SPECTACULAR: The Art of Action
April – November, 2003
Museum Kunst Palast
Ehrenhof 4-5
40479 Düsseldorf
Phone: +49 211 8922460
www.museum-kunst-palast.de
A Program On Performance And The Art Institution
Curated by Jens Hoffmann
image: Carsten Höller, Upside-Down Glass, 1994/2003, Courtesy: Gothenburg Biennial & Kiruna Underground Psycho Laboratories (KUPL)
SPECTACULAR V:
November 8, 2003 6 PM
Carsten Höller
Followed by a conversation between the artist and Jens Hoffmann
For the last section of SPECTACULAR German artist Carsten Höller will set up a guided tour through the collection of the museum kunst palast (conducted by a regular museum guide) for which the visitors will wear specially designed Upside-Down Glasses. With this project Höller follows one of his primary artistic concerns, the alteration of the perpetual world and the spreading of doubts. By handing out eyeglasses to the audience that invert the visual field of view, various types of optical transformation such as inversion, displacement, reversal, magnification and scrambling occur that will foster a severely different notion of perceiving the world around us. The artist encourages us to take nothing for granted and to doubt and mistrust what we have gotten to know as reality. His aim is to show we should not try to achieve any kind of certainty about what, where and who we are as the world could also, at any given moment, be very different from what it appears to be.
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SPECTACULAR: The Art of Action
April 26 > June 17 > June 21 > August 2 > September 18 > October 23 > November 8
SPECTACULAR I:
April 26, 2003 6 PM
Pawel Althamer, John Bock, Surasi Kusolwong, Jonathan Monk, Tino Sehgal
SPECTACULAR II:
June 21, 2003 6 PM
Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset
Followed by a conversation between the artists and Jens Hoffmann
SPECTACULAR III:
August 2, 2003 9 PM
Open-Air Film Screening
Performance-Films and Videos, selected by John Baldessari and Joan Jonas:
Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Valie Export, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, Joan Jonas, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer and Richard Serra
SPECTACULAR IV:
September 18, 2003 6 PM
Trisha Donnelly, Annika Eriksson, Laura Lima, Kirsten Pieroth, Cai Guo-Qiang, Andreas Slominski, Patrick Tuttofuoco
SPECTACULAR V:
November 8, 2003
Carsten Höller
Followed by a conversation between the artist and Jens Hoffmann
Lectures:
June 17, 2003 6 PM
RoseLee Goldberg > The View from Here: A Century of Performance Art
October 23, 2003 6 PM
Dorothea von Hantelmann > Art after Performance
SPECTACULAR aspires to demonstrate that performance today in fact includes a wide range of artistic strategies from institutional critic, conceptual art, identity politics to object making or long-term social and political investigations. The main objective is to investigate the relationship between performance and the art institution by stressing performance¹s immediate and spectacular character. While performance projects often function as adjunct programs of art institutions SPECTACULAR takes the ephemeral serious and investigates, by means of an one year program, performance¹s relevance as a contemporary art form. Being divided into independent, yet interconnected parts, the project emphasizes the dynamics of time and advocates an artistic practice that privileges development and motion over inflexible dispositions. Besides the four performances evenings, a film program showing historical performance work and a lecture program will be presented within the framework of the program to provide further information to the subject and to locate historical references. SPECTACULAR will make the museum become an active site, a place of investigation and process rather than a site for fixed arrangements. It aims to do so by examining the way artists use the language of performance as it was originally developed during the 1960s and 1970s in their work today and relates it to the art institution in a diverse range of possibilities. All performances of SPECTACULAR will try to respond directly to the particularities of the museum and specifically its role as a place for maintaining a cultural heritage as an archive of art works.
The Foundation museum kunst palast is a Public-Private-Partnership of the City of Düsseldorf, E.ON AG, METRO Group and degussa AG.
