berlin:
an anthology of art
gloria
zein
"In
the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?"
Jochen
Gerz' impertinent and intelligent concept uses this contemporary dialectic as
the basis for an art work: "Anthology of Art". The work precisely reflects
the world wide web, where it was first shown: both serve as a platform for anybody's
self presentation, knowledge or smattering of an idea. Surfer-visitors have to
decide themselves, what they want to accept - or not.
Born
1940 in Berlin and Paris based since 1966, Gertz launched his project in fall
2001, inviting six artists and six writers, to answer the question with their
image, and their text. Each participant invited an artist or theorist of their
choice to follow suit. Every other week, twelve new contributions where shown
on the internet. Following a first presentation of the project at the Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, in 2002, the complete inventory was first on view at the Berlin
Academy of Fine Art in 2004 and will now be shown at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The exhibition
is challenging for its visitors: 312 contributions (156 images and 156 texts),
printed on square paper and stuck directly on the gallery walls, are presented
in groups of 'generations.' "How impertinent, to confront us with so much
writing! It could have been reworked in order to make a point," a visitor
complains at the Berlin opening.
Jochen
Gerz should be used to this kind of statement. Since his youth he has labored
over forms of communication which don't permit easy understanding but require
an ability to decode. Various activities, such as a conversation in two languages
in which the partners do not understand each other, invite the viewer to empathize
and use their imaginative capability to complete the piece - a principle described
by Duchamp when inventing the term "coefficient d'art."
"Anthology
of Art" deals with the subject: "How do we generate transformation -
through a question or through the answer(s) it triggers?" In the catalogue,
Gerz explains the concept: "... the question about an art, we do not yet
know, is a question, we cannot answer without fearing to become part of a tautology.
It can, quasi, only be answered artistically.... participants cannot contribute
what we would call a creative act, but an indication, an image - no matter what
that looks like or how it has been achieved. This shows the inquiry's limit. The
question only makes sense because it cannot be answered. The question survives
the answers it has triggered." Literally, each contribution to Gerz' anthology
would simply serve to justify his conceptual idea.
But
the Academy's press release communicates a different aim: "The artists and
theoreticians are from 37 countries and six continents. Their contributions...
provoke a reconsideration of a global society's practices and theories."
During
a first walk through the gallery rooms, the predominance of photography and video
stills is striking. These media, conserving primarily actions or situations from
the past - are they useful to visualize an idea of the future? Rosemarie Trockel,
participant of the first "generation," sketches her acrylic vision on
paper: on top of a mountain of magazines, is enthroned the sign "vogue",
the "e" barely visible. There it is! The fashion, the vogue - on the
garbage of print media. Her piece is called "Birthplace."
An
artistic project that had its first presentation on the internet naturally evokes
a large number of statements dealing with the use of technical development in
the arts. James R. Watson writes about the problematic of digital photography:
"Two extremes must be avoided: fist, any contribution to the cultic fabrication
of mythic auratic communities, and secondly, the wholesale rejection of the photographic
aura..." Apparently, Watson sees photography as a means to continue Plato's
discourse about reality and its representation.
From
there, a hazardous glance stops at a text by Yvonne Volkart, expert on "cyberfeminism".
She describes her idea of "fluid subjectivities and data bodies beyond traditional
gender dichotomies, body images and artist's myths..." She wants to see "subjectivities
which are decentered, and collective... which are in the process... of becoming
data, of becoming flow."
Next
to her, Avraham Schweiger and Jason W. Brown proclaim that "the flexibility
of our nervous system in adapting to new environments will extend ... to entirely
novel structures." Because "there is something inherently foreign to
the nervous system in contemporary art forms."
Reduced
to a single print per artist, the practitioners' positions from the field of media
arts cannot assume the theoreticians' discourses about neural systems, data flow,
conceptual identity, codes, hybrid art, mutation, context, idiosyncrasy, rhizomatic
diagrams or "Inter.Intra.Translation." Film stills, computer simulations
and web site images of this exhibition seem insignificant, some poor. Over all,
this inventory of images reminds of an artistic practice that grabs anything out
of the personal stock of art production, hoping that it will fit somehow the collective
project. (In the world-wide-web presentation, each artist was given space for
a statement or additional visuals, which naturally helps to communicate some of
the work.)
The
exhibition lacks visions such as those by Archigram, an architects' collective
founded beginning of the 1960s in London and known for technological utopias,
which have had a considerable impact on the development of art and architecture.
Drawings and models by architects or urbanists stay projects, ideas until they
are realized. Maybe that is why their creators escape Gerz' tautological trap?
"'There
is' a vision for you of a yet unknown art: Cage's prophetic words about electronically
produced music," states David Grubbs. "Surprisingly, 'Future of Music:
Credo' is no less interesting for its prescience or its accuracy; it provides
an exception to the rule that the more profoundly mistaken, the more an alternate-universe
vision holds the greater interest, precisely for being unrealized. (...) The realization
of a hitherto-unknown art (...) had to do primarily with the revelatory nature
of otherwise isolated disciplines finding themselves in blushing, heated encounter.
That's still the best prediction I know for the otherwise-unknown."
There
are no such blushing or heated encounters between the participants of the "Anthology
of Art." Carefully, authors as artists refuse to predict, referring to the
past, the present or their individual disposition. There is no interaction between
the "generations," no contribution relating to another. It almost seems
like most participants agreed, that the purpose of this relay-run was not to answer
Gerz' question; that there would be no winner, because there is no answer, anyhow.
This attitude
makes the anthology an end in itself. All that matters is being part of the project,
whatever the outcome might be. There we are: another platform in the world wide
web for almost anybody's opinion - just like the magazine you are reading right
now.
Much alike,
Gerz' project is a representative selection of positions on contemporary art -
but his anthology being art in itself: Thanks to the democratic process and the
equalized presentation of texts and images, all contributions are occupied and
dominated by Gerz' stunning conceptual idea.
"Anthology of Art"
www.anthology-of-art.net
November - 9. Januar
2005 at Akademie der Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), Berlin.
März
- 7. August 2005 ZKM, Karlsruhe.
