Curated by 2015Juliette Blightman Adam Christensen Matthew Dickman Patrizio Di Massimo Nick Mauss Eddie Peake Zoe Williams
IMPOSSIBLE LOVE
Juliette Blightman
Adam Christensen Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos
Matthew Dickman Gabriele D’Annunzio
Patrizio Di Massimo & Anaïs Nin
Nick Mauss
Eddie Peake Oscar Wilde
Zoe Williams
Curated by Vincent Honoré
My love comes to me
in ribbons and robes
roses and thorns
foxes and crows
He tells me he loves me
by the end of his whip
my loneliness flickers
like a candle once lit
Love is a very good dog, my love
love is a very good dog,
love is a very good dog my love
a very good, very good, dog
My lover knows me
by zippers and chains,
cocaine and lipstick,
sheets white and stained
Oh love is a very good dog, my love
a very good, very good, dog
He loves me when I beg and sit,
I come when he calls me,
I come undone,
I come whimpering and clean
I burn down the forest and conquer the sea
Oh love is a very good dog, my love
love is a very good dog,
love is a very good dog my love,
a very good, very good, dog
A VERY GOOD DOG, 2015.
Matthew Dickman
Impossible Love is a portrait of a feeling to come,
a story that speaks about the immateriality of desire and its blues. An
accumulation of disrupted temporalities creates the setting for an essentially
performative project. Invited artists, actors, poets, musicians and performers create
an utmost decadent representation of a hopelessness to be most hunted, and never
possessed.
An exhibition should
be an organism–in essence - unnameable, like a feeling that should never cease
to constitute or to escape itself: an exhibition should be a desire. In this
sense, the proposed exhibition is an experience more of loss than of
accumulation, facing immateriality more than gathering objects: a constant loss
of its own sense, at least. Whatever its protocols, its procedures, its strategies,
I understand this exhibition to be a system of desires and, in fact, a
pluralist history with multiple temporalities. As curator, my role is to be its
narrator, to understand its failures and tell its story.
What we will create is
an impossible museum, a museum not of objects but of stories. “The work [in
this museum] draw whoever devotes himself to [them] towards the point where
[they] undergo the ordeal of impossibility: an experience which is precisely
nocturnal, which is that of the night” (Maurice Blanchot).
What we will create is
a fiction: we will tell the story of a feeling to come.
Impossible Love
11 September - 17 October 2015
Private view: 10 September from 6-10 pm
PERFORMANCES DURING THE OPENING EXCLUSIVELY BETWEEN 8-10 PM
Impossible Love is an exhibition composed and produced by Vincent Honoré with Nicoletta Lambertucci
projektraum viktor bucher
praterstrasse 13/1/2
a-1020 wien
t +43 1 212 693 0
projektraum@sil.at
www.projektraum@sil.at
Eine Veranstaltung der Reihe
curated by_vienna 2015 - "Tomorrow Today"
Biographies
Juliette Blightman
(b.1980, UK) lives in Berlin. Juliette works
with film, performance and installation, and more recently with oils, gouaches
and acrylics images presenting innocuous moments of everyday life, where the
eventless in the action conveys a natural intimacy of a suspended moment.
Adam Christensen
(b.1979, UK) lives in London. Adam works
with sculpture, performance, video and text works, and performs with the
band Ectopia. Adam uses his own presence to create uncanny fictions while
mixing improbable and sensual romances with queer existentialism and
obsessions.
Patrizio Di Massimo
(b.1983, IT) lives in London. Patrizio works
with paintings, installations and performance using a variety of materials and
techniques. The relation between the personal and the universal history
constructs parallel narratives populated by mythical figures floating in
sensual landscapes of pleasure.
Matthew Dickman
is an American poet, author of
All-American
Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008),
50
American Plays (co-written with his twin brother Michael Dickman,
Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and
Mayakovsky’s Revolver (W.W.
Norton & Co, 2012). Matthew lives in Portland, Oregon. His poetry is
delivered with both conversational fluidity and instinctive intellect; A
feeling of resourcelessness occupies most of
his writings, looking at reality with an acute sense of loss.
Vincent Honoré
lives in London. Vincent is a curator and
publisher and he is director and chief curator of DRAF (David Roberts Art
Foundation) in London. His programme of exhibitions and events is informed by
different disciplines, including dance, literature and music, to explore and
question how exhibitions can function as process.
