press announcement 26.09.2007
Bad Beuys Entertainment, Boling, Bruno, Chrisa & Tkacova, collectif_fact, Matsoukis, Mirza, Previeux, Rungjang, Zucconi, curated by VVORK.com (06.10.2007 - 03.11.2007, Galerie West)
Content
1. general
2. addendum 1: information on the lecture series connected to the exhibition
3. addendum 2: essay by Lorna Mills, Toronto
4. addendum 3: information on participating artists
Bad Beuys Entertainment, Boling, Bruno, Chrisa & Tkacova, collectif_fact, Matsoukis, Mirza, Previeux, Rungjang, Zucconi, curated by VVORK.com (06.10.2007 - 03.11.2007, Galerie West)
Content
1. general
2. addendum 1: information on the lecture series connected to the exhibition
3. addendum 2: essay by Lorna Mills, Toronto
4. addendum 3: information on participating artists
VVORK.com is an artlog. VVORK is Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Christoph Priglinger, Georg Schnitzer; a collective of artists, curators en designers. Together with a quote and a link to the artists website, they update their artlog daily from different locations with pictures of art works from all over the world. They are using very personal (often unknown) choices and only very few words. The (picture of the) art-work itself gets all the space and the enormous quantity (of mostly unknown work) published sets VVORK apart from similar initiatives.
VVORK has every day over 9000 visitors. They combine different phenomena from modern media culture: international editors on different locations, publishing only online, images replacing text and an international readership.
West invited VVORK for their one year anniversary to curate their first offline, physical exhibition. In West they will present a group-show with works of Bad Beuys Entertainment, John Michael Boling, Christophe Bruno, Anetta Mona Chrisa & Lucia Tkacova, collectif_fact, Katerina Matsoukis, Haroon Mirza, Julien Prévieux, Arin Rungjang en Damon Zucconi.
VVORK has every day over 9000 visitors. They combine different phenomena from modern media culture: international editors on different locations, publishing only online, images replacing text and an international readership.
West invited VVORK for their one year anniversary to curate their first offline, physical exhibition. In West they will present a group-show with works of Bad Beuys Entertainment, John Michael Boling, Christophe Bruno, Anetta Mona Chrisa & Lucia Tkacova, collectif_fact, Katerina Matsoukis, Haroon Mirza, Julien Prévieux, Arin Rungjang en Damon Zucconi.
addendum 1
West is organizing two evenings with lectures and presentations. These evening are focusing on artlogs, globalization, positioning, internet vs traditional media and the influence of internet on the perception of art.
These evenings (6 & 9 october) are for free.
saturday 6 october, 19:00
Artist talk with
Matthieu Clainchard & Olivier Cazin - Bad Beuys Entertainment
Julien Prévieux - www.previeux.net
Haroon Mirza - www.clickfolio.com/haroon
tuesday 9 october, 20:00
Artist talk/discussion: Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Georg Schnitzer en Christoph Priglinger from VVORK.com
Jeroen Bosch from www.trendbeheer.com
Peter Luining from www.ctrlaltdelete.org
Marie Jeanne de Rooij from www.denhaagsculptuur.nl
Constant Dullaart www.constantdullaart.nl
6 october - 3 november
Exhibition open, wednesdays till saturdays from 12:00 - 18:00
For questions feel free to call Marie-José Sondeijker 070.3925359.
West is organizing two evenings with lectures and presentations. These evening are focusing on artlogs, globalization, positioning, internet vs traditional media and the influence of internet on the perception of art.
These evenings (6 & 9 october) are for free.
saturday 6 october, 19:00
Artist talk with
Matthieu Clainchard & Olivier Cazin - Bad Beuys Entertainment
Julien Prévieux - www.previeux.net
Haroon Mirza - www.clickfolio.com/haroon
tuesday 9 october, 20:00
Artist talk/discussion: Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Georg Schnitzer en Christoph Priglinger from VVORK.com
Jeroen Bosch from www.trendbeheer.com
Peter Luining from www.ctrlaltdelete.org
Marie Jeanne de Rooij from www.denhaagsculptuur.nl
Constant Dullaart www.constantdullaart.nl
6 october - 3 november
Exhibition open, wednesdays till saturdays from 12:00 - 18:00
For questions feel free to call Marie-José Sondeijker 070.3925359.
addendum 2
Essay by Lorna Mills, Toronto
VVORK (april 2006 to the present) is a web based project edited, collated or curated by four artists: Aleksandra Domanovic & Oliver Laric in Berlin, Georg Schnitzer in London and Christoph Priglinger in Vienna. The VVORK project led to an invitation to curate an exhibition at Galerie West in Den Haag. The title of the exhibition is a list of the participating artists’ names: Bad Beuys Entertainment, Boling, Bruno, Chisa & Tkacova, collectif_fact, Matsoukis, Mirza, Prévieux, Rungjang, Zucconi.
