Global
Cloud
Local
An exhibition of reproductions exploring the idea of knowledge and the borders of the art object
Slought is pleased to announce "The Other Epistemology," an exhibition of reproductions on display from November 20, 2004-January 31, 2005, with an opening reception to be held on Saturday, November 20, 2004. Artists in this exhibition include Luis Benedit, Braco Dimitrijevic, Benni Efrat, Nahum Tevet, Klaus Rinke, and Giorgio Griffa, and represent countries including Argentina, the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Israel and Germany.
This exhibition features a select group of international artists from the 1960s and 1970s whose work, neglected in contemporary criticism and resisting celebrity status, explored epistemological issues. An awareness of these artists and their inventive works broadens our understanding of art as a form of knowledge, and serves as a model with theoretical overview for an anthology or more comprehensive exhibition to follow.
Exhibition curator Osvaldo Romberg suggests that there is a need today to revaluate work and analyze practices that have been discarded or discharged of meaning by the establishment. Because reproductions are a type of technology that can facilitate misinterpretation, Romberg has only included artists in this exhibition that he had a personal or professional relationship, and whose work and thinking he follows and is familiar with.
The artists in this exhibition were born and educated, and many continue to reside, in countries outside of the United States. In calling attention to this situation, he suggests two things: first, epistemological concerns were found within artistic practices in the 1960s and 1970s regardless of geography (albeit with different approaches and subtle modalities); second, that although they were important artists, the peripheral philosophical aspects of the work and their countries of origin were contrary to the unified tendencies of mainstream art (conceptual or otherwise) of that time in the United States. With the distance of almost 30 years since these works were first on display, it is now possible to detect in these works a more layered understanding of epistemological concerns than is evident in work by many of the conceptual art celebrities of that time. Such celebrity-oriented practices have also come to define the historical movement today in contemporary art criticism.
If we consider epistemology in philosophy to mean a concern, at the most elemental level, with the idea of knowledge, what it is possible to know, and how that knowledge is grounded, then epistemological art will be an art that is based on the self-reflection and self-awareness of the artist vis a vis his discipline. Epistemological art would also be an art that is concerned with the extensions of the borders of the art object, as well as the practice of being an artist. One of the ways that this can manifest itself is through the "white box process," in which the development of the idea is made evident and rendered transparent in the final process.
Luis Benedit (b. Argentina) created a series of labyrinths and transparent architectural containers designed for plants and animals that emphasized the possible paths between the natural and the artificial (e.g. the Biotron at the Venice Biennale) during the 1970s. Some of the works, like the labyrinth for mice, pose interesting questions about the way in which animals and humans resolve situations and can be understood as an alternative social model. His later translation of drawings of his son into sculptures offer emotional insight into the phylogenetic aspects of art, as well as the idea of an art built upon primitive or non-cultural grounds.
Braco Dimitrijevic (b. former Yugoslavia) has dealt with the epistemological issue of identity, and who or what is considered important, through work that featured large reproductions of anonymous passerby on public and artistic sites such as in his work for the Venice Biennale of 1976 (The Casual Passery-by I Met at 1:49pm, 1976). Other work at that time in the same exhibit (Dialectic Chapel, Leonardo-Hundic, 1976) dealt with issues of who achieves celebrity, and who does not (which is among the subjects addressed in this exhibition). Later on, he also explored the idea of where the work of art should be situated, and to whom it should be addressed (human beings as well as animals). In juxtaposing living lions and actual work by Malevich, he also addresses how the natural impinges upon art.
Benni Efrat (b. Lebanon) in the end of the 60s and at the beginning of the 70s was already engaging ideas of perception and time, as well as the relation of time and image. Using an image projected on a wall, he performed the projections and worked upon them. In this work, then, he unified the previously dialectical relationship between presentation and representation. The self-referring and tautological aspect of printmaking is also evident in his work in 1975 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam where he elevated the numerical aspects of a print edition to a work of art in itself.
Giorgio Griffa (b. Italy) was a practicer of Analytical art, a movement in the beginning of the 1970s that tried to restore to painting the possibility of a practice that would be self-reflextive to the point of questioning whether it was still possible to paint after conceptual art. Griffa painted the painting by executing works comprised of minimal marks on unstretched burlap and alternative canvases (Sette segni of 1976, Tratteggio of 1976, and obliquo of 1978 are examples), and a series of gestures with the brush in which one or two desaturated color is applied to the support.
Klaus Rinke (b. Germany) manifests a concern with natural phenomena and our understanding of the body in relation to a given site and time. His continued interest in the sensualization of time connects his two obsessions: his body work and performance, evident in works such as Maskulin-feminin from 1972, and Wand, Boden, Raum from 1970, that engage his obsession with body, gravitation, and time, and his translocations of water into container forms, evident in works for Documenta 5 (1972), as well as Wasserzirkulation I of 1969. Among artists of his generation, he also pioneered in Germany a strong attraction to primitive cultures and environments (with the Aboriginees of Australia, etc). His aesthetic values are first and foremost natural, and his work can be understood as an extension of the natural, before the imposition of cultural interpretation.
Nachum Tevet (b. Israel) in his work from the 1970s took on concerns of order, time and space by situating modular tables in different positions and configurations as a commentary on the gallery space. In subsequent years, his investigations became more sophisticated and complex: the space he proposes involves the viewer in a more physical and personal relation than before. If the earlier works refer to the white box of the gallery, the later works (Narcissus 3 of 1982 is a typical example) refer to the body of the viewer as well. Notions of rhythmical and Euclidian geometry are analyzed and proposed through the theatrical construction of planes, lines, and rotations. Accents of color connote and denote the possibilities of a dynamic and infinite mutation of the gallery space.