ARCOmadrid 2009 - EXPANDED BOX
Madrid, Arco Art Fair, February 11 - 16, 2009
More infos
Curators: Domenico Quaranta (stands); Carolina Grau (cinema)
Galleries and artists (stands): Arc Projects, Sofia / THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD; Ernst Hilger, Vienna / JOHN GERRARD; Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Brescia / UBERMORGEN.COM; Fortlaan 17, Gent / LAWRENCE MALSTAF; MS Galeria, Madrid / ESTHER MANAS & ARASH MOORI; One and J Gallery, Seoul / KIM JONGKU; Project Gentili, Prato / JOAN LEANDRE; Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi / PORS AND RAO.
LIST OF CONTENTS:
[1] PRESS RELEASES
[2] CATALOGUE TEXT
[3] EXPERTS FORUM
[4] DOWNLOADABLE IMAGES
[1] PRESS RELEASES
Downloadable format - ENGLISH | SPANISH
Young artists showcasing trends in new media art, with a special focus on video and installation
ARCOmadrid Press Office, 05/01/2009
EXPANDED BOX
Curated by: Domenico Quaranta, Carolina Grau
Dialogue and an exploration of media art languages is, once again, the main focus at EXPANDED BOX. From a renewed perspective, this programme, specialised in art and new technologies, takes a step further in its mission to reflect a process of unstoppable expansion of art practices towards new formats and contexts. This year, the programme has been divided into two: STANDS, a space set aside for large format installations, curated by the art critic and independent curator Domenico Quaranta; and CINEMA, a monographic section dedicated to video art, selected by the independent curator Carolina Grau.
A total of 15 art projects are on view in the EXPANDED BOX programme, 8 at STANDS, and 7 in CINEMA. For the Italian curator Domenico Quaranta, “more than reflecting the creative exploitation of the medium, these proposals contain a critical examination of the cultural consequences of today’s media and technologies.” The tendencies come from a number of international artists, in turn represented by galleries taking on the challenge involved in fostering a new conception of art.
EXPANDED BOX is a market platform at ARCOmadrid for the exploration of art languages and dynamic discourses proposing new concepts. From the perspective of the notion of expansion, the selected programme “showcases a type of art that looks outside the parameters of contemporary art to art developed on the Net, the art produced in research centres and labs and that has all the potential to change our present-day notion of art. A change of perspective that should not scare collectors or art lovers, because these works are representative of the information society and of the globalised world we all live in,” says Quaranta.
STANDS, multiple format installations
Quaranta’s selection includes eight projects represented by both veteran and young international galleries. Eight pieces that, “in the wide open field of art experimentation, dictate their own rules regardless of prevailing canons, and give rise to a radically altered context that allows them to successfully progress.”
These tendencies are well represented in the selection made by Quaranta, defined by the variety of the projects on display. The exhibition covers a lot of ground, ranging from works using a combination of new technologies and traditional media, to pieces employing new media but with conventional purposes, or works that rediscover the potential of technologies that have virtually fallen into disuse.
The two ends of that diversity are embodied, on one hand by Arrow Wall, an interactive installation by the two-artist collective Pors & Rao, presented at the Indian gallery VADEHRA ART GALLERY. The project responds to the position and movements of the spectators moving throughout the space. For the artists, “it is a naïve abstraction of the complex dynamics of the relations surrounding us and of which we are an integral part. When users stand at a certain distance from Arrow Wall, the movements are subtler though nonetheless active. However, when the spectators comes closer, the feeling is that of a fracture of the balance, with the walls starting to move at a greater pace, as if the user acted as a magnet whose magnetic field has an effect on behaviour.
At the other extreme, we find the critical examination of the cultural consequences of present-day media and technologies through the work of the Austrian duo Ubermorgen.com, represented by FABIO PARIS ART GALLERY from Brescia, Italy. Their piece The EKMRZ Trilogy is a complex proposal developed over the last two years, integrating three projects based on a subversion of the interfaces of three giant digital corporations: Google, Amazon and Ebay. Resorting to code, software and to social hacking, they created a network of websites through which they obtained money by hosting ads in Google. The funds were subsequently invested in the acquisition of Google shares as a means to gradually erode the rigid power of the world’s most popular browser. Thus, they managed to steal, page by page, whole books from the Amazon database than were then redistributed without copy license, or to translate for Ebay users music databases from a directory based on a soft porn page. Using two projectors, the booth of the gallery reproduces the impressions and texts gathered in that space.
In these contrasting points, what matters is not how the medium is used, but the way in which the works explain to the public how human beings experience the world, how images, narratives, aesthetics and habits spread by the media have an effect on our environment.
