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Armin Medosch: "Mapping New Tendencies and the Emergence of Networked Thought"
25 . 07 . 2016 _ 19 h
Foretić Garden, Hrvatske bratske zajednice St. Nr. 116 (next to the city park, across the street from the main bus station), Korčula
entrance free
Medosch will present the ideas tackled in his recently published book “New Tendencies - Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1971 - 1978)” (MIT Press, 2016). After the lecture, Medosch will engage in conversation with Darko Fritz, curator of the gallery program of grey) (area, who as an independent curator conceptualized so far the most comprehensive retrospective exhibitions on New Tendencies, which took place in Graz and Karlsruhe 2007- 2008.
New Tendencies, an art movement, emerged in the early 1960s in Zagreb. It represented a new sensibility, rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and socialist realism in an attempt to formulate an art adequate to the age of advanced mass production. In this book, Armin Medosch examines the development of New Tendencies as a major international art movement in the context of social, political, and technological history. Doing so, he traces concurrent paradigm shifts: the change from Fordism (the political economy of mass production and consumption) to the information society, and the change from postwar modernism to dematerialized postmodern art practices.
Medosch explains that New Tendencies, rather than opposing the forces of technology as most artists and intellectuals of the time did, imagined the rapid advance of technology to be a springboard into a future beyond alienation and oppression. Works by New Tendencies cast the viewer as coproducer, abolishing the idea of artist as creative genius and replacing it with the notion of the visual researcher. In 1968 and 1969, the group actively turned to the computer as a medium of visual research, anticipating new media and digital art.
Medosch discusses modernization in then-Yugoslavia and other nations on the periphery; looks in detail at New Tendencies’ five major exhibitions in Zagreb; and considers such topics as the group’s relation to science, the changing relationship of manual and intellectual labor, New Tendencies in the international art market, their engagement with computer art, and the group’s eventual eclipse by other “new art practices” including conceptualism, land art, and arte povera.
“Carefully researched and deeply insightful, Medosch's overview illustrates that New Tendencies was much more than a highly relevant exhibition series: a playing field for exploring key ideas of the information revolution, from cybernetic control systems and networked communication to information aesthetics and digital art as visual research. A must read for anyone interested in the evolution of contemporary digital art and its complex technological and socio-political histories.” —Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum, Associate Professor, School of Media Studies, The New School
Foretić's Garden is a protected monument of park architecture and an extraordinary example of the 18th Ct garden art.
Medosch's lecture is carried out in the collaboration of grey) (area and Foretić family, as well as in cooperation with Korčula Town Museum, in the frame of the program "Museums and Cultural Landscapes: it clicked to me in the garden! Walk in Foretić's Garden" which celebrates the International Museum Day. That program started in May 2016, and there is exhibition planned in August 2016.
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New Materialisms (Station 3.2): Goran Trbuljak
until 30. 9 . 2016
part of the exhibition-in-progress New Materialisms (station 3)
Korčula Town Museum
curator: Darko Fritz
Among objects exhibited within the permanent exhibition in Korčula town museum there are also two works by conceptual artist Goran Trbuljak at the display.
In the untitled work, which has been in the museum since the early July, there is a hand counter which the author counts the visitors with, or more precisely, the visitors who have been coming to his solo-exhibitions openings since the early 1970s until now. Those who have come more than once are counted only once.
The second work is also without a title, and it is exhibited starting from July 25, 2016. Identical hand counter, but with another figure, one which shows the number of the people who came to his solo shows in 2016 (there have been three shows so far).
With these works Trbuljak, via for him typical institutional critique, takes part in the questioning of the large quantification of the matters and phenomena in contemporary society from the first person position, which also reflects on the interpretations of the notion of new materialism seen through the optics of different fields that use the same term, but very often with different meanings.
New Materialisms project reflects historically divergent art practices and discursive fields of concrete and conceptual art, as defined in the 1960s. Project tackles understanding of those art practices through the discourse of post-media contemporary approaches to art as well as via post-digital condition of our every day life, whereby digitality is interwoven with each aspect of our social being. New Materialisms strives to formulate a dialogue among important authors of concrete and conceptual art and contemporary practitioners who work within the post-media context, while assuming the design of aesthetical experience as vital mechanism which has its agency in the process of creating the physical world.
New Materialisms series is a long-term program of exhibitions and lectures that has been developed in a collaborative process between grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art from Korčula and HICA (Highlands Institute for Contemporary Art) from Scotland since 2015.
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