The Reservoir of Modernism 9 February – 21 May 2018
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The Reservoir of Modernism 9 February – 21 May 2018 KUNSTMUSEUM LIECHTENSTEIN Saâdane Afif Rosemarie Trockel Bojan Šarčević Walter Benjamin: Mondrian ’63 –’96 Marcel Duchamp Tacita Dean Mario García-Torres Maya Schweizer / Clemens von Wedemeyer Thomas Hirschhorn Mai-Thu Perret Dmitry Gutov Charlotte Moth Latifa Echakhch David Maljković Pamela Rosenkranz Künstler The Reservoir of Modernism Bad, good, or indifferent, I don’t The artists in this exhibition hark back to modernism. They examine the con- care. You don’t have to be happy ceptual, programmatic and formal traditions of the early twentieth century that or unhappy about it, you see? have become established as parameters. They search for traces that help to That’s the trouble: taste can’t identify alternative modes of reception, thus opening up avenues for an unex- help you understand what art pected positioning in the history of art: they rediscover modernism. can be. The difficulty is to make a painting that is alive, so that The aspect of inspiration that lies in reappraising the past plays a special role: when it dies in fifty years, it goes modernism becomes a reservoir. This also involves removing the artwork from back into that purgatory of art its current, representative role and connecting it to the original conditions of history. As far as art history is its creation and its effects on human experience. The attempt to preserve the concerned, we know that in spite openness of artworks while continuing their discourse is equally an attempt of what the artist said or did, to assess the avant-gardes and their sometimes conflicted and ambivalent something stayed on what was histories. completely independent of what the artist desired; it was grabbed Essential ideas for the avant-gardes all over Europe – including cubism, by society, which made it its own. futurism, suprematism, dadaism, surrealism or constructivism – pertain to The artist doesn’t count. He does progress, the attempt to raise art to a life practice, questions of aesthetics and not count. Society takes what it their effects on society. A younger generation of artists from the East and West wants.1 interrogates the attendant utopias with regard to their current validity. Above all, Marcel Duchamp this must be seen in the context of defamation in the era of National Socialism and Stalinism, as well as the incipient Cold War in the mid-1950s that was accompanied by aesthetic attributions such as abstraction and realism. The approaches taken by these artists are self-reflective and conceptual in nature. Research, appropriation, repetition, re-enactment, narrative, reportage and archival practices are among the methods used in different, open ways to update the limits of memory and subjectivity of the recent past. Marcel Duchamp’s work is a frequent point of reference. For example, since 1999 Mai-Thu Perret has been developing an extensive project dealing with a virtual model of a female society for a possible future, based on her fictitious narrative The Crystal Frontier and especially by studying the female protagonists of classic modernism. By contrast, Saâdane Afif, in his work Fountain Archive (2009–2017), examines the history of reception of a key work of modernism, Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917. Mario García-Torres, on the other hand, uses his installation A List of Names of Artists I Like (Or Cubism Seen Under a Specific Light) (n. d.) to focus on a legendary list drawn up by Pablo Picasso for the first Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) in 1913. The Reservoir of Modernism presents works chiefly from the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein’s collection. A Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein production curated by Friedemann Malsch and Christiane Meyer-Stoll. 1 Marcel Duchamp, The Afternoon Interviews, edited by Calvin Tomkins, Brooklyn, NY: Badlands Unlimited, 2013. 1 Saâdane Afif The works of Saâdane Afif are based on an interdisciplinary system that is con- * 1970 in Vendôme, France, tinuously taking shape in an extended process of transferring and translating his lives and works in Berlin themes, be it in the form of performance, installation, textual image or sculptural object. Afif incorporates elements from the history of art, music or poetry into 1 his multi-layered narrative – often with the collaboration of invited artists. This Fountain Archive, 2009–2017 not only constitutes a vibrant element of playfulness, but also a profoundly self- Archival material, framed reflective aspect. 