This qoute came from the exhibition catalogue of
The Death of The Audience in Vienna's Secession which Line was lucky enough to see last summer. And the on-going 'transgressions' of the thesis in question is under discussion in the latest issue of the
e-flux journal, no. 13.
Meanwhile our own 'thesis' is set to continue with around half of issue 002 of
The Kakofonie sourced. It's set to be an extremely interesting and mobile collection of propaganda and art. Send in anything you may have!
The conversation between Elisabeth Leibovici and the exhibition's curator Pierre Pal-Blanc is well worth checking out.
I found it fascinating because it's in the general space of the novel I've just finished writing and the avantgarde group
LGB whom I've created and who lie at its centre. I could almost substitute my own creation, Djordje Bojic, into their conversation so similiar is it to what I've been working hard to create.
Take Djordje Bojić [André du Colombier] for instance, a Serbian [French] artist who is even less well-known than those named above, an incredible character who embodied a kind of late version of Dada from the '90s and early 2000s [‘60s to the ‘80s], but with a very precise and concentrated radicality. He constantly worked with common people, less showing work than giving it, a bit like a neighborhood poet, exchanging a piece of work for a pack of cigarettes, generally using the thread of the rumor, the web of the conversation. He used to call up artists or museum curators and make a work from the conversation. Bojić [Colombier] managed to represent a way of being marginal, of staying on the border of exhibitions even while being well-known by the whole art scene...
.... Of course it’s a bit too easy to hide behind the domination and exploitation of artists in authoritarian events such as biennials, but at the same time we can clearly see that the figure of the artist-hero is no longer current, but is rather a historicist view that tries to cling to the branches of the avant-garde. Similarly, in the context of the over-institutionalized Tate Triennial, “Altermodern” works like a parody of the work of the great critics of the twentieth century, up to Pierre Restany or Germano Celant, trying to create a movement. It’s still about trying to create a party, a power position, an adhesion, contrary even to how artists themselves work. Rather than oversimplify the role of the artist, it might make more sense to look outside this figure to a form of organization to be presented or prolonged, one in which the community is involved, where not only the artist but the audience provides a disseminated, deterritorialized experience for the exhibition.
- Pierre Pal-Blanc
When I first went to rue Danielle Casanova I was homeless. But life was good and the swing of things went from very bad to very good via New York and back again. In the middle of listing all the places I'm sleeping this year, I think Danielle Casanova will remain hard to beat in terms of connotations, memoriesm setting. I think that's why I put it in The Readymades so much: I wanted to write about it the only way I could. Anyway, doing some half baked research I came across the above text. It's wonderful that Picabia - of all people! - lived just down the road, in I think the same building I went many a morning to buy tobacco. It was Picabia's work that started off my writing in my first story, Germania. He is, of course, big inspiration for Djordje Bojic and other LGB artists.
