[artinfo] Anonymous: In the Future No One Will Be Famous
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Fri Oct 27 13:51:37 CEST 2006
Under the programmatic title Anonymous: In the
Future No One Will Be Famous, the Schirn
Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents an exhibition with
works by 11 international artists who – like the
curator – will remain unnamed. In their Notes
toward a Manifesto, the initiators of the
exhibition proclaim: “Anonymous artists wish to
wriggle the status quo into a status incognitos.
Their aim is to remove the increasing
barbarization of thought via short circuits and
fast lanes created by the marketing of artists as
brands whose works have become masterpieces in
ignorance of philosophy.”
Unlike other manifestations of anonymity in the
current contemporary art scene – where artists
take on pseudonyms – this exhibition is unique in
gathering a group of artists who have put
themselves undercover for a certain period of
time (vaguely stated as “until the expiration
date has been reached”).
In recent years, critical observations of the art
market and its influence on the discourse of
contemporary art have increased noticeably.
Artworks have turned into branded commodities and
the artist’s name has become the primary means of
distinction. Content fades into the fog,
magazines feature artists who have not even
graduated from art school, and dealers purchase
works en masse in advance. Exhibition curators
have changed into impresarios setting the tenor
for the reception of the work with their names
and the themes associated with them. Under such
circumstances, the work of art is forced into the
background and loses its disturbing and
subversive potential. An exhibition in which the
artists remain unnamed, however, takes on the
social and aesthetic task of revitalizing access
to art and individual experience by leaving out
certain codes that have become primary, as it
were. A playful situation is created where the
work can be critiqued ad hoc without having to
read t he label.
The enormous quantities of data with which the
contemporary art system operates today is
difficult to ignore. What art is today and how we
think and talk about it is dependent not least on
how we deal with this data and what weight is
given to various bits of information.
Whether it is a specific artist or the depiction
of a certain theme, the perception of an artwork
is immanently informed by the prior experience
one brings to the exhibition. Artist names
inevitably structure subjective experience and,
at times, even hinder spontaneous reactions and
aesthetic encounters.
In addition to keeping the artists’ names
undercover, the exhibited works have been placed
within an architectural puzzle piece, a labyrinth
of deferred meaning. By taking up the theme of
anonymity as well, the exhibition transposes the
subject of hidden authorship onto another level.
Is there an author of the five white cars
mysteriously parked one after the other? Has the
hand of the artist intervened within recognized
“acts of nature” – is the bird’s song making that
branch move? Did the dog’s bark spark a fire? Why
are the authors of city fountains most always
anonymous, and was Duchamp cognizant of this fact
when he titled his famous latrine “Fountain”? And
what happens to the notion of sculpture when the
sculpture begins to drip? The phenomenal
questions raised by these works yield to an
unparalleled autonomy of the spectator.
In the case of an exhibition that casts an opaque
veil over names and whose works not only
communicate this enigma but themselves contain
traces of anonymity – laying a trail replete with
mysteries and myths – the ability to read art by
means of its metadata shifts to a lower-lying
level. As if a space has been folded into
multiple strata, in which the ceiling becomes the
floor and the window only lets in that which
already exists inside, viewers are continually
cast back on themselves, on their own
observations, and they are, thus, connected with
the works whose reality is shaped in part by
their perception and a language that explains
them.
Well-known artistic strategies like Appropriation
or Conceptual Art recede to the periphery of
perception – and the metalanguage that has long
since permeated and “managed” artistic works (or
manipulated the reception thereof) undergoes a
recession. Under the bright light of aesthetic
perception, the names of the artists appear as
distracting prosthetics, supplemental limbs that
keep us from falling into a conceptual void. It
is precisely this gap that anonymous works seek
to fill. Removing the names produces a strange
chaos, a game that is more than an obvious trick
and also more than a deliberate deception. As
viewers, we stand at the edge between knowing and
not knowing the work, and at the same time we see
the names that appear in our consciousness and
their meaninglessness, and stand in the center of
a mysterious or rather unknown language.
In art, the known and the unknown are not
mutually exclusive opposites. Not infrequently,
the idea is to foreground the unknown aspect of a
known artist, to confront the unknown side of an
artist with what is known about him or her,
increasing the significance of his or her work.
This legitimizes not only the repeated
exhibitions of so-called classics but also
results from the variety of perspectives and
interpretations of a work of art that ensures
that its meaning is not restricted but demarcated
(or stripped of its boundaries). It proves more
difficult – though many ambitiously contemporary
galleries and exhibition spaces pursue
competition on this front – to make previously
unknown artists known, and the chances of success
in that venture are in no small measure based on
how well the institution – or curator – is known
that shows the unknown artist’s work. In both
cases, the unknown is less a failing of art than
a guarantee of its continuation.
Andy Warhol – whose artistic reproduction of
everyday images and celebrated faces became
world-famous even beyond connoisseurs of art –
made the prophetic statement in 1968: In the
future everyone will be world-famous for 15
minutes. Undoubtedly, this certainly approximates
the truth of the devaluation of the status of
fame and the assembly line production of
so-called art stars. With the popularization of
fame, however, comes an unwieldy hunger for fame
that must be fed – a vicious circle as more and
more famous people are fabricated, who, likewise,
possess less and less of the “aura” of fame and,
consequently, are quickly and easily replaced.
Anyone who is world-famous today, thus the
tautological formula, will be soon forgotten
tomorrow.
CATALOGUE: “ANONYM /ANONYMOUS – In the Future No
One Will Be Famous,” anonymous and Max Hollein
(eds.), with a preface by Max Hollein and texts
by Dominic Eichler, Stephan Heidenreich, April
Elizabeth Lamm, Eckhart Nickel, and Hans Ulrich
Obrist. German/English edition, 160 pages, 32 b/w
illustrations, Snoeck Verlagsgesell-schaft mbH,
Cologne, ISBN 3-936859-51-5, hardcover, linen.
In addition, 500 blank catalogues with 160 empty pages will be published.
DIRECTOR: Max Hollein
CURATOR: Anonymous
SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
Römerberg
60311 Frankfurt, Germany
http://www.schirn.de
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