45 parts, variable dimensions Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz Afif began work on the Fountain Archive (1) in 2009 – the year in which he was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize. He had already begun collecting images 2 of Duchamp’s trailblazing Fountain readymade (1917) in 2008. The aim of the 7 songs about Fountain Archive research project, which is still in progress, is to bring together 1001 images from various publications. In each case, the artist tears or cuts out the whole page, FA.0000 (And It Spills) – mounting the separate sheets in specially modified picture frames, some with Kilian Rüthmann / S.A. coloured backs. Each work in the Fountain Archive is unique, with Afif usually FA.0000 (Get Around 1964) – creating only a single copy per publication and page. In this exhibition, the ele- Michel Gauthier / S.A. ments of the archive are presented as a wall installation on a pencilled square grid made up of 4, 9 or 16 sheets. The second part of the Fountain Archive com- FA.0000 (Here I Am) – prises the collection of publications from which Afif has taken the pages for his Nathalie Czech / S.A. framed objects. Afif has also presented a selection of books at some shows, but FA.0000 (Hard on) – as a rule he stores this library – without Fountain – in chronological order in his Willem de Rooij / S.A. studio. FA.0000 (But I Do) – In this archival work, Afif examines the history of the reception of Fountain, a Jonathan Monk / S.A. modernist work that – even as an original – exists only in the photograph taken FA.0000 (Un bobo uro bien chaud) – by Alfred Stieglitz. Despite, or perhaps because of, that very reason it has Lili Reynaud Dewar / S.A. become one of the most frequently reproduced artworks of the twentieth century. Duchamp had submitted a porcelain urinal, lying on its back and signed ‘R. Mutt FA.0000 (Voir Paterson) – 1917’, as a contribution to the New York Society of Independent Artists, using Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster / S.A. the pseudonym Mr. Richard Mutt from Philadelphia. The only requirement for Letraset admission to this forum of artists, who saw themselves as open-minded, was Variable dimensions payment of a small subscription. However, Fountain caused such indignation Courtesy the artist and Galerie Mehdi among the Board that the work was rejected. Duchamp, who had been appointed Chouakri, Berlin, Xavier Hufkens, head of the hanging committee, kept his authorship a secret. Together with the Brussels, and RaebervonStenglin, collector and founder member Walter Arensberg, he resigned from the Board. Zurich The object disappeared, the only trace that remains is Stieglitz’s photograph. Duchamp’s editorial ‘The Richard Mutt Case’ printed in The Blind Man, (the second issue, May 1917), assembled by Duchamp with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, testifies to his ironic humour, while allowing him to promote his readymade concept: 2 Saâdane Afif Fountain Archive, 2009 –2017 (detail) Saâdane Afif 3 They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit. Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion this article disappeared and never was exhibited. What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain:– 1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. 2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. Now Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no impor- tance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object. As for plumbing that is absurd. The only works of art that America has given are The Blind Man, No. 2, May 1917, n. p. her plumbing and her bridges. In Afif’s objets trouvés – the pages featuring Duchamp’s readymade – we can make out a number of intertwining narrative threads of cultural history: for example, the theoretical examination of mass reproduction and the apparent loss of aura (see Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936). Or the Western, literary tradition of the life-saving stories- within-stories in the One Thousand and One Nights, with the Fountain Archive being completed when it comprises one thousand and one objects. In his publication Fountain 1917, which features a piece by fellow artist Tacita Dean, Afif uses his collection of postcards of historical fountains – all sent in 1917 – to hark back to the origins. He considers the work in the context of its time, viewing the circumstances in which the 101-year-old, infamous urinal was developed. (See the publication presented in Alexander Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club). Additionally, the Lyrics (2), also shown here, written by people invited to engage poetically with the Fountain Archive, reflect Afif’s transformation from one medium to another and his involvement of other people – a never-ending loop. CMS 4 Saâdane Afif Rosemarie Trockel Rosemarie Trockel’s works operate in a sphere profoundly informed by social * 1952 in Schwerte, Germany, issues. The artist, who studied anthropology, sociology, theology, mathematics lives and works in Cologne and painting, works with different media including drawing, collage, installation and, above all, the knitted images that earned her renown in the mid-1980s.