The logic of the title extends directly from the illogic of the VVORK site.
The cranky art historian, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) devoted the last five years of his life to producing a picture book that contained a massive amount of images of varying quality, without commentary or captions, that he titled the Mnemosyne Atlas. One of the other titles he sometimes used for this unfinished project was Picture Book for a Critique of Pure Unreason. That’s the title I prefer.
The VVORK site is simply designed and continuously updated with isolated images by contemporary visual artists. The first remarkable aspect is a total lack of commentary apart from brief descriptions for those images that may not clearly convey their content. No statements of intent from the editors, no reasons for their choices, in other words a total failure to inoculate the viewers from the art we are looking at. The second remarkable thing is that these are art works from all over the world, an art world not limited to London and New York, presented without any sense of critical or market hierarchy, cross-referenced only by city of origin. The third remarkable thing is the excessive volume of work they have managed to post in such a relatively short time period. And it grows daily. Though ultimately, when visiting their site, we are looking at a collection of nothing but jpegs of art chosen by four individuals with unspoken motivations, this simplicity is deceptive. I think of their project as propositional, with some art works posted at the speed of impulse – obviously constructed in linear time – but with occasional odd convergences of similar materials, subjects or approaches. It’s the sporadic bunching up of these parallel art works that resonates the most for me. A run of artists from all over the world working with neon, fabricating human skulls, piling books or making chessboards. The burden is placed on the viewer to come up with a method of understanding this stuff. That’s an exercise that can be both frustrating and attractive when the volume of work and VVORK’s unvarying editorial distance invites enough art theory to make total nonsense of our usual critical apprehensions. A clusterfuck. Really. And one can easily resent VVORK’s refusal to clean up the unholy mess they make by showing artists who participate in the culture at the same time and who might even share the same methods, ideas or materials. Its left up to me (or you dear reader) to decide what works are structurally unsound failures and what works are rich and expansive enough to survive these sometimes deflating comparisons. That said, there are instances where, in spite of all the similarities in a run of individual works, each piece is distinct and strong – a paradox, but it’s not impossible. It’s as if an argument is made that no one artist truly needs to own an idea or a form. (a totally ridiculous claim anyway, but some markets and myths demand it) The VVORK platform places certain works at a severe disadvantage, and further, as someone pointed out to me, most of those jpegs are like a cartoon hand pointing at or towards the work. The little deal we make with the internet devil is that most of us will never see all of this art as it exists in space or time. (but we still want to know what it looks like) The arena of reproduction used to be just a place for the discussion of art. Browsing and scrolling through a site full of nothing but art images, no matter how marvelous some seem, will not sustain any of us as artists or viewers of art, but then again all the chatter around art has never sustained us either.
The greedy barbarian in me still loves, with maybe too much ardor, the idea of an gigantic open ended visual listing of discrete objects and projects. It’s the illusion of getting to see everything, but it’s more about being intoxicated with potentials. VVORK’s ongoing web site project and their gallery curating are not an either/or proposition, an on/off binary. As their onsite choices attempt to reflect trends and patterns of practise, they do not as a group unanimously endorse, support and ‘love love love!’ every image on their site. The exhibition at Galerie West gives them an opportunity to state some of their preferences. Lacking an interest in thematic curations, they have opted for works from very young artists they describe as ‘using information technology or contemporary media which they believe employ innovative and unorthodox approaches.’ All their prior dealings with the work and the participating artists have been mediated by information technology, the work has been selected based on nothing but reproductions found on-line, most of the shows conception has been discussed via skype. Their undertaking is a conversion from the virtual to the physical.
For an artist, the making of a work comes down to dealing with what is actual. For curators, the final choices, the peculiarities of space & location, and finally, the negotiation of the relationships between the different works also finally comes down to what is actual: no longer imagined, estimated or guessed.