Nicoletta Lambertucci
lives in London. Nicoletta is curator
of DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) in London.
Nick Mauss
(b.1980, USA) lives in New York. Nick employs a
variety of materials including paper, glaze, ceramic, textile and works with
drawings, paintings and prints that often take on sculptural mode in their
presentation. Nick has a dream-like, incantatory, mechanistic approach to
art-making where ideas, memories, influences float inadvertently to the
surface.
Eddie Peake
(b.1981, UK) lives in London. Eddie’s artistic
expressions include performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture and
installation. He plays with the spaces of ambiguity that exists in gender
categorization and sexual identities investigating the processes between the
verbal and the nonverbal communication modes.
Zoe Williams
(b.1983, UK) is based in Glasgow and London.
Zoe’s practice is primarily concerned with the creation of immersive
environments and objects that hold a veneer of seduction, and seek to access
the cerebral through sensual experience.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all the artists
who have contributed works to the exhibition, and also their galleries, for
their trust and commitment. We wish to thank Hannah Uprichard for kindly
lending her exquisite jewellery on this occasion.
http://hannahrings.com
Adam Christensen "Impossible Love", 2015. Acrylic on wood. 8 x 10 cm. Courtesy the artist
Vincent Honoré
curated by_vienna 2015_Armen Avanessian
TOMORROW TODAY
Today, science fiction might be the best kind of realism – if, that is, it is not the only possible
realism. This insight by J. G. Ballard provides the impetus to look at our political, economic and
artistic present from the perspective of an already present future. For example, though the current
financial crisis has led to severe criticism of financial speculation, those market operations also force
us to realise what may have been repressed for decades: Capitalism as we conventionally understand it
might not exist anymore, and we are only just becoming aware of this.
The latency period of this transformation of the past decades coincides with the history of
contemporary art as a genre or concept devoid of the time orientation that was characteristic of the
historical avant-gardes and modern art movements, each of which affirmed the possibility of future
(social) progress as a constant in the present. If the coincidence of contemporary art and the latent
transformation of capitalism is not entirely arbitrary – and it cannot be if the basic claim of
contemporary art is that it is an art appropriate to its time – then contemporary art could be taken as
the sign of the derivative or speculative financial system that has left us bereft of both future and
present since it reduces every future present to a present future pre-calculable on the basis of
probability theory. Here, what has yet to happen is but a continuation of the long-known, the execution
of what has already been priced in.
Tomorrow Today opposes this futureless condition, instead presenting experiments in new art-
economics projects and taking up the interface between art and capital as a political contestation.
Accepting that we are currently in a period of transition and new formation, the question of Tomorrow
Today is whether and to what extent artistic imagination and poetic practices can help us accelerate the
entry into a post-capitalist society rather than passively accompanying the gradual and increasingly
ubiquitous approximation of post-democratic conditions (the aestheticisation of everyday life,
gentrification, the art-market bubble, biennale tourism). After postmodernism we realise: the end of
(art) history has not yet been reached. Neither liberal Western capitalism nor the genre of a globally
expanded contemporary art will have been (art) history’s last word.
art as currency
For a while now, we have been up against a speculative regime in the world of art. In the
pricing system of art, the expertise, skill and, ultimately, the degree of influence of the respective
market players play a decisive role. The artistic significance of artworks, their critical content and their
art-historical relevance serve a mostly ideological function. If that is the case, we should do nothing
less than reverse the popular conviction that the relationship between art and the market is
characterised by constitutive ‘tension’. It is rather the priceless nature of art, whose value cannot be
calculated through and is irreducible to price, which has rendered it a perfect object of speculation. In
this sense, isn't contemporary art indeed the model and transmission mechanism of a universal
financialisation permeating all aspects of society, as has recently been proposed? Perhaps for this reason, amidst the increasingly disoriented movements of critical
contemporary art we are confronted with accelerationist positions that, instead of simulating a
‘critical’ distance to the market, move in a diametrically opposed direction. These positions replace
distanced aesthetic reflexions with creative interventions and practical confrontations, for example, at
the interface with fashion or celebrity culture (lifestyle branding, image campaigns, marketing
strategies) or that of art and science (big data, climate change). They are remarkable for their recursive
appropriation and reprogramming of the respective technological, economic and media platforms
(virtual money, bitcoin).
