2 August - 28 September 2008

THE PERCEPTION OF IDEAS LEADS TO NEW IDEAS

Bernadette Corporation / Claire Fontaine / Reena Spaulings, Kerstin Cmelka, Claire Fontaine, Iain Forsyth / Jane Pollard, Joachim Koester, Jon Knowles, Jonathan Monk, Falke Pisano, Mario Garcia Torres

»Perception of ideas leads to new ideas« is No. 21 in Sol Le Witt's famous sentences on Conceptual Art. The nine artists participating in the exhibition have originated works which can in turn be classed as »re-makes« of works dating from the 1960s and 70s. They extend beyond a loose referentiality and adopt concrete examples of works from the historical genre of conceptual art in order to endow them with a specific, contemporary slant.
The strategies of appropriation and contemporarisation determining the approach to historical works are many and various: works can be repeated performatively or-true to the word-produce variations. Thus the Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres takes the theft of Michael Asher's Caravan during last years »Skulptur Projekte Münster« as the basis for his 16 mm road movie »My Westphalia Days«. He approaches both the mystery of the temporarily vanished artwork as well as Asher's artistic concept by driving the caravan through the Münsterland and finally depositing it in a wood. Joachim Koester on the other hand re-photographed Ed Ruscha's »Real Estate Opportu-nities« taken in 1970 in Los Angeles. These localities have now been developed and tell a tale of their capital and role in the city and no longer of their supposed potentialities. The exhibition compiles works ranging from film via photography, sculpture to installation which for their part maintain a reflexive relationship to their own (art) history. They are side effects, ideas from ideas, making their own relativity an agent of productivity. In so doing they facilitate new perspectives of historical positions. Scrutiny is directed here at the reciprocal influence of the historical work and the specific strategy towards the remake precisely within the overall compilation of the various artists' differing works.
Following on from the historical positions of the 1960s and 1970s, artists working within a conceptual framework are obliged to engage with an abiding discourse on the topic of conceptual art which precludes the notion of a paradigm shift. Awareness of this background and a continuing delimitating of artistic practice and aesthetics enable an open and reflexive relationship towards recent art history. It is not 1980s Appropriation Art forming the central focus here, blithely adopting figuration through repetition, but rather a (self)-reflexive transference of established positions from art history into a contemporary context.
The exhibition's main interest lies in the very interstices-where the engagement with historical works actually unfolds-and the shifts and displacements which duly arise. The focus is not upon the genuinely new work that comes into being free from contextual references and demarcation from its forerunners, but rather that very type of work in which the perception of ideas unashamedly leads to new ideas.