Essay by Lorna Mills, Toronto
VVORK (april 2006 to the present) is a web based project edited, collated or curated by four artists: Aleksandra Domanovic & Oliver Laric in Berlin, Georg Schnitzer in London and Christoph Priglinger in Vienna. The VVORK project led to an invitation to curate an exhibition at Galerie West in Den Haag. The title of the exhibition is a list of the participating artists’ names: Bad Beuys Entertainment, Boling, Bruno, Chisa & Tkacova, collectif_fact, Matsoukis, Mirza, Prévieux, Rungjang, Zucconi.
The logic of the title extends directly from the illogic of the VVORK site.
The cranky art historian, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) devoted the last five years of his life to producing a picture book that contained a massive amount of images of varying quality, without commentary or captions, that he titled the Mnemosyne Atlas. One of the other titles he sometimes used for this unfinished project was Picture Book for a Critique of Pure Unreason. That’s the title I prefer.
The VVORK site is simply designed and continuously updated with isolated images by contemporary visual artists. The first remarkable aspect is a total lack of commentary apart from brief descriptions for those images that may not clearly convey their content. No statements of intent from the editors, no reasons for their choices, in other words a total failure to inoculate the viewers from the art we are looking at. The second remarkable thing is that these are art works from all over the world, an art world not limited to London and New York, presented without any sense of critical or market hierarchy, cross-referenced only by city of origin. The third remarkable thing is the excessive volume of work they have managed to post in such a relatively short time period. And it grows daily. Though ultimately, when visiting their site, we are looking at a collection of nothing but jpegs of art chosen by four individuals with unspoken motivations, this simplicity is deceptive. I think of their project as propositional, with some art works posted at the speed of impulse – obviously constructed in linear time – but with occasional odd convergences of similar materials, subjects or approaches. It’s the sporadic bunching up of these parallel art works that resonates the most for me. A run of artists from all over the world working with neon, fabricating human skulls, piling books or making chessboards. The burden is placed on the viewer to come up with a method of understanding this stuff. That’s an exercise that can be both frustrating and attractive when the volume of work and VVORK’s unvarying editorial distance invites enough art theory to make total nonsense of our usual critical apprehensions. A clusterfuck. Really. And one can easily resent VVORK’s refusal to clean up the unholy mess they make by showing artists who participate in the culture at the same time and who might even share the same methods, ideas or materials. Its left up to me (or you dear reader) to decide what works are structurally unsound failures and what works are rich and expansive enough to survive these sometimes deflating comparisons. That said, there are instances where, in spite of all the similarities in a run of individual works, each piece is distinct and strong – a paradox, but it’s not impossible. It’s as if an argument is made that no one artist truly needs to own an idea or a form. (a totally ridiculous claim anyway, but some markets and myths demand it) The VVORK platform places certain works at a severe disadvantage, and further, as someone pointed out to me, most of those jpegs are like a cartoon hand pointing at or towards the work. The little deal we make with the internet devil is that most of us will never see all of this art as it exists in space or time. (but we still want to know what it looks like) The arena of reproduction used to be just a place for the discussion of art. Browsing and scrolling through a site full of nothing but art images, no matter how marvelous some seem, will not sustain any of us as artists or viewers of art, but then again all the chatter around art has never sustained us either.
The greedy barbarian in me still loves, with maybe too much ardor, the idea of an gigantic open ended visual listing of discrete objects and projects. It’s the illusion of getting to see everything, but it’s more about being intoxicated with potentials. VVORK’s ongoing web site project and their gallery curating are not an either/or proposition, an on/off binary. As their onsite choices attempt to reflect trends and patterns of practise, they do not as a group unanimously endorse, support and ‘love love love!’ every image on their site. The exhibition at Galerie West gives them an opportunity to state some of their preferences. Lacking an interest in thematic curations, they have opted for works from very young artists they describe as ‘using information technology or contemporary media which they believe employ innovative and unorthodox approaches.’ All their prior dealings with the work and the participating artists have been mediated by information technology, the work has been selected based on nothing but reproductions found on-line, most of the shows conception has been discussed via skype. Their undertaking is a conversion from the virtual to the physical.
For an artist, the making of a work comes down to dealing with what is actual. For curators, the final choices, the peculiarities of space & location, and finally, the negotiation of the relationships between the different works also finally comes down to what is actual: no longer imagined, estimated or guessed.
addendum 3
Information on the artists
Bad Beuys Entertainment (1999, France) - www.badbeuys.ent.free.fr
Founded in 1999, by Matthieu Clainchard and Olivier Cazinin Cergy-Pontoise, at Cergy-Pontoise, in the Parisian suburbs. The work of Bad Beuys Entertainment stems from and speaks about the outskirts. To live in these outer-urban spaces is to inhabit a certain culture, with specific reference points, represented by a whole spectrum of outsider activities. Bad Beuys Entertainment works with and around tags, rap, riots, insults, burning cars, suburban underworlds, urban legends, big architectural housing developments, popular culture, the ubiquity of the television, urbanism, hip-hop and graffiti.
