Local
Global
Cloud
An exhibition of correspondence by Edward Fry about the organizing of Documenta 8
Slought is pleased to announce "Edward Fry: A New Modernity," an exhibition of research notes and correspondence by the late art historian Edward Fry, on display from October 5, 2002 through January 11, 2003.
Edward Fry was invited to co-curate Documenta 8 with Manfred Schneckenburger in 1985, and the exhibition opened two years later in 1987. The correspondence between these curators over the course of those two years of collaboration is the subject of the exhibition at Slought. A variety of letters, contracts, and paraphernalia from that exchange will be displayed on the walls of Slought, and will be installed in a manner reminiscent of the conceptual and information aesthetic of that era. The correspondence provides insight into the particularities and idiosyncrasies of this curatorial endeavor, but also curating more generally. It will also provide an opportunity to further historicize artistic, art historical and curatorial practices from the 1970s and 1980s.
The exhibition will also feature unpublished research and diagrams by Edward Fry from 1979, in which he analyzes the paintings of Barnett Newman according to numerical analysis and the golden mean. He is believed to have presented this material in the form of a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. Following the exhibition, both sets of papers will be permanently gifted to the University of Pennsylvania rare books and manuscripts collection, and entered into the archives of the library as a resource for others.
"Modern art was once considered dangerous. One thinks of Goya; of David and Delacroix; of the scandals surrounding Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists; of the initial hostility to Cubism; of the reception of the 1913 Armory Show; of Dada and Surrealist provocations; and of the Nazi and Stalinist repressions, for different but parallel reasons, of "decadent" or "bourgeois" modernism. Since the 1950's in the Western democracies, however, modern art has been fully assimilated into the mechanisms of public bureaucracies and the private commercial market. The only notable exceptions to this assimilation have been artists such as Beuys, during a brief period at the end of the 1960's and early 1970's, and Hans Haacke and other politically and socially oriented figures. The danger posed by these tendencies, which until recently were considered marginal, is that they transgress the ideologically imposed limitations erected around what Peter Bürger has correctly called the institution of contemporary art. Such transgressions liberate art from an academicized pseudo-modernity which appears to extend the previous achievements of aesthetic modernity, but which in fact only codifies them within narrowly defined limits. The consequence of these transgressions is to illuminate previously unnoticed myths, be they aesthetic, theoretical, or social, and to confront the instrumentalisms of thought and social practice which inevitably accompany these myths. The growing number of artists who pursue these goals, many of whom are included in Documenta 8, is creating a new modernity which is comparable to earlier phases of the modern tradition.
At the center of this new modernity is a rediscovery of, and a return to, the original critical and emancipatory functions of modern art. During the nineteenth century the critical power of modernity, when it was not swamped by a triumphant myth of Progress, as opposed to the real human progress achieved in medicine, communication and general well-being—remained for the most part implicit or latent, whereby a creatively alienated minority depicted the exterior imperfections of society, or, later, discovered the subjective epistemologies underlying modern life. [...]
A real, emancipatory, baroque modernity has as yet only a direction in which to move, and must make use of its present strategies until new communicative means are invented which will be both adequate to their task and resistant to the threat of an eventual academicizing orthodoxy.
A new modernity: it is a return to the old/new emancipatory project of modernity by way of the critical reflexivity of modernism itself, expanded beyond autonomous subjectivity into a no longer tightly compartmentalized world; it is the ongoing struggle with myth and instrumentality, by means of inner contradictions and outer confrontations with new contexts and new experience. It is also a leap of faith, in the same way that a sick man, lost in pain and delirium, hopes for the return of a health and sanity which he can hardly remember save for the fact that they must once have been part of his very being. The new modernity is neither utopia nor anti-utopia, but a condition of responsible freedom defended by eternal vigilance."
-- Edward Fry, A New Modernity (1988; published 2003 courtesy of the family of Edward Fry and Slought).