In between these two points, we find proposals also providing a critical insight into the social consequences of the use of technology. That is the case of the work by the Spaniard Joan Leandre, one of the pioneers of software art. PROJECT GENTILI, a gallery from Prato, Italy, will exhibit a piece by this artist in which he filters our connection with reality through hyper-real interfaces. In turn, the British collaborative Thomson & Craighead, will show their work at the booth of the ARC PROJECTS gallery from Sofia, Bulgaria, with a project revealing the semantics of every devices and mechanisms.
Another sound installation shown at EXPANDED BOX comes from Esther Mañas & Arash Moori, represented by GALERIA MS from Madrid. The installation by the Korean artist Kim Jongku, on display at the booth of ONE AND J. GALLERY from Seoul, Korea, explores the fine line dividing matter and the dematerialisation brought about by the media.
FORTLAAN 17, a gallery from Ghent, Belgium, will present an installation entitled Compass, by the Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf, a proposal researching into the interactive interface and the human-machine. Finally, the list of projects is completed with a 3D animation piece by the Irish artist John Gerrard, on view at ERNST HILGER CONTEMPORARY from Vienna.
CINEMA, an overview of video art
EXPANDED BOX has an area with screens projecting unique works by young artists from various origins. Represented by galleries with a long track record at the fair, the selection of this space set aide for video art includes “projects by artists influenced and inspired by the language of cinema and its visual codes as well as by the popular culture of television and the music world. Their videos feature daily stories and exceptional, extraordinary events captured by the artist’s camera,” as the curator of this section, Carolina Grau, states.
A regular of the ARCOmadrid’s curatorial team, Grau has chosen seven works. Pieces addressing the global society and a committed engagement with the world’s most pressing issues will be presented by galleries including the Austrian GEORG KARGL, representing the artist Andreas Fogarasi who is bring a new work Public Brands – La France. This video piece shows images of France’s 26 regions, depicting a variety of landscapes and local identities, underscoring the fact that public sector and tourism are following the path of private corporations by attempting to position locations as if they were brands.
Next up, RUTH BENZACAR GALERIA DE ARTE from Argentina is also taking part this year in this section with a piece by Judi Werthein, an artist living between New York and Buenos Aires. From the Big Apple comes MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, presenting the most recent video by the Indian artist Amar Kanwar.
This CINEMA selection is completed with work brought by four veteran galleries at the ARCOmadrid. From the Netherlands comes MIRTA DEMARE, with a piece by the highly promising Serbian artist Katarina Zdjelar. Next, the gallery from Pamplona, MOISÉS PÉREZ DE ALBÉNIZ shows a work by the Basque artist Iñaki Garmendia that will certainly encourage the members of the audience to let themselves go and experience rather than think.
This space devoted to video art will also include a proposal by Nuno Cera, brought by the Portuguese gallery PEDRO CERA. Last but not least, the screens of CINEMA will also project a work by Stefanos Tsivopoulos represented by the Italian PROMETEO GALLERY.
The new vision of art proposed by EXPANDED BOX does not consist of exotica, but rather of thought-provoking artworks heralding an interesting dialogue with other creations, languages and supports shown at the fair, with the clear intention of expanding the boundaries of art.
[2] CATALOGUE TEXT
Downloadable format - PDF
Expanded Box – Caring for an Expanded Conception of Art
Domenico Quaranta
In the vast, variegated panorama of contemporary artistic experimentation there are various practices germinating that find it difficult to carve a niche for themselves in the official discourse and channels, despite the undeniable appeal they possess. The thing that makes them so precious, and as delicate as a flower growing under the snow, is not the fact that they use the “new media”, because everyone uses the media - and now they are anything but new. What makes them so special is the fact that like the aforementioned flower, they contain a new strength, and a new promise. The strength is that of those who go about their lives without a thought for the rules that govern the world they live in, and who create the conditions that enable them to live, successfully, in a radically altered context; the promise regards this radical transformation.
Everyone in the contemporary art field knows perfectly well that the context in which artists operate today was by and large established during the 20th century by Marcel Duchamp, and given structure and supported by a renewed museum and market system. According to this model, art no longer consists in the masterful implementation of a technique (painting, sculpture, music or writing) to present a world (the so-called “real” world, the unconscious world of the Surrealists, etc.). Anything can be art, if given a specific discourse and a specific conception, and if conveyed by means of a specific context. The aura of a work of art, which may be lost and found time and again, is now attributed by means of a precise process of consecration, which takes place on the market and in the museums. Without venturing into value judgements, it will suffice to consider the duration of this model to understand that what comes into being within it now is pure academicism. Murakami is to Duchamp and Warhol as Bouguerau is to Poussin and David. The gradual, unstoppable transition to the information society has radically challenged this model, nurtured in the bosom of the industrial society, but has not succeeded in destroying it altogether. It lives on as an act of faith, a consensual hallucination, a superstition boosted by the fear of what is to come. It survives, and continues to produce masterpieces, basking in the splendour which characterizes all periods of decadence.