Bad Beuys Entertainment will join the artist talk on the 6.10, 19.00.
John Michael Boling (1983, USA) - www.gooooo...oogle.com/guitarsolo.html
Boling is a 24 year old artist from New York. He is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia and have quickly gained the attention of the New York new media scene with his video and net art. He is best know for his focused, brilliantly executed video re-edits of television footage. He is a founding member of Nasty Nets internet surfing club.
Christophe Bruno (France) - www.christophebruno.com
Bruno lives and works in Paris. We scan your intimacy to protect your privacy! Is the economic dynamics of the collective hallucination leading us towards a privatization of the glance? Logo.Hallucination is a mixed media installation by Bruno. Awarded at the Madrid Contemporary Art Fair with the ARCO new media prize 2007 and at the Prix Arts Electronica 2003. He divides his time between his artistic activity, teaching, lectures and publications.
A. M. Chisa (1975, Romania) & L. Tkacova (1977, Slovakia) - www.chitka.info
Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova both work as artists and curators. In Galerie West they will show the video Dialectics of Subjection #4. The most powerful men in the world politics are submitted to uncompromising judgement, admitting only the criteria of physical (un)attractiveness. Ignoring the subjects’ political and moral qualities as well as their significance in the contemporary political sphere. The video is an exciting dialogue filled with racy comparisons and some surprising victories.
collectif_fact (2001, Switzerland) - www.collectif-fact.ch
collectif_fact = Annelore Schneider (1979), Swann Thommen (1979), Claude Piguet (1977). They have worked together since 2001, after they had met at the Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts Genève. Collectif_fact create their works by using a sophisticated digital sampling technique. Similarly to processes for composing electronic music, elements and tiny fragments taken from photographs, videos, digital data sets, and image databases are isolated, cut out, transferred, multiplied, reassembled, deprived of their original spatiality and physicality, and thus placed in entirely new contexts and non-narrative but quite coherent sequences of images. The group’s works reflect a digitized society in which a parallel, interchangeable life is possible thanks to standardized, virtual, formal, and functional elements. For all their virtuality, direct links to reality remain since what emerges emanates from a real experience. The works’ content is what makes them so intriguing; Collectif_fact, thanks to their meticulous observations, are able to articulate contemporary social phenomena with great poignancy.
Katerina Matsoukis (GR)
more info soon
Haroon Mirza (1977, United Kingdom) - www.clickfolio.com/haroon
Haroon lives and works in London. His work is concerned with technology – the technology of seeing and hearing – specifically the romanticising of technology, with its emphasis on representation, and the excess of information he believes it faces us with today. His artworks set up environments where the technology of their construction becomes the focus, whilst at the same time the withholding of information interrupts the sorts of expectations we might make of them. The resulting experience, then, is of a disjunctive temporality.
He will be joining for the artist talk on 06.10, 19.00.
Julien Prévieux (1974, France) - www.previeux.net
Julien Prévieux born in Grenoble (France), works and lives in Paris. His work Post-post-production is a 120-minute video. To The World is not Enough, Prévieux adds a completely new set of effects to the penultimate James Bond movie: each shot is enhanced by additional explosions, flames, smoke, torrents of water and avalanches... Thus ‘augmented’, the film reveals a second rhythm which is no longer that of its narrative, but the rhythm of its new effects.
Arin Rungjang (1976, Thailand) - www.arinrungjang.blogspot.com
Arin Rungjang is an artist from Bangkok, 31 years old. His work, part of Collected Neons From Art Spaces. Rungjang will show a new site specific installation made in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The installation is a work about two cultures, one contemplative and filled with spirituality, and the other shaped by conceptual art. The relationship between viewer and artwork has produced via a sensation device, both physical and psychic. The viewer is part of the work and completes it.
Damon Zucconi (1986, USA) - www.reticular.info
Damon Zucconi is a 21 year old artist living and working in New York.
