Public lecture and exhibition opening in the framework of the Free School for Art Theory and Practice in the new space of tranzit.hu, KIRÁLY 102
Date:
May 11, 2012, 6 p.m.
Place:
KIRÁLY 102, 1068 Budapest, Király u 102, 1st floor 1.
Lecture by Walter Benjamin: The Unmaking of Art
The Unmaking of Art is a story told by Walter Benjamin about the birth of art and art institutions. It tells us where why and how certain ideas of art (museums, galleries, exhibitions, artist and artwork)
originated, and how they have developed in the last five centuries. In this story the notion of art is not a universal category or something that is characteristic for all cultures, but a specific concept that appeared in the Western world during the period called the Enlightenment.
Walter Benjamin is an influential philosopher and art theoretician, best known for his 1936 essay
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".Many years after his tragic death, Walter Benjamin reappeared again in public in 1986 with the lecture "Mondrian '63 -'96" organized by the Marxist Center in Ljubljana. In recent years Mr. Benjamin became an associate of the Museum of American Art in Berlin. After a long pause he appeared again in public 2011 with the lecture "The Unmaking of Art", first at the Times Museum in Guangzhou and then at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The same lecture was repeated in 2012 at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City.
Goran Djordjevic: Against Art Reconstruction of the 1980 exhibition in the Gallery of the Student Cultural Center, Belgrade
GoranDjordjevic has been active in the art scene from the early 1970s as one of the protagonists
of the so-called “analytic line” of Belgrade conceptualism. In 1979, he completely turned to projects of copying (copies of iconic originals of modern art, multiplication of worthless amateur paintings or
painting copies of kitsch-reproductions), which he practiced until 1985, when he stopped producing authorial work in the field of art.
The exhibition Against Art was organized in the Student Cultural Centre in 1980, a year after Djordjevic’s call for The International Strike of Artists “against the art system’s unbroken repression
of the artists and the alienation from the results of their work”, in which he suggested the radical halting of art production on an international level. The exhibition was opened with the following statement:
"A work of art expresses, among other things, certain attitude towards art. The works showed at this
exhibition are not works of art. They are only attitudes towards art. More precisely, they are attitudes against art. I think it’s high time to tear the powdered mask of freedom and humanism of art and reveal its proper face – the face of a faithful and humble servant."
Against Art is one of the first conceptual exhibitions (or artistic statements in the form of an exhibition) in former Yugoslavia. It is also the first project of Djordjevic’s “radical copyism”, based on idea that the copy can become more significant thatn the original, since it contains all of the visual information as presented in the original, but also points to the story to which the original belongs and through which it was being made.
The exhibition Against Art was reconstructed for the first time in the Gallery of Student Cultural
Centre – Belgrade in 2011 as part of the retrospective exhibition “Against art - Goran Djordjevic: Copies 1979–1985” curated by Branislav Dimitrijevic, Dejan Sretenovic and Jelena Vesic, and produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art – Belgrade.
Detailed information on the seminar of the Free School for Art Theory and Practice:
http://hu.tranzit.org/en/free_school/0/2012-04-19/against-art---frre-school-jelena-vesic
Image: La Biennale di Venezia 54th International Art Exhibition ILLUMInazioni – ILLUMInations
