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DISAPPEARANCE |
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| Elmgreen & Dragset. Powerless Structures, Fig.19, 1998 |
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FREDERIC MONTORNÉS
When the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) referred to Cubism in terms of conceptual painting, he was not only confirming a growing tendency in the art of the early years of the 20th century to turn away from the work as a physical object; he was also bearing witness to the interest certain artists had begun to take in the processes of formation and constitution of the artwork — an interest that, in marking the rejection of the mimetic principle in the visual arts and initiating the long march toward reflection, entailed not only a progressive shift in emphasis from the object to the conception, the project and the perceptive, imaginative and creative conduct of the spectator, but also the beginning of what was to become a process-based aesthetics. It is this current, which culminates in the conceptual artists of today, that has led us to think of contemporary art as an art of reflection; a reflection of the mental operation that Duchamp referred to in speaking of art and, advocating its dematerialization as a practice every bit as artistic as those that are centred on the construction of a work, is that which prompts us to conclude that one of the challenges confronting the artist at the end of the 20th century is that of impregnating with concepts, ideas and critique a matter and a form whose limits are in permanent expansion and dissolution.
But the world has changed a great deal, and if until not so long ago it was the theoretical proposals, embodied in non-material materials, that were developed in order to project ideas and concepts, today it is the attention to the world as something already created, something that needs to be observed, acted on and intervened in, that keeps artists busy and prompts them to descend from the plane of art and enter into everyday life. It is this action, determined by the desire to get away from art and engage with the real world —and, consequently, with the real spectator— |
that paves the way for the art of everyday life that is grounded in the mandate of experience and the engagement with things in themselves; a return to reality that, in the wake of what Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg posited in the manifesto Dogma 95, may be capable of rescuing art from the conventions within which it has become lodged and bring it closer to what the creators of cine verité were calling for back in the 1960s: ‘we want the truth, we want fascination and pure childlike sensations like those one experiences in any real art.’
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| Dan Perjovschi. Art Public, 2007 |
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| Dan Perjovschi. Radical Artist out and in the museum, 2007 |
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| Dan Perjovschi. Curator Artist, 2007 |
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| Dan Perjovschi. Main Stream, 2007 |
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If one of the consequences of what has been said up until now is the emergence —by way of documentarism, political action, relational aesthetics, attention to the specific context or withdrawal— of the illusion that is perceived in a large part of contemporary artistic practices, another of the processes through which is announced the beginning of what could be a new era of the close-to-home would be those proposals that, in contrast to the strategy of the excessive, choose to ground their discourse in what could be defined as a silent, hidden or disappearing art. That is to say, an art that, relying to a judicious extent on the visual component of a work, removes, reduces, hides or causes to disappear everything there is to see; an art of the invisible or of the almost visible in which excess is turned into a defect and seeing too much into seeing almost nothing.
Conscious that the mass media as generators of an infinity of images, advertising, realities, unrealities, needs and emotions have influenced the way we apprehend the world, there are artists that, far from gloating over the disorder and confusion of this iconographic torrent, opt instead to offer in their work some of the keys with which to understand the world from a perspective that is more suggestive, insinuating, silent and even empty; in other words, the way of expressing themselves of some of the artists in this exhibition, in whose work disappearance is only the first step toward the beginning of its reading.
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Andreas Slominski. Katzenfalle (Cat trap), 1999 |
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