Untouchable: (The Ideal of Transparency)
29th June – 16th September 2007
Curators: Guillaume Désanges y François Piron (Work Methods, París)
PATIO HERRERIANO
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español
Calle Jorge Guillén, 6. 47003
Valladolid-España
Tel. +34 983 362 771.
Fax +34 983 375 295
patioherreriano@museoph.org
www.museopatioherreriano.org
Ignasi Aballi (Spain), Boris Achour (France), Martin Arnold (Austria), Larry Bell (USA), David Claerbout (Belgium), Philippe Durand (France), Harun Farocki (Germnay), Hans-Peter Feldmann (Germany), Michel Fran%-Ìedil;ois (Belgium), Jonah Freeman (USA), Ryan Gander (Great Britain), Dora García (Spain), Liam Gillick (Great Britain), Douglas Gordon (Great Britain), Dan Graham (USA), Rodney Graham (Canada), Graham Gussin (Great Britain), Hans Haacke (Germany / USA), Jeppe Hein (Denmark), Pierre Huyghe (France), Jiri Kovanda (Czech Rep.), Les Ready-Made appartiennent à tout le monde(Registered Trademark) (France), Mark Lombardi (USA), Corey McCorkle (USA), Laurent Montaron (France), Sarah Morris (USA), Joe Scanlan (USA), Marijke van Warmerdam (Holland), Hannah Wilke (USA).
The ideal of transparency, of which Utopian genealogy is found in modern architecture, goes beyond this specific field and projects throughout the twentieth century, encompassing new relations with society, politics, aesthetics, psychoanalysis and the intellectual. On the one hand exists the metaphor of an omniscient perspective enabling us to see everything, albeit from a sheltered, unexposed position, whilst on the other hand exists the metaphor of a body that allows the filtering of light and therefore the truth that prevails in all our minds. Glass is more than a systematically used resource at the heart of social space. What asserts itself is the value of transparency as an essential progressive model, analogous to absolute virtue. But is this virtue really indisputable? Does the blind trust in infinite visibility not poke fun at meaning and reason at the same time as it nourishes them? Transparency is not invisibility, and its transformation of object into subject, and of matter into value, is determined by the ambivalent characteristics of glass as a physical body, not only with regard to reflection and opacity, but also to estrangement, excitement, frustration, isolation and the potential virtualisation of the world.
Resulting from very personal and unrestricted work on this theme, the exhibition Untouchable (The Ideal of Transparency) unites a selection of works from the last four decades, bringing to the table a collection of productions from international artists, each one with his own style, and each one with his own markedly original and divergent ideal of transparency. The relationships between transparency, reflection and opacity constitute the basis of the exhibition, constructing these notions not so much as material reality, but in terms of value, thus transcending all the ideological. Gliding between substance and moral, the exhibition is particularly interested in the fascination brought to bear by the ‘dematerialised’ aesthetic of the tertiary economy, represented in many contemporary art works, with the eroticism and the hygiene of transparency. This follows a movement that goes with the ideal and its divergence; the opacity of an economic emptiness, the frustration of separation, and the confinement of the subject.
Through this voluntarily ambiguous and polymorphic display concerning the thematic (including films, installations, painting, photographs and performances), the exhibition aims to expound certain modern attitudes and contemporary links to the notion of transparency through several chapters; positive celebration and ornamentalism, economics and politics, eroticism and the organic, discolouration and disappearance. This game of free associations brings about a sensuous journey, from absolute visibility to black-out, from dazzling dawn to muted dusk, from purity to contamination, from appearance to evanescence.
This exhibition, an enriched version of the original exhibition realised for the Villa Arson de Niza (France) in June 2006, is one phase within a more extensive theoretical project about this theme which will lead to a second exhibition organised for 2008 in the Museo Patio Herreriano, commencing with specific productions that will develop the complex relations artists nowadays maintain with relation to certain aspects of modernity.
Departamento de Comunicación y Desarrollo
Calle Jorge Guillén., 6. 47003 Valladolid. Teléfono: 00 34 (9) 83 362 908. Fax: 00 34 (9) 83 375 295.
Correo electrónico: comunicación@museoph.org ; prensa@museoph.org
