Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal) and Jiri Kovanda Versus Rest of The World

Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal) and Jiri Kovanda Versus Rest of The World

Work Method

RIGHT: Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963, collection Macba, Barcelona, LEFT: Jiri Kovanda, XXX, November 19th, 1975, courtesy gb agency, Paris

October 8, 2006

Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal)
Until September 24

CNAC Villa Arson, 20 avenue Stephen Liegeard, F-06000 Nice, France
www.villa-arson.org

Jiri Kovanda Versus Rest Of The World
September 9-October 14
gb agency, 20 rue Louise Weiss, F-75013 Paris, France
www.gbagency.fr

Two Projects curated by Guillaume Désanges & François Piron, Work Method, Paris

Work Method is a Paris-based agency run by François Piron and Guillaume Désanges, both independant french art critics and curators, to initiate and manage independantly individual and collaborative projects, including exhibitions, performances, lecture programs, seminars, and editorial projects linked with contemporary art. This association is purposed to structure an independent art criticism and curatorial activity, sharing projects on intellectual, economical and logistical levels.

Work Method has an office and a shop window in Paris, in Belleville area: 65 rue Rebeval, F-75019 Paris. Email contact : workmethod@club-internet.fr
Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal) is an exhibition freely adapted from Paul Scheerbarts 1914-manifesto, Glass Architecture. This visionary text claims the coming of a transparent and coloured architecture, fundament of an idealistic transformation of the individual and the society, and opens the reign of transparency as a positive value.

The exhibition focuses on relationships between transparency, reflection and opacity, in aesthetical, economical, political and psychological aspects. The exhibition reflects the fascination for the aesthetics of service economy in contemporary art works, the eroticism and hygienism of transparency, in a movement from a positivist ideal to its corruption: the opacity of economical void, the frustration of glass separation, the subjects confinement.

The exhibition does not aim to be an illustration of Scheerbarts projection, but adopts its method: a montage of affirmative statements, through associations and confrontations between works of art of the past forty years, from minimal and conceptual art until now.
With works by: Ignasi Aballi (E), Boris Achour (F), Martin Arnold (A), Art & Language (UK), Larry Bell (USA), David Claerbout (B), Philippe Durand (F), Harun Farocki (G), Hans Peter Feldmann (G), Jonah Freeman (USA), Michel François (B), Ryan Gander (UK), Dora Garcia (E), Liam Gillick (UK), Douglas Gordon (UK), Dan Graham (USA), Rodney Graham (C), Graham Gussin (UK), Hans Haacke (G), Damien Hirst (UK), Pierre Huyghe (F), Les Ready-Made appartiennent à tout le monde ® (F), Corey McCorkle (USA), Laurent Montaron (F), Sarah Morris (UK), Man Ray (USA), Anri Sala (Alb), Joe Scanlan (USA), Rosemarie Trockel (G) Hannah Wilke (USA), Heimo Zobernig (A).
Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal & Glass Architecture)
The 224-pages book contains a new edition of Paul Scheerbarts Glass Architecture and texts from Philippe Duboy, historian of architecture, Guillaume Désanges and François Piron, art critics and editors of the book, and Marcus Steinweg, philosopher.

Views of the exhibition provide a complete documentation and a reconstruction of the exhibitions sensitive journey, from total visibility to black-out, from glare to dusk, from purity to contamination and break , from appearance to disappearance.
Jiri Kovanda Versus Rest Of The World
One of the most impressive living artists in Czech Republic, Jiri Kovanda has realised since the late 70s discreet actions, almost impossible to distinguish from real life: bumping into passers-by, waiting for the telephone to ring, attempting to meet girls in the street Poetical as much as political, like Bas Jan Ader or Douglas Hueblers works, his gestures question the place of an individual in social space, staying apart from any reaction to the context of the soviet period in Eastern Europe.

With historical and recent pieces, the exhibition will propose as well a curatorial statement: a series of links to Kovandas work through a vast number of documents, roughly xeroxed : reproductions of works of art, of news images Associations of ideas, visual echoes, intuitive links, structural or formal. Jiri Kovandas work, at the centre of this web of images, gestures and energies, proves its universality.

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October 8, 2006

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