A Singular Form
June 26–August 24, 2014
Press conference: Wednesday, June 25,
10am
Opening: Wednesday, June 25, 7pm
Secession
Friedrichstraße 12
1010 Vienna
Austria
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +43 1 587 53 07 11
F +43 1 587 53 07 34
office [at] secession.at
Curated by Pablo Lafuente
With works by Martha Araújo, Ricardo Basbaum, Dustin Ericksen, Asger Jorn (with Gérard Franceschi), Hilary Lloyd, Asier Mendizabal, Peter Madsen, Bruno Munari, Nicole Wermers, and a few other things
A Singular Form
A Singular Form brings together works of art and ‘everyday’ objects in order to pursue potential uses and meanings that go beyond those usually assigned to them. On display at Secession, these objects should not only propose a particular approach or specific use by virtue of their mere materiality and compositional form; they should also enact a release from such determinations.
A critical engagement with the form and potential meanings of art and non-art objects might be an all too generic and abstract undertaking. A Singular Form attempts to make it concrete by focusing on the sculptural form, accompanied by a displacement from the sculptural to the functional. This shift intends to present the material structures of the objects as part of a changing network of relations or a sequence of activities (such as contemplation, action, use, and transformation) in which they serve, alternately, as the basis, as the catalyst, or as the result.
The exhibition poses the following two questions: How concrete or how specific can an object of mediation be? And to what extent can it be abstracted and made generic? Attempts at responding are made through a variety of objects, such as a Viking mastefisk and a kølsvin, constructed by Peter Madsen; a number of photographic contact prints from Asger Jorn and Gérard Franceschi’s project 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art; a Venetian forcola; a video projection by Hilary Lloyd; Martha Araújo’s wearable geometric canvas; a ‘portable’ sculpture by Bruno Munari; a stretcher; a series of spoons by Nicole Wermers; a travelling object and its housing structure by Ricardo Basbaum; a batea mapuche; a wallpaper and modular sculpture by Dustin Ericksen; and a number of sculptural pieces, prints and support units by Asier Mendizabal. The display frames and organises these objects as both things and images in order to heighten their potential agency—a power that questions fixed attributions of function and thus also alters the conditions under which life can occur around them.
Much of the thinking and doing around this exhibition has been developed in very close collaboration with Asier Mendizabal.
Publication
A book with essays by Franz Boas, Roger Caillois, Fernand Deligny, Asger Jorn, and Pablo Lafuente will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.
Conference
“Art as Exhibition“
Thursday, June 26
A joint event of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Friends of Secession
The conference seeks to investigate how exhibition formats may be inherent in specific modes of artistic production and subsequently in an artwork itself. Significantly an interweaving of both artistic and curatorial practice is involved, which on the one hand documents a development toward formats of presentation, and on the other hand coincides with the rediscovery of the object as an independent agent. The interlocking of exhibition, mediation, collection and archive conflates aesthetic and education policy agendas in occasionally indistinguishable ways. Thus it becomes clear that those fields of education, knowledge and information regarded as “common goods” introduce a dynamic into the work-as-exhibition event in the sense of a medial information process. To explore what this implies for the perception of the increasingly reevaluated physical object will be one of the common threads of the panel and the subsequent artist talks at the Secession.
Program details here.
Press
For interview requests and any other questions, please contact: katharina.schniebs [at] secession.at
Please find the press releases and images for download here from June 25: www.secession.at/presse
Guided tours: Saturdays at 3pm and Sundays at 11am and by appointment
Permanent presentation: Gustav Klimt Beethoven Frieze
