JONATHAN MONK
WITHOUT TITLE
February 8th -10th April 2007
opening hours: Mon thru Friday 5 10 pm
introduction: Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna
As Stefan Berg phrases it in his introduction to the exhibition in Hannover (March 2006) his works are irritating games with language and ideas. This places Monk in the tradition of Conceptual Art. At the same time the artist undermines the strict principles of this movement, when he imbues them with aspects of everyday life and confronts them with his biography. His photographs, drawings, objects, installations and films reproduce existing works and seminal works of art history in the 20th century.
In fact Jonathan Monk initially proposed for Y8 to repeat John Armleders recent installation (80 fir trees were suspended from the ceiling), except Monk would have turned the installation around, so the trees would have been planted firmly on the ground: Maybe we should do it again, but the right way, he suggested. His artistic process is less about finding/inventing new objects, rather he is concerned with finding again what potentially was at the beginning of creating an art work and went missing as a result of modes of perception and mystification. Strategies of recontextualisation, appropriation, reflection, criticism, doubling and shifting of proportion could certainly be read in a distanced manner, if they were not connected with autobiographical facts. This connection releases Monks works into a hybrid field of tension and creates a place, which manages to juxtapose and thus confront concepts and elements.
The floor of Y8 is divided into a grid of 36 equally large fields. They point towards the East and serve for the orientation of daily yoga practice. While Armleder decided to paint over the floor with golden paint so that the slightly elevated marks of the grid appeared as a relief, Monk decided to adapt an iconic late work by the constructivist artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) for the grid structure. Inevitably discontinuities occur. In addition his earlier works A journey from here to there and Zero O Clock (both courtesy Galerie Meyer Rigger, Karlsruhe) will be shown together with new works by the artist, which relate explicitly to Y8 and its function.
Y8 developed from the long-term project (since 1995 at Pat Hearn Gallery, NY). With this project Benita-Immanuel Grosser explore the possibility of launching the philosophy and practice of yoga into the context of art, as well as transferring it to the architectural and socially coded situation of exhibition spaces. After this project several public yoga sessions took place at a variety of international art institutions. With the intention of opening up a discussion of contemporary art in the context of yoga Benita-Immanuel Grosser founded Y8 in 2000.
Y8 as a place continuously changes perspective through the different exhibitions.
A grid, calculated especially for the Y8 space, serves as platform for the sessions at the museums.
Y8 projects: 2001 Katharina Grosse – 2002 Angela Bulloch – 2002 Hamburger -Kunsthalle: VIDEOClub 99 – 2003 Silvia Kolbowski – 2004 Rita McBride/Glen Rubsamen – 2005 Klaus Frahm – 2006 John Armleder – 2007 Jonathan Monk
For more information check out our website on artyoga.de
Y8
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Germany
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