poniedziałek, 3 marca 2014

Aneta Rostkowska, Kuba Woynarowski, applied arts of gonzo

artist, curator, critic and collector create a sect/a secret agreement/
an artist or non-artist secretly puts his/her own work into an existing exhibition.
an artist appropriates specific objects from within an art institution, recognizing them as her/his own work.
through mediation, a number of artists deliberately blur the authorship of a particular work of art.
an artist distributes alternative versions of his/her own (or someone else's) biography.
an artist invites guests to the opening of her/his exhibition in a randomly selected art institution. the institution knows nothing about the exhibition. at the announced time the exhibition is not there and the artist is absent.
a photographer prepares documentation of an artists’ work, but the resulting images wouldn’t get approval of the artist (the work is being presented in a non-appropriate way).

a director of a museum organizes an expensive exhibition that only s/he can see.
by secret agreement all art institutions in a city simultaneously present exhibitions of work by the same artist; or the same exhibition is transferred from one art institution to another within the same city.
an art institution compiles false information concerning a single art project it has organised, and disseminates multiple conflicting descriptions of one project.
an art institution organizes an exhibition of random objects of different origins, which have been accumulated over the years (regardless of whether they are art objects or not).
the same curatorial text is used in multiple exhibitions.
curatorial texts belonging to two different exhibitions (taking place simultaneously) are exchanged.

a non-existent artist, event or art institution is promoted in the media. the primary source of all information is difficult to identify.
artworks produced by several artists are treated as having been created by one artist, and the objects made by one single artist are attributed to several different artists.
an (anti-)curator (falsely) claims to be a curator of a particular exhibition pursuing her/his own media campaign.
an (anti-)curator distributes an alternative curatorial text or audio/video-guide, changing the meaning of (someone else's) exhibition
a curatorial talk about the exhibition is being taken over by self-proclaimed (anti-)curator

all items in a gallery space are treated by the public as works of art.
a visitor sees the exhibition from a predefined point of view - for example, an art project is going to be perceived as surreal, socially engaged or abstract.
a visitor perceives a group exhibition as a solo show, and a solo exhibition as a group show.
the public treat several independent exhibitions as one single exhibition, and several unrelated exhibitions as one single project.
something that is not an exhibition is received by the public as an exhibition. a non-curatorial text is read as a curatorial text.

art critic sees an exhibition under the influence of strong drugs and then describes her/his experience in a review
an art critic reviews only: the exhibitions s/he did not see; exhibitions that did not exist; non-exhibitions; or the reviews of exhibitions written by other art critics.
an art critic reviews exhibitions according to a predefined formula - for example, adopting the format ‘positive - negative - positive – negative’.
an art critic writes only non-reviews, or creates texts consisting only of quotations, or gives his/her column to someone else (eg. non-critic ), or uses only visual material, or writes an entirely unrelated text.
an art critic prepares her/his review in the form of a cabaret, musical radio-piece or video-performance.
an art critic prepares a review of multiple use (so that it may be used for different exhibitions)
an art critic writes a positive review as negative (negative assesment, positive conclusion) or a negative review as positive (positive assesment, negative conclusion).
an art critic simultaneously publishes a positive and a negative review of the same exhibition.
an art critic describes exhibitions only in the way that she/he would like them to be  - as a result her/his reviews are always positive

an art dealer sells all the objects in a gallery, regardless of their origin.
an art dealer arranges studio visits for clients – the artists visited are played by actors in suitably constructed sets.
an art collector collects only the fetishes of the artists.

an art historian shows a marginal phenomenon as a canon, and a canon of art as something marginal.
an art historian describes an alternative version of events, mixing facts and fiction.
an art historian gives lectures in the form of cabaret, musical radio-piece or video-performance.

* we loyally warn that some of the ideas described above have been implemented

niedziela, 2 marca 2014

Centre for Contemporary Art 'Wawel Castle'



Artists: Michał Gayer, Justyna Gryglewicz, Michał Hyjek, Szymon Kobylarz, Magdalena Lazar, Cecylia Malik, Mateusz Okoński, Agnieszka Piksa, Aneta Rostkowska, Marta Sala, Łukasz Skąpski, Piotr Sikora, Kuba Skoczek, Łukasz Surowiec, Piotr Swiatoniowski, Wojciech Szymański, Kuba Woynarowski.

Centre for Contemporary Art “Wawel Castle” is a fictive centre for contemporary art in Cracow/Poland. It is “located” in an existing museum of Wawel Royal Castle. The Museum almost never allows any contemporary art into its spaces so we decided to create an imaginary “collection” of site-specific works of art situated there. The artists taking part in our project don't create any physical works, instead they reappropriate different elements of the Castle and its real collection and claim authorship over them. They create stories and new meanings related to these objects.

After a successful first edition of the project that consisted in a guided tour around the Castle, this year we invited a performer Olof Olsson to prepare a special performance that will take place inside the Castle. During the event the objects from the Museum’s collection will be presented as contemporary artworks. We also intend to create a second - this time international – full edition with different artists. It will take place in 2015 and consist in site-specific artworks, a guided tour around them lead by us and the artists and a special map of the Castle with all the artworks marked and described. Currently we are also working on a website that will look like a website of a normal art institution and present all artworks from our “collection”.

Our project is an attempt to break the barrier related to the physical and symbolic inaccessibility of the Wawel Castle, to rediscover the potential hidden in this most recognizable element of Cracow’s urban fabric and to provide a stepping stone to a critical and imaginative reinterpretation of the issues related to the history and tradition of the city. Together with invited artists we intend to liberate narrations “imprisoned” there and use them to construct a living, developing hypertext that would allow a new way of sensing and experiencing the Castle. By means of the project we would also like to test the power of language in creating a different and compelling “reality” and in providing an untypical agency to an invisible art institution.

This project is an example of a new vision of curating we created, which combines the gonzo “style” with the reality of the economic crisis (so-called “gonzo curating”).

An important aspect of the project is the narrative as such – it seems that after the postmodern deconstruction of language a new need for narrative and storytelling is emerging. It is particularly visible in the growing popularity of ambitious TV-series, but also in the emergence of whole group of neo-conceptual artists and curators that very intensively work with language.

The project doesn’t acknowledge a rigid opposition between fiction and the real. Instead it proposes to look at fictions as a possessing specific "reality effects" – as influencing the real world in various ways. In this respect one of the main inspirations for the show was Orson Welles’ masterpiece – a radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938) that caused a real panic and hysteria among wider audiences in the United States. Another reference is the pivotal Happsoc piece of Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárčik (1965), in which the artists designated all life in the city of Bratislava as a work of art for one week.

Aneta Rostkowska, Kuba Woynarowski