Jochen Gerz
Anthology of Art
27 January – 26 February 2006
In September 2001, the artist Jochen Gerz invited six artists and six writers
to respond with either an image or an essay to the question: “What could
a hitherto unknown Art be like, corresponding to your view of art today?” Each
participant also proposed a successor, whose contribution was to replace his
own comment after fourteen days. For the period of one year, or more exactly,
52 weeks, one ‘generation’ of twelve contributions each was placed
onto a webpage (www.anthology-of-art.net), thus forming 26 ‘generations’ totalling
312 contributions (from 37 countries): 156 images and 156 texts = 1 Anthology
of Art.
Almost all contributions have been created especially for this project, and regardless
of their initial appearance, they all became part of the anthology in digital
form.
Yet it is this process of alienation through photographing, scanning, digitalizing,
publishing and printing – for the purpose of this exhibition, each contribution
was printed on a sheet of fabric measuring 1 x 1 meter – which reflects
most clearly on the question of the role of art.
The question for the future, and for art as a sign of a hitherto unknown world
was posed by artists, theoreticians and institutions even before the beginning
of the Modern era. The exhibition “Anthology of Art” shows how radical
the answers to these basic questions have changed towards the end of the 20th
and the beginning of the 21st centuries: it presents art and its discourse, the
entanglement of image and text not as a collection of individual comments but
as a pluralistic piece, a constituted network that appeals to rethink aesthetic
processes as well as theory and practice in our global society.
The exhibition has been shown at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin and at
the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe.
The complete publication with the same title is available from the DuMont Literatur
und Kunst Verlag, Cologne. |
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