I’ll be speaking at a symposium at the Columbus Museum of Art on May 1 and 2. Tying in with the CMA’s George Tooker exhibition, the symposium “addresses the ways in which the visual arts confront or collude with surveillance, and the particular effects of surveillance that the visual arts might be best at revealing or manifesting.” I am super excited; the lineup includes artist Julia Scher and a keynote by David Simon (creator of The Wire).
Paddy Johnson has an interesting post about privacy today:
A need for privacy, however– also listed by psychologist Gary A. Davis as an attribute amongst creative people– seems much more dubious, particularly in the age of Facebook. In fact, as it pertains to creativity, nobody’s discussing the matter at all.
“Exhibitions that are mounted in Berlin always face enormous problems of transportation: not only must works of art be flown into the city, also critics and visitors from West Germany experience difficulty in reaching Berlin. The ‘Fernseh-Galerie’, serving as a fictitious exhibition space, will bring together information and opinions from various places concerning a particular artistic theme … The art objects will not be presented in the static, isolated context in which art is customarily obliged to manifest itself … While the process of realization was still underway, critics introduced the projects to the public.”
“The exhibition does not prresent final projects, but processes of making art … during which the wishes of consumer of art come into play in a sort of feedback operation.”
From the original draft of Gerry Schum’s plan for the Fernseh Galerie, c. 1968, reprinted in Dorine Mignot, “Gerry Schum – a pioneer”, Gerry Schum, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1979. p. 67.
“The transmission of art exhibitions by television is the beginning of an era when the public will be taught to appreciate great works of art, seeing them in their homes and at the same time that the finer points are demonstrated by an expert lecturer – in other words illustrated talks.”
…
“Animals, trick-cycling balancing acts, roller skating… are useful for the light entertainment programme of the future as being the means by which the ear will be relieved of the intolerable strain of concentration by the eye.”
Robb, E. “Internal report to DP, DIP and CE,” 10 may 1933, BBC file T16/214. Quoted in R W Burns, Television: An international history of the formative years, London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1998.
Since the announcement of the Rose Museum’s closure, I’ve been thinking a lot about art collections, and how they are all really a story of the collector – whether it’s an institution or a person. When collections are disbanded, that story is lost, even if the works survive.
Jennifer Teets pointed me towards Gustave Moreau:
When the artist Gustave Moreau died in 1898, he bequeathed his three-story house, containing more than 1,200 paintings and 12,800 drawings, to the French state. His only wish was that the collection be kept together forever. “Taken as a whole,” he stated, “they give an idea of what kind of an artist I was, and in what kind of surroundings I chose to live my dreams.”
My review of Yeondoo Jung’s Handmade Memories at Kukje Gallery in Seoul is online and in print in this month’s issue of ArtAsiaPacific. The exhibition is now on view at Tina Kim Gallery in New York through 28 March. [Link]
I’m going to be traveling to Australia at the end of this month to speak at the Adelaide Film Festival’s Art & Moving Image Symposium. My session is monochromatically entitled ‘White Cube Black Room’. It’s really about moving image installations in the gallery. I’m going to talk about some past project, but I’m also going to look at some historical examples like the ‘Fernseh Galerie’, which saw the medium of television as a way of escaping from the gallery space.
