[Nettime-nl] Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat/ Chris Evans in SMBA

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

> Chris Evans
> Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat
> 3 June - 9 July 2006
>
>  Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam
>  Rozenstraat 59
>  NL-1016 NN Amsterdam
>  http://www.smba.nl
>
> On June 2 the exhibition Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat 
> by the British artist Chris Evans opens at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau 
> Amsterdam. This exhibition is a prelude for a project that Evans will 
> realize this Autumn in a public area of Amsterdam: a retreat where 
> anyone who calls him or herself artist can stay for a while.
>
> Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat sets out to explore some 
> of the issues around contemporary forms of patronage and the extent to 
> which they differ from historical forms.  The project will question 
> what is at stake for the supported artist and sponsored artwork and 
> whether the philosophical project of existentialism, with its doctrine 
> of self-determination and quest for meaning, has anything to offer the 
> artist cushioned by state subsidy and public sector funding. Starting 
> from the Renaissance, when the fields of art and science were 
> supported by the patronage of both the royal and holy courts, to the 
> present day where forms of state and public sector sponsorship are 
> dominant, artists – or those who are lucky enough to be supported – 
> cling to the ‘umbilical cord of gold’ (Greenberg, Avant-Garde and 
> Kitsch). Militant Bourgeois asks, what is the precise nature of this 
> relationship and what happens if the cord is broken? And, once this 
> ‘freedom’ is won and the artist tumbles into an abyss of uncertainty 
> and angst, what tools might he or she engage in order to climb back 
> out?
>
> The project centers on the foundation and construction of an 
> ‘existentialist’ retreat for Dutch artists. The retreat will be 
> situated in a small building near Amsterdam’s orbital motorway. It 
> will be sparsely furnished with a table, chair and wood-burning stove. 
> Recalling the neo-existentialism of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island and 
> its protagonist’s involuntary exile from the modern world, the retreat 
> simultaneously offers exclusion from, and a ringside seat on, the 
> logic of late capitalism. The chimney of the stove will mutate into a 
> sculpture of eleven ladders, all of which will protrude from the roof 
> of the building. The sculpture, has been created in collaboration with 
> Jan Six, a descendent of Jan Six I, a 17th Century Burgomaster and 
> Patrician.
>
> A meeting with Baron Jan Six, Lord of Hillegom and director of the Six 
> Collection – to give him his full title – inspired Evans with the idea 
> for the sculpture. Evans introduced the premise of the project and 
> asked him to think about an image which could be situated within the 
> retreat and would accentuate the ‘existentialist’ experience. Because 
> this is a difficult concept, Evans asked Six to imagine a situation 
> where it would it be impossible to conceive of a universal moral, 
> right or wrong decision. Six eventually settled on the image of eleven 
> ladders, which he saw as a literal extension of the horizontal 
> buttonholes of the jacket that Jan Six I, his ancestor, is wearing in 
> a portrait of him painted by Rembrandt in 1654. For Six these ladders 
> would symbolize (or represent) the ‘ladder of life’, the number of Six 
> generations and, for the purpose of the sculpture situated in the 
> existentialist retreat, the absence of any ‘moral/ethical high ground’ 
> and the presence of endles s choice.
>
> The Netherlands has suffered recently from international criticism of 
> a lack of artistic intensity despite, or perhaps because of, abundant 
> funding for the arts and a generous subsidy system for individual 
> artists. The project will test this thesis by inviting Dutch artists 
> to stay at the retreat. No funding or support will be offered to the 
> artists, other than a place to live and work, and a chance to re-visit 
> Søren Kierkegaard’s proposal that the highest good for the individual 
> is to find his or her own unique vocation. As he wrote in his journal, 
> “I must find a truth that is true for me… the idea for which I can 
> live or die’. .
>
> Artworks that Evans has realized as part of the project will be 
> exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. These include an 
> illusionistic wall painting of flyposted publicity material 
> advertising the retreat, a sculpture to be placed in the retreat and a 
> short video work. The film narrates an ‘existentialist’ encounter with 
> the painting of Jan Six I by Rembrandt. In a somewhat oblique way the 
> film connects the different strands of the whole project.
>
> Chris Evans (1967) lives and works in London and Berlin. In 2004, he 
> was the Scottish Arts Council’s ‘artist in residence’ in Amsterdam 
> and, since then, has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at 
> Gallery Juliette Jongma in Amsterdam, STORE Gallery, London, Tramway, 
> Glasgow and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. His work has also been 
> exhibited internationally in many group exhibitions including Lisson 
> Gallery, London in 2005 and  KUMU, Tallinn in 2006. Evans’ work is 
> also included in the current exhibition British Art Show 6 – which 
> gives an overview of recent developments in British art. For the 
> British Art Show 6, Evans is showing Radical Loyalty, an ongoing 
> project to build a sculpture park that started in 2003 with the 
> purchase of a plot of unpromising land in Estonia. In 2006 Evans will 
> be producing a solo exhibition with Studio Voltaire, London; Chapter, 
> Cardiff and IPS, Birmingham. He will also exhibit at MOCA Belgrade, 
> East International UK and Gasworks, London .
>
>  ------------------------------------------
>
> The exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam is open from 
> June 3 till July 9. The retreat, located near the South Ring Road, is 
> scheduled to be open from mid September until mid November. Artists 
> can sign up for a stay in the retreat from June 3. From September 
> onwards additional publicity concerning the retreat will be sent out. 
>  
>  The exhibition is accompanied by SMBA newsletter nr. 92 with an essay 
> by Alex Farquharson who is curator and publicist in London.     
>
> For more information, please mail to mail@smba.nl or call 
> +31-20-4220.471
>
> ‘Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat’ is made possible 
> thanks to support of the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.     
>
>  -----------------------------------------
>
>  Chris Evans
>  Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat
> 3 June - 9 July 2006
> http://www.smba.nl
>
> Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam is a project space of the Stedelijk 
> Museum





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