Information on the artists
Bad Beuys Entertainment (1999, France) - www.badbeuys.ent.free.fr
Founded in 1999, by Matthieu Clainchard and Olivier Cazinin Cergy-Pontoise, at Cergy-Pontoise, in the Parisian suburbs. The work of Bad Beuys Entertainment stems from and speaks about the outskirts. To live in these outer-urban spaces is to inhabit a certain culture, with specific reference points, represented by a whole spectrum of outsider activities. Bad Beuys Entertainment works with and around tags, rap, riots, insults, burning cars, suburban underworlds, urban legends, big architectural housing developments, popular culture, the ubiquity of the television, urbanism, hip-hop and graffiti.
Bad Beuys Entertainment will join the artist talk on the 6.10, 19.00.
John Michael Boling (1983, USA) - www.gooooo...oogle.com/guitarsolo.html
Boling is a 24 year old artist from New York. He is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia and have quickly gained the attention of the New York new media scene with his video and net art. He is best know for his focused, brilliantly executed video re-edits of television footage. He is a founding member of Nasty Nets internet surfing club.
Christophe Bruno (France) - www.christophebruno.com
Bruno lives and works in Paris. We scan your intimacy to protect your privacy! Is the economic dynamics of the collective hallucination leading us towards a privatization of the glance? Logo.Hallucination is a mixed media installation by Bruno. Awarded at the Madrid Contemporary Art Fair with the ARCO new media prize 2007 and at the Prix Arts Electronica 2003. He divides his time between his artistic activity, teaching, lectures and publications.
A. M. Chisa (1975, Romania) & L. Tkacova (1977, Slovakia) - www.chitka.info
Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova both work as artists and curators. In Galerie West they will show the video Dialectics of Subjection #4. The most powerful men in the world politics are submitted to uncompromising judgement, admitting only the criteria of physical (un)attractiveness. Ignoring the subjects’ political and moral qualities as well as their significance in the contemporary political sphere. The video is an exciting dialogue filled with racy comparisons and some surprising victories.
collectif_fact (2001, Switzerland) - www.collectif-fact.ch
collectif_fact = Annelore Schneider (1979), Swann Thommen (1979), Claude Piguet (1977). They have worked together since 2001, after they had met at the Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts Genève. Collectif_fact create their works by using a sophisticated digital sampling technique. Similarly to processes for composing electronic music, elements and tiny fragments taken from photographs, videos, digital data sets, and image databases are isolated, cut out, transferred, multiplied, reassembled, deprived of their original spatiality and physicality, and thus placed in entirely new contexts and non-narrative but quite coherent sequences of images. The group’s works reflect a digitized society in which a parallel, interchangeable life is possible thanks to standardized, virtual, formal, and functional elements. For all their virtuality, direct links to reality remain since what emerges emanates from a real experience. The works’ content is what makes them so intriguing; Collectif_fact, thanks to their meticulous observations, are able to articulate contemporary social phenomena with great poignancy.
Katerina Matsoukis (GR)
more info soon
Haroon Mirza (1977, United Kingdom) - www.clickfolio.com/haroon
Haroon lives and works in London. His work is concerned with technology – the technology of seeing and hearing – specifically the romanticising of technology, with its emphasis on representation, and the excess of information he believes it faces us with today. His artworks set up environments where the technology of their construction becomes the focus, whilst at the same time the withholding of information interrupts the sorts of expectations we might make of them. The resulting experience, then, is of a disjunctive temporality.
He will be joining for the artist talk on 06.10, 19.00.
Julien Prévieux (1974, France) - www.previeux.net
Julien Prévieux born in Grenoble (France), works and lives in Paris. His work Post-post-production is a 120-minute video. To The World is not Enough, Prévieux adds a completely new set of effects to the penultimate James Bond movie: each shot is enhanced by additional explosions, flames, smoke, torrents of water and avalanches... Thus ‘augmented’, the film reveals a second rhythm which is no longer that of its narrative, but the rhythm of its new effects.
Arin Rungjang (1976, Thailand) - www.arinrungjang.blogspot.com
Arin Rungjang is an artist from Bangkok, 31 years old. His work, part of Collected Neons From Art Spaces. Rungjang will show a new site specific installation made in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The installation is a work about two cultures, one contemplative and filled with spirituality, and the other shaped by conceptual art. The relationship between viewer and artwork has produced via a sensation device, both physical and psychic. The viewer is part of the work and completes it.
Damon Zucconi (1986, USA) - www.reticular.info
Damon Zucconi is a 21 year old artist living and working in New York.