LINA KRUOPYTE
A Map, Bigger Than Its Territory
Heman Chong (New York), Claude Closky (Paris), Marcelline Delbecq (Paris), Chris Fitzpatrick (San Francisco), Aurelien Froment (Dublin), Tessa Giblin (Dublin), Gabriel Lester (Amsterdam), Aaron Schuster (Paris), Jiří Skála (Prague), and Lee Walton (Greensboro)
Like a trailer without a movie, like a poster without an event, this is an exhibition without an artwork. We were influenced by Lev Manovich’s fragment "a map is larger than its territory", where the relationship between what is expected and what is contained has shifted to unequal proportions. Inspired by the distance between an artist’s statement and their actual work, or the hype surrounding an art-event compared with the experience of it, this show explores the before and the after of the exhibition, completely skipping what lies between—the artwork. The participants have used the auxiliary structures that typically support or explain an artwork—the wall label, press release, audio guide, critic’s review, etc.—as their creative format. The exhibition space may appear empty, but is in fact charged with content. By altering or reconstituting the pre/post production elements of the art, we aim to not only disrupt the conventional curatorial processes, but also to blur the divisions between user/producer, curator/artist, production/consumption and fiction/reality.
The exhibition features 11 international artists, writers and curators. Most of the pieces have been created solely for this exhibition. The following descriptions correspond to the exhibition layout, beginning clockwise from the entrance.
The site-specific work by Claude Closky has the appearance of being instructive gallery floor plans placed throughout the exhibitions space, but rather the artist has simply turned the same empty blueprint around, treating each variation as if it is different. There is an act of nothingness, insignificance, and ironic absurdity in this gesture. Converting a sign or a system into an ornament stripped of its initial meaning is very prominent in Closky's practice.
Writer Aaron Schuster’s article for this exhibition "The Man Who Made Artworks in His Head", can be considered both as an informative, critical text about the exhibition premise—a show without artworks—and also a text project in it’s own right that is an interplay between theoretical vocabulary and complicated structures.
Curator Chris Fitzpatrick employs the form of the audio guide, which is typically a curatorial aid to help an artwork be understood and appreciated. This time, the audio guide comes first: it describes a mysterious art piece and the guide is the only place it exists. Printed alongside the audio is the story of a man with amputated legs who was allowed to walk again through the artwork, as well as a picture of the main character with his wife.
Elvira Belafonte is the author and copyright holder of take-away postcards with a single note on the front: "I'll miss your absence”. All additional information about this participant is absent as well.
Tessa Giblin’s contribution is the result of a curator being curated by other curators; in the center of the room is an exhibition within the exhibition. On display are three different perspectives, guides, maps about the very same territory—an exhibition co-curated by Giblin and Amalia Pica "Every Version Belongs To A Myth", that took place in Project Arts Center in Dublin. The three versions were written by the curators, Juno Claffery-Hegarty (a 7-year old girl), and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith (an academic).
Adhering to the premise of presence in the form of absence, Marcelline Delbecqpresents an empty glass jewelry case with an intricate description of precious Faberge egg. The original item was stolen in Russia and never recovered.
Gabriel Lester is showing a label of a group show of himself. This piece works two ways: as a poetic gesture with a multi-layered, melancholic title and as a specific approach to the exhibition structure. He displays only the maximum subtraction of an artwork—the wall label—leaving everything else to the imagination.
Jiří Skála’s audio monologue depicts an image of the closed factory where his parents worked for forty years by simply listing the names of the industrial machinery once used by the workers. Much like “an exhibition without artwork”, presented here is a factory without its machinery.
Lee Walton's An Ongoing Conversation About An Artwork For An Exhibition Without Art is a correspondence between the curator Finn Chung in Sweden and artist Lee Walton in the United States, begun July 18th, 2010. In this conversation, an artist and a curator explore the multi-layered possibilities of non-existing art. The project will continue until July 18th, 2011.
Aurelien Froment's inclusions depict different moments in time, where the sense of presentness is replaced by the before or after. Two publications, 2030 and Les Arques 88 (by Froment and Abake), invite us to imagine a series of events that are bound to take place in years to come or are left to the memories of others.
For the entire duration of this exhibition, Heman Chong will disappear into a room in New York City to read from cover to cover, Lust, a novel written by Elfriede Jelinek. Written in 1989, the novel describes the life of a woman entrenched in a spiral of brutal sexual abuse, forming a portrait of human behavior as one that is capable of intense cruelty, one that is ritualized and with no end in sight.
