these specifics of site are written down they suggest approaches to "public art strategies". For instance: partnerships with researchers at the University of Sudbury, shipwrecks in Lake Ontario, documents of the street, driving by and advertising message boards. And on and on "But so what? How does all this become new work or public art and who cares and why should we?"
We live in a world a lot like Baroque Europe: Explosions of available information, a vision of the world destabilized by a daily bombardment of discovery, frequent disaster,
Imminent financial ruin, new habits that change our world on an intimate scale, "the shallow recession of our homes and domestic scenarios, is moving and being constantly transformed." Pubic art today is not "the Monument" it is interventionist, playful, Baroque scenarios expand narratives infinitely creating complex multiple possibilities. This Public art carries an inherent process of audience engagement and does not fear interpretation but relies on interpretive drift. There is no longer a separation between the cultural bombardment of the mass media and the art of the avant garde, we are in an infinite polydimensional "matrix" of contemporary culture.
Here is one concrete suggestion for the group as a whole at the Burlington Art Centre. As part of the international "Inquiry Projects" I have done we always finish the project with a "public visual presentation". This is a relatively simple thing. We edit inquiry work daily and create or extract or perform documentation in digital form. All the documentation is edited to a manageable size by the participants and mentor. This material which, may also include images of completed projects, is put on a CD and projected in or to the outdoors at the Inquiry location. At The Burlington Art centre we could project more than one CD of images to fill the glass wall of the Shoreline Room. We would just have to line the glass with mylar film on the inside and the images would appear on that film from the outside to the people in cars driving by. This suggestion happens to include the whole group as well as interacting with a specific observation of "site".
As with most public projects it may also involve permission. This is another Baroque area of public art. But that would be another essay.
N.B. I have not given any citations for quotations in this piece... partly because I made them up, but not all of them, but it's a blog anyway. I would recommend the book, Neo-Baroque Esthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, by Angela Ndalianis, MIT Press 2004.
Vjane
Waterdown March 25
SO BSersWHAT DO YOU ALL THINK?
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)