The new world is there, just round the corner – or, to return to the cutesy flower metaphor - under the snow. It is in the art that exists outside the confines of the art world, rejecting the “contextual definition” of Duchampian origin which seems to persist, as Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito wrote in their book At the Edge of Art, purely by inertia; it is in the art that seeks out public space, media space, biotechnology labs and the world of information, communications and e-commerce as its operative environment; it is in the art that draws on other practices and other specific fields of knowledge, to a point where at times it has problems seeing itself (and being seen) as art; it is in the art that enthusiastically embraces technological reproducibility, the variability of data and the fluidity of information, abandoning - and radically challenging - the status of precious fetish, and it is in the art that is open to interaction with the spectator, that forges and develops relationships, that breaks down the wall which interrupts and conditions our mental and physical dialogue with a work.
This art exists, and it is at once strong and delicate, timid and aggressive, marginal and supreme. It is entrenched in the contradictions of all revolutions: it rebels against a world, but needs the cares of that world to resist. It has tried to escape, to open up new channels, but in the end it will succeed in changing our idea of art, defeating the academicism and opening the way to the future by means of dialogue and mediation. A future, which as the novelist William Gibson said, is already here, just badly distributed.
The historic function of Expanded Box, the last embodiment of an enduring attention Arco devoted to new media and languages, is precisely that of cultivating and redistributing the future, and supporting an ?expanded? definition of art. In the last ten years, and through different programs, Arco has done exactly that, hosting and offering market opportunities to a growing number of galleries that take up this challenge, at their own risk. When you see this compact block of eight galleries that offer their space to monographic projects - often decidedly ambitious - you could be forgiven for thinking that Expanded Box is one of those typical cultural initiatives increasingly staged on occasion of contemporary art fairs, with the idea of accompanying the dialogue and exchanges between galleries and collectors, but without attempting to compete with them. This is not the case.
Expanded Box, today, is the place where Leo Castelli would go to sell and Alfred H. Barr would go to buy. I am aware that this might sound rhetorical, and possibly a little ingenuous, but I cannot find a non-rhetorical way to say that there, more than anywhere else, the seeds of an evolution are germinating. They rest, well protected, in the machines of Lawrence Malstaf and the interactive environmental installations by Pors & Rao; in the sound installations by Manas and Moori and Thomson & Craighead; in the exploration of the dividing line between matter and the dematerialization of the media undertaken by the Korean Kim Jongku, and in John Gerrard’s 3D animations. They reproduce at the speed of a virus in the works of Joan Leandre, who upends the hyperreal interfaces that filter our rapport with reality, while they lurk in UBERMORGEN.COM’s media hacking activities, which uses low-tech tools to bring the giants of e-commerce to their knees.
For ten years Expanded Box has invested in this new current, the novelty of which, we should reiterate, lies not so much in the media that these works use, but in the culture they reflect and in the idea of art that they open the way for.
[3] EXPERTS FORUM
NEW MEDIA ART BETWEEN ISOLATION AND INTEGRATION, INTER-DISCIPLINARITY AND MEDIA SPECIFICITY
February, Sunday 15, 2009
Forum Auditorium 1, Hall 6 Sunday 15, from 12.30 to 2.30 p.m. and from 4 to 9 p.m.
Director: Domenico Quaranta
Speakers: Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais, Roberta Bosco, Geert Lovink, Inke Arns, Régine Debatty, Zhang Ga, Joasia Krysa.
Download the program.
[4] DOWNLOADABLE IMAGES
UBERMORGEN.COM, EKMRZ Trilogy Seal, 2009. Courtesy Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Brescia (Italy)
PORS AND RAO, Pygmy, 2008. Electro-Mechanics, Wood, Plastic, Reactive Installation, 6m x 5m x 3.6m. © Pors & Rao, courtesy Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (India)
JOHN GERRARD, Grow Finish Unit (Elkhart, Kansas). Realtime 3D, 2008. Courtesy Hilger Contemporary, Vienna (Austria)
KIM JONGKU, Poongkyoung, Installation View. One and J. Gallery, Seoul (Korea)
JOAN LEANDRE, In the Name of Kernel - Kernel Peak - At My Limit, 2008. Courtesy Project Gentili, Prato (Italy)
LAWRENCE MALSTAF, Compass, 2005. Courtesy Galerie Fortlaan 17, Gent (Belgium)
ESTHER MAñAS & ARASH MOORI, The Fly Killer, 2007. Courtesy Galeria MS, Madrid (Spain)
THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD, Unprepared Piano, 2004. Baby grand piano, software application, computer, dimensions variable. Courtesy ARC Project, Sofia (Hungary)