"False Innocence: Exploring the Fundamental Issues of Contemporary Art"
2003-03-21 until 2003-06-01
Joan Miro Foundation
Barcelona, , ES

False innocence, selected by David G. Torres, contains over 40 works by contemporary artists that comprise installations, sculptures, videos and drawings produced from 1990 onwards and held in the French public collections, especially the Fonds Regionaux d’Art Contemporain (FRAC). The show invites viewers to reflect on one of the fundamental issues of contemporary art: the consideration of art as an intellectual activity connected with reasoning and knowledge.

The title of the exhibition is an attempt to catch the visitor’s attention and predispose him to explore the contents of the works on show beyond their innocent physical appearance, reviving the idea of a committed art generating doubt and confusion.

All art is a discursive activity from the moment it involves an artist’s discourse and provokes discussion. False innocence sets up a series of dialogues or exchanges between the pieces on show that reinforce their meaning or create other different meanings according to the connections that are established between them.

The relationship between art and intelligence has a lot to do with the difficulty in distinguishing exactly what is a work of art, since it is clear that classifying an object as such depends on the conceptual value attributed to it by the viewer as a result of his ability to see and his willingness to think.

The exhibition contains works by Martí Anson, Fiona Banner, Pierre Bismuth, Alain Bublex, Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Claude Closky, Jeanne Dunning, Hubert Duprat, General Idea, Félix González-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Thomas Grunfeld, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Pierre Huyghe, Véronique Joumard, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Fiorenza Menini, Marylène Negro and Klaus Scherubel, Gabriel Orozco, Philippe Parreno, Andréas Slominski, Nedko Solakov, Simon Starling, Haim Steinbach, Uri Tzaig and Mark Wallinger.

Many of them work on the basis of images or objects that appear quite ordinary or even ridiculous but are by no means innocent, and that invite viewers to think in order to give them meaning.

IMAGE:
  Pierre Bismuth  
Sans titre, 1992

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Spain

Other Important Exhibitions in Barcelona