The exhibition Eco-Visionaries: Art and Architecture after the Anthropocene was inaugurated on April 11th 2018 at MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon. Curated by Pedro Gadanho and Mariana Pestana, the show presents works of more than 35 artists, architects and designers that critically reflect on environmental changes and how human activity is affecting the planet.
Anthropocene is a concept created by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen. During a conference in 2000, he announced the end of Holoceno - the geological period that the human race is being living for the last 12 hundred years - and presented the ideia of this new era, characterised mainly by the impact of the human action on the planet [2]. While the term is still on discussion between geologists, it is already on use and debated on other fields. Eco-Visionaries is the second "manifesto-exhibition" produced at MAAT and was organised in collaboration with several museums in Europe, being the "first and most wide-ranging of the four exhibitions that will appear simultaneously in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden" [1]. Climate change, mass consumption, environmental crisis and ways of surviving are some of the topics explored by the selected works, which are divided into four sections: Disaster, Coexistence, Extinction and Adaptation. The show occupies the Main Gallery of the museum and I would say that is necessary at least 2 hours to explore it - but you can easily spend way more time if you want to read everything. The concept of the show, the selected artists/works and their distribution is the exhibition space are all very well done. It had been a while since I liked a group show that much. Mixing artists and architects under the same conceptual scope is one of my biggest interests and it was refreshing to visit Eco-visionaries. Here are some of the artists/architects/designers I discovered in the exhibition and examples of their works (with links):
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"[...] It seems to me that quite a few of today's curatorial customs - the heavy use of didactics and headsets, the increasing emphasis on the catalogue, the urge to comprehensiveness, and the assumption that the exhibition must be an essay (i.e., have an idea, prove something, or at least make a point) can be understood as efforts to counteract what is tacitly acknowledged as an essential defect of the exhibition - its transience. It's not hard to understand the reason why either. You work for literally years; you develop a concept; you comb through and scrutinise innumerable candidates for the checklist; you choose sometimes a hundred or more of these; you beg people to lend the works to you - and I mean you beg; you read your butt off so that you know everything there is to know about them, and if the architects or artists you are working with are alive, god help you deal with them; you arrange and arrange and rearrange the works in your head and in models till your eyes bleed to get the concept and the experience to mesh in a stubborn set of spaces, and then you pray someone comes to see your show. If they do, when they gossip and pontificate and opine as they breeze through it without the slightest interest in, or even awareness of, the sacrifice, the heroism, and yes, damnit, the genius of your efforts. You begin to despise every single one of the moronic motherfu... Uh, sorry, I digressed."
Jeffrey Kipnis on The Praxis Questionnaire for Architectural Curators, 2005. The Institute for Art and Urban Resources (IAUR), the organization that became MoMA PS1, was founded in 1971 during a critical period of transition for artists and the New York art world. Installation, performance, film, and video were rapidly expanding the definition of what art could be, while emerging artists exploring those forms sought new contexts for showing their work, outside the ideological and commercial strictures of the "white cube" gallery and the authoritarian control of museum curatorship.
The IAUR, led by its founder, Alanna Heiss, rehabilitated derelict warehouses and unused city-owned property in an environment reeling from blight and decay, creating nonprofit art spaces that blurred the lines between studio, gallery, theater, and community center. Heiss's organization ran multiple spaces across the city, and in 1976 it occupied Queens Public School No. 1. By the IAUR's tenth anniversary, in 1981, hundreds of artists were passing through P.S. 1 and its Clocktower Gallery each year, and the institution had established the programming and practices it would follow through the ensuing decades. Johanne Lamoureux, in Thinking About Exhibitions "...it seems important to consider the imbrication of private and public in the heart of the museum and to sketch the shape, more circular than is generally believed, that connects the museological function and the private apartment. (...) The indissociability of private life and public matters may be approached in two apparently antagonistic ways. On the one hand, what we term “private life” has a public dimension; that is, a dimension determined by a whole series of conditions of belonging and by an historical context particularly favourable to the cult of moi. From this perspective, there is no “private” refuge: not only because the private behaviour of an individual is determined, but especially because the very idea of private life as a refuge is a historical construction (and one which is/has a political effect); because everyday activities have a social-effect coefficient, and because the choices that come into play may be more determinant on a wider scale (whether this concerns a sexual practice or a product boycott). (...) Following the practice of modernist museums (as analyzed in Reesa Greenberg’s timely MOMA study),7 art historians generally quite graciously agree to eclipse modern artists’ concerns with the contextualization of their work—on the pretext that the modern artwork asserts itself in the insular mode of a self-contained fragment. But this very quest for insularity, though less systematic than is generally believed, has sometimes forced artists to pay excessive attention to the site in order to guarantee the precise conditions of visibility sought for their works. (...) For the moment let us note that, from this viewpoint, it appears less dramatic when a modernist museum “omits” to restore the original moulding or frame to modern works and continues to feed the fantasy of a neutral or neutralized space. For this is precisely the way it is called upon to deal with the phantasm of modern works like those already mentioned: the museum shares their conviction that the private-space model offers ideal exhibition conditions. (...) Although post-modern architecture is fond of scale changes (between outside and inside), modernists and post-modernists come to terms around a common reference: the privatization of public museum space. The Beaubourg “privatization” on the model of the bottegha has historical reverberations more symptomatic: it somehow reverses the museification process of the Louvre which necessitated the eviction of Académie artists lodged in the semi-deserted palace at the King’s favour. Transforming the Louvre into a museum sounded the death knell for a labyrinth of artists’ studios and lodgings. When the King’s collections became national property and had to be made accessible, it is easily understandable why in renovating the museum no attempt was made to evoke the small and private cabinets d’amateur. The grande galerie crystallized the museum project into a wide boulevard, a fast-lane where the history of painting unfolds school by school, and where one travels without detour or traffic jam. Moreover, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, private life was not yet envisaged as the refuge it would become in the next century with growing urbanization. " "Chambres d’amis teaches the museum a great deal about itself and not only in a parodical way. It was already mentioned that the museum has learned to question its code via its conf rontation with the quite tangible everyday reality, and via its inf filtration into places and corners which are essentially strange to the museum. The museum’s authority has been blurred and upset by the project. But there is yet more to it. The museum is slowly finding out how it is reappearing in all the places where it propagated. As if the museum is only now discovering for the f irst time that its space—a space which usually simply exists—is developing all over town, in all its aspects. The museum, reflecting itself in all the spaces where it propagated, is now witnessing its structural origin."
[Jan Hoet, Chambres d’amis.] - A Desmaterialização da Arte, by Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler.
"Every exhibition is one possibility surrounded by many other possibilities which are worth being explored." - Marcel Broodthaers.
"It was Duchamp who taught him the cardinal curatorial rule: in the organization of exhibitions, the works must not stand in the way." |