museum kunst palast SPECTACULAR The Art of Action A Program on Performance and The Art Institution April – November, 2003 museum kunst palast Ehrenhof 4-5 40479 Düsseldorf Phone: +49 211 8922460 http://www.museum-kunst-palast.de Image: John Bock, ‘A gentleman works when a gentleman works a work’ (2002) Photo: Kunt Klaßen SPECTACULAR The Art of Action April 26 > June 17 > June 21 > August 2 > September 18 > October 23 > November 8 Curated by Jens Hoffmann SPECTACULAR I: April 26, 2003 6 PM Pawel Althamer, John Bock, Surasi Kusolwong, Jonathan Monk, Tino Sehgal SPECTACULAR II: June 21, 2003 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, Anna 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 investigation will focus especially on the conflict of supposedly eternal art works such as sculptures and paintings and the ephemeral nature of performances. The project¹s 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 seriously 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 this 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. Jens Hoffmann The foundation museum kunst palast is a Public-Private-Partnership of the City of Düsseldorf, E.ON AG, METRO Group and degussa AG. The performance of Elmgreen & Dragset is supported by International Art Movers Knab.