The title and lead motto of the core project, ‘The Eye Never Sets Itself’ as part of the 2nd Ural Industrial Biennal, for us the event of 2012 for its unconventional setting, can be attributed to a treatise by Joseph Brodsky in 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell.
Taking a cue from the event and essay, an accompanying note by Iara Boubnova mentioned, “The heroes of today are not the artists, nor are they the viewers or the audience. It’s the protester on the streets of Cairo, New York or Athens. The street movement in New York last year invented the slogan: “Demand nothing, occupy everything,” which reflects the actual status of contemporary art.”
The show was about suggesting how artists are using their vision to defuse the world from its dangers; about analysis and transformation seen not as a process but as co-existing in a single work and artistic statement. The idea was to show how art tries to reinvent itself in order to better save the world while it equally fails and succeeds.
Boubnova explained, “The world was and is a dangerous place caught between disappearing past and unstable future. Brodsky had intuition for that so he wrote: It’s harder to beautify the misshapen than it is to misshape the beautiful. A sapper is needed to make innocuous from the dangerous. Such attempts are to be applauded and supported in every way possible.” For us the artist is a sapper who makes innocuous from the dangerous; this figure is the central figure for the biennial project. “
“We are interested in how sight, the eye, vision, the artist are making the world less dangerous – as if the world is full of land mines – how do artists see where there are “mines”, areas in the life of the world, which are seen as dangerous, threatening. Such areas are for instance, the past in the general sense, or effects of industry on the environment, or politics of all sorts, or violence, war, street unrest, terrorist threats and so on – the world is still a very dangerous place although maybe various parts of it, central or not, have a different ideas of what their local dangers might be.”
Taking a cue from the event and essay, an accompanying note by Iara Boubnova mentioned, “The heroes of today are not the artists, nor are they the viewers or the audience. It’s the protester on the streets of Cairo, New York or Athens. The street movement in New York last year invented the slogan: “Demand nothing, occupy everything,” which reflects the actual status of contemporary art.”
The show was about suggesting how artists are using their vision to defuse the world from its dangers; about analysis and transformation seen not as a process but as co-existing in a single work and artistic statement. The idea was to show how art tries to reinvent itself in order to better save the world while it equally fails and succeeds.
Boubnova explained, “The world was and is a dangerous place caught between disappearing past and unstable future. Brodsky had intuition for that so he wrote: It’s harder to beautify the misshapen than it is to misshape the beautiful. A sapper is needed to make innocuous from the dangerous. Such attempts are to be applauded and supported in every way possible.” For us the artist is a sapper who makes innocuous from the dangerous; this figure is the central figure for the biennial project. “
“We are interested in how sight, the eye, vision, the artist are making the world less dangerous – as if the world is full of land mines – how do artists see where there are “mines”, areas in the life of the world, which are seen as dangerous, threatening. Such areas are for instance, the past in the general sense, or effects of industry on the environment, or politics of all sorts, or violence, war, street unrest, terrorist threats and so on – the world is still a very dangerous place although maybe various parts of it, central or not, have a different ideas of what their local dangers might be.”
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