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| Martin Beck, "An Image guide...", foto: Begoña Zubero |
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| Mathias Poledna, "Untitled", "Version", foto: Begoña Zubero |
Archaeologies of the Future
Martin Beck / Carol Bove / Dora García
/ Mathias Poledna / Pia Rönicke
Curator: Peio Aguirre
sala rekalde, Bilbao, 27 September to 2
December 2007
This exhibition revolves around an
archaeology of different historical aesthetic forms coexisting at the heart of
recent artistic practices. Rather than starting out from this vast
storehouse-cum-archive of forms that is History, understood as a linear narrative
that stretches from the ‘past’ to the present day, the exhibition focuses on
examples and cases from ‘now’ that use different forms of historicity and/or
historicism. Archaeology, as everyone knows, centres on research into history
and is a discipline based on strict methods of chronological dating, period,
epoch, style, school, etc. Only after archaeological analysis of material signs
and remains is it possible to enter into anthropological studies on who made
what, why and to what end.
One of the underlying intentions of
this group exhibition of work by five artists is to reflect on the
sedimentation of time in highly codified cultural forms that range from the
realm of everyday objects to the configuration of the environment around us,
including the formation of artworks. Architecture, design, the moving image and
popular culture all intermingle in an X-ray of the cultural present with one
eye on yesterday.
There are few cultural productions that
transmit as much codified information to us as the cutting edges of image, art
and design. The diagnosis of the present is stratified to the extent that “one
day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even
classic films” (William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003).
This sci-fi novel about the advent of new modes of consumption makes its
appearance here like a reference. In a pop-cultural context, what we tend
towards is the recognition of forms, patterns and models. In identifying
ourselves with aesthetic elements, we mould subjectivities. What is going on
here is a contradictory balance between the standardisation of ways of life and
the need for their continual singularisation: a “mirror-world” in which
everything is recognisable without being alike, in which everything looks like
everything else but is different.
The artistic practices of Martin Beck,
Carol Bove, Dora García, Mathias Poledna and Pia Rönicke share this analytical
sensitivity towards the artificial constructs that intersect historical memory
with mass culture, and are part of a tradition of critique that has continued
to question the universal concepts of the aesthetic experience of high
modernism through to the present day. It is in the form, the style and the
language that the differences between the projections of the Sixties to the
present are visible. Style (as residue) in this context is a carrier of the
ideology of the times, dissolving the historical within the aesthetic, midway
between timelessness and periodization.
This exhibition borrows its name from
Fredric Jameson’s book, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire called Utopia
and other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), a title that is an entire programme
in itself. Nevertheless, its origin lies in the conclusion of the author’s previous
book on modernity and modernism, A Singular Modernity (Verso, 2000), when he
writes that “Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not
forecasts of the past”.
This exhibition as a visual essay is an
attempt to short-circuit the archaeologies of the past (those of modernity)
with a scenario of historicism close to science-fiction.
Another of the notable features lies in
the methods used by all the artists, which include appropriation, quotation,
re-contextualisation, revision, design, reference and self-reference, and
manipulations of style, with culture being read as a second nature.
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| Pia Ronicke, "Whithout a Name", foto: Begoña Zubero |
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