speculating beyond
How then to speak to the intrinsic relation between art and finance capital? And what is
capital, if it isn’t the market, economy, consumption or simply money? Strictly speaking, ‘capital’ is a
social entity that facilitates translations of cultural, social, economic and other forms of capital (a good
example of this is the shamelessness with which ‘critical’ intellectuals are continuously producing
value-adding catalogue texts). Noisy debates on the pricing structures of the art market (most recently
on the allegedly illegitimate flippers, etc.) have to be understood against the background that all
cultural and social processes are indissolubly connected to the capital. Capital is a social relation, a
permanently shifting balance of power.
In view of the current system-wide crisis, revaluing the debt economies that are collapsing
right before our eyes becomes inevitable. Financial speculation is becoming increasingly detached
from any type of real economy through high-frequency and algorithmic derivative trading. Can
finance nonetheless be controlled by better means of regulation, as suggested by the government
parties of the European mainstream (who are all adherents of neo-liberal economic policy, whether or
not they are social-democrats)? Or are we witnessing the final throes of a morbidund political-
economic classification system named ‘capitalism’, which in turn could entail serious consequences
for the production and distribution conditions of art?
gallery 2.0
Given the technological (digital, algorithmic) conditions of the current economy, new and
different ways of working from these premises come into play. curated by_vienna explores the
alternative economic and artistic strategies that are now available.
What options should galleries take if they are not to continuously equip art fairs with the
newest in zombie formalism, the youngest emerging artists and evermore exhibits of alleged criticality
- often only to be overshadowed by a few global players and risking financial ruin in the process? On
the side of artistic practices, economic interrelations are being explicitly readdressed to realign them
into the future. Artists and curators who are digital natives and seismographers of a new economy of
attention optimistically experiment with poetic and artistic practices instead of believing they can
escape from overarching capitalisation by resorting to folkloristic niches. This anti-nostalgic
accelerationist perspective raises the question to what extent artists can succeed at steering the
changing forms of distribution (for example, by founding companies or through similarly offensive
strategies) in an emancipatory manner in today’s Internet age practices that are already forcing gallery
and museum exhibitions to take different approaches to the well-established conventions.
accelerating (contemporary) art
From a speculative and untimely perspective, the principle of spectatorship proves to be an
expression of the expiring television age. Doesn’t the omnipresence of social media call for entirely
different artistic strategies, not least in how social media providers view their users as passive
spectators but as disposable concrete and active material for enhancing diverse algorithmic and data
processing and, through that, revenue? What is important here is less the purpose and disadvantage of
social media or new communication technologies than it is their means of navigation and control.
The determining media of this day and age are to be understood as interfaces between the
human and the non-human (bio hypermedia), whereby creative activities are increasingly integrated
into extended technological and economic processes in everyday life. What were once ‘final’ exhibits
are now taken only as intermediary stages in an ongoing process of action - once again making
apparent the necessity of testing new models or combinations of art and economy. The gallery festival
curated by_vienna, as organised by the Vienna Business Agency, offers a unique platform to conduct
these experiments into how the future will be.
Adam Christensen´s outstanding performance during opening (song-texts by Matthew Dickman) Photo: Francisco Peralta Torrejón
Juliette Blightman Study for Still Life, 2015, Bleistift auf Papier/Graphite on Paper, 14,8 x 21 cm
Courtesy: der Künstler/the artist und/and Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Patrizio Di Massimo Dentro di me (Inside me), 2013. 130 Pölster aus Samt, Baumwolle und Satin, Besätze. Live Performance. Circa 150 x 250 x 200 cm. Einzelstück/Unique. Courtesy: der Künstler/the artist und/and T293, Rom
Eddie Peake Fashion Work 17, 2010. Black ink on fashion magazine
page. 11 1/4 x 8 11/16 in. (28.5 x 22 cm) (unframed) © Eddie Peake.
Photo © Eddie Peake Courtesy White Cube
Opening
Installation view
Opening. Photo: Francisco Peralta Torrejón
Zoe Williams. Cape Crème, 2011. Reversible hand dyed and digitally printed silk cape, with mink tail details. Approx 140 x 300 cm. Unique