SMART PROJECT SPACE/PANEL DISCUSSION
December 14, 2008/Amsterdam"La Vie d'Artiste"
DISCUSSIONA panel discussion on the artist as object of appropriation by intellectual and popular discourse.
At each moment of history groups emerge from society to cohere and structure different forms of singularity: the saint, the genius and the hero in the past, the missionary, the artist and the champion today.
Vincent van Gogh is the best example of the notion of artistic singularity that 20th century society has had of the 19th century artist: a paradigmatic figure of a new model of the artist who would be turned into a popular symbol. The Van Gogh phenomenon has become a synonym for the legend of the artist, destined to be wrapped in a public affection nourished by a host of variables in the treatment, and also destined to be critically reviewed by the social sciences as well as art history and anthropology, which make values spontaneously perceived as absolute, timeless and universally relative. Just as the person and the life of the artist have been essayed by the biography, the character and emotions by exegesis of the pictures, the diagnosis of the illness by psychiatric and artistic studies, the existential anguish and the social criticism by literature, the motifs of images by modern philosophy artistic gesture has been essayed by cinematic fiction.
Artistic gesture is taken from the artist's legend and from that legend the representation of the gesture inherits and recreates given forms and commonplaces. The discussion "La Vie d'Artiste" proposes to frame the broad territory of cinematic biography, the natural framework for representation of the artistic gesture, which includes everything from an exhaustive vision of an artist's life or career, by way of slices of life-a few years, months or days-down, to a life flash.
"La Vie d'Artiste" is organized in conjunction with the current exhibition
Guest Speakers:
Matthieu Laurette is an artist who established himself in the 1990’s through his exploration of the relationship between art, spectacle, media and economy using a variety of media from TV and video to installation and public interventions.Olav Velthuis is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
Chris Stolwijk is the acting Head of Research at the Van Gogh Museum and Editor-in-Chief of Van Gogh Studies.
Ansje van Beusekom teaches film history and media studies at Utrecht UniversityLech Majewski is a Polish-American film and theatre director, writer, poet, and painter.
Doris Berger is an art historian, curator, critic and works as an editor for BHA at the Getty Research Institute, LA.
Panel discussion moderated by Eva Fotiadi who studied art history, archaeology and museum studies in Greece, the U.K, and the Netherlands and has recently completed her Ph.D on participation and collaboration in contemporary art.
Field Work 2 DISCUSSION
Parallel to the exhibitions "Field Work – part 1" and "Field Work – part 2" SMART Project Space launched a ediscussion aimed to address Curatorial and Artistic Practices from the Perspective of Ecological Thinking.
ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION/SYMPOSIUM are:
Amy Balkin
Roderick Hietbrink
Juneau Projects
Mikael Levin
Rebecca Sakoun
As a two-part exhibition and an ongoing discussion, "Field Work" conjectures two parallel, interconnected, and yet differently orientated trajectories that encompass art, nature and ecology. The exhibitions "Field Work-part 1" and "Field Work–part 2" address contemporary perceptions and understandings of nature.
"Field Work–part 1" looked at contemporary perceptions and understandings of landscape, at how ones perception of landscape may be informed by human transformations of the environment, and by their mediation through artistic depictions and cultural representations–which are often partial and politically inflected. "Field Work – part 2" is a gentle invitation to rethink the distinction most of us make between nature and culture. Each work in the show in its own way deals with the relationship between nature and a man-made environment.
Mikael Levin's series of photographs "Settling into Nature" show not only how industrialization of a particular area in France resulted in the transformation of the landscape over time, but also how it meticulously wrecked it. His photographs document how the landscapes´ topography was shaped over time by its usage, and correlates this with restoration proposals that might shape it in the future.
Roderick Hietbrink's video installation "Vivarium" is an oddly pared-back exploration of the borders between nature and the built environment, as processed by a Dutchman arriving in Sydney–by proxy through the figure of a young female botanist.
Urban farming is addressed in the work of architect/artist Fritz Haeg, whose video documents the process of transforming a front lawn into an edible garden as part of his ongoing project "Edible Estates", and that of Ingo Vetter & Annette Weisser, showing an interview with one of the co-founders of the Detroit Agriculture Network called "I am Farming Humanity".
Amy Balkin's slide show "Public Smog" narrates the process of working towards the opening of Public Smog, a shifting and fluctuating clean-air park and attempts to nominate the atmosphere as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Rebecca Sakoun shows "Biotope 4", a photograph of an abandoned, dying plant in a deserted office space.
Servet Kocyioit's video "Bird Village" was shot in Kus Koyu--Bird Village--in Turkey, that takes its name from the birdlike whistling that the villagers often use in place of words. Whistled languages are normally found and used in locations with abrupt relief created by difficult mountainous terrain.
Juneau Projects presents "Underneath the Floorboards of the Forest, Empty Space", a text-based computer game to visualize written passages describing a series of interlocking environments gradually moving from the countryside to the city, and "Sewn to the Sky", an interactive sound and visual performance/installation continuing their exploration of the interfaces between nature and technology.
The exhibitions are connected to a parallel trajectory in which the notion of ecology is the focal point. This parallel trajectory consists of an ongoing discussion with artists and curators, examining particular artistic and curatorial practices from the perspective of ecology, as a strategy rather then a "thematic". This is in line with what feminist philosopher
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