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MAKING IS THINKING
23 January – 1 May 2011
Opening: Saturday 22 January 2011, from 6-9 p.m.
Witte de With, Center for Contemporary
Art, is pleased to announce the exhibition Making is Thinking.
This group show featuring fifteen international
artists and curated by Zoë Gray will run from 23rd January until 1st May
2011.
Making is Thinking explores distinct
artistic practices engaged with notions of conceptual craft and intuitive
industry. It seeks to collapse the persistent dichotomy between the practical
and the intellectual, and presents a range of works that refuse the binary of
concept and form.
Artists:
Wilfrid Almendra (FR); Eva
Berendes (DE); Alexandre da Cunha (BR); Julia Dault (CA); Daniel Dewar &
Gregory Gicquel (UK/FR); Anne Hjort Guttu (NO); Hedwig Houben (NL); Teppei
Kaneuji (JP); Edgar Leciejewski (DE); Rita McBride (US); William J. O'Brien
(US); Eva Rothschild (UK); Hans Schabus (AU); Koki Tanaka (JP).
European society has been marked by an
increasing division between making and thinking that finds its roots in the
industrial revolution. With the decline of urban guilds and rural cottage
industries in the nineteenth century, and the subsequent mechanization of labor,
workers were separated into blue- and white-collar jobs. Today, our education
system privileges the creation of flexible “knowledge workers” over
those with practical skills or manual know-how.
It is possible to trace a similar division in
art since the beginning of the twentieth century. With Duchamp’s
introduction of the readymade in 1913, the focus of avant-garde artistic
practice shifted away from technique and the process of making to the
transformative power of the artist’s vision.
This saw the flourishing of conceptual art and
the movement that Lucy Lippard famously labeled the dematerialization of the art
object, culminating in Lawrence Weiner's 1968 Declaration of Intent in which he
announced that an artwork “need not be built.” For Weiner, thinking
is making. Nevertheless, today artists are still making physical artworks and
engaging with tangible materials. In our increasingly dematerialized world, how
are we to engage with materiality? How might thoughtful forms of this insistence
on making relate to our supposedly post-industrial society?
In recent years, craft has been held up to
epitomize an alternative set of social values in the face of industrial
production, global capitalism and mass consumerism. Yet this idea of craft is
broader than that defended by John Ruskin or William Morris at the start of the
previous century. Incorporating many elements of Modernism and informed by
postmodernism, it offers a radical way for rethinking questions of work, both
within and beyond the artistic field. Many artists are turning to this expanded
notion of craft as a paradigm for making that seems to fuse previously
oppositional positions – such as the trace of the artist’s hand and
conceptual reflection – and are exploring its potential for reconsidering
broader questions of production.
Among the artworks included in Making is
Thinking, several recurring or overlapping areas of interest are
discernible: There is a fascination with the role of the amateur, occupied with
absurdly time-consuming activities that verge on meditation (Wilfrid Almendra,
Dewar & Gicquel, Teppei Kaneuji, Hans Schabus). There is an analysis of the
process of creation, and a transformation of this analysis into a new moment of
creation (Hedwig Houben, Ane Hjort Guttu, Edgar Leciejewski). There is an
exploration of sculpture and the applied arts, a struggle between functionalism
and formalism that avoids any hint of nostalgia (Julia Dault, Rita McBride, Eva
Rothschild).
There is a flourishing of decoration and beauty
in the reassessment of certain Modernist tropes (Eva Berendes, Alexandre Da
Cunha).
There is the avoidance of conscious thinking and
the emphasis on intuitive knowledge (William J. O’Brien, Koki Tanaka). And
in many of the works, there is a knowing humor or irony that deflates the pious
earnestness that can accompany discussions of craft.
Accompanying program:
· 25 January 2011:
Masterclass by Julia Dault and William O’Brien.
· Throughout: Workshop by Hedwig Houben
at Willem de Kooning Academy.
· Date tbc: Crafternoon, a discussion
afternoon combined with making, open to all.
· Date tbc: Rita McBride will give a
public lecture.
As Rita McBride once said: “Art
doesn’t matter, it is the doing, the learning, the scrambling, the
growing, the discoveries along the way that matter.” Continuing Witte de
With Education’s successful series of “art confrontations”,
interactive tours of the exhibition will be available throughout its duration,
structured to explore the “discoveries along the way.”
Publication:
To highlight the importance
placed on process, the accompanying publication will be produced over the course
of the show, and made available to the public in online installments. It will be
an illustrated downloadable file in English, available free of charge from
www.wdw.nl. With this publication, Witte de With begins our foray into digital
publishing.
The publication will feature an introduction by
curator/editor Zoë Gray followed by four essays.
The contributors include Gavin Delahunty, Head
of Exhibitions & Displays, Tate Liverpool; Alice Motard, curator, Raven Row,
London; Solveig Øvstbø, director of Bergen Kunsthall; Yoshiko
Nagai, curator, Maison Hermés, Tokyo.
Supported by: Goethe-Institut Niederlande, OCA.
For any additional information about the
project, please contact press@wdw.nl
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For more information about Witte de With, please visit our website
www.wdw.nl or contact us via info@wdw.nl or +31 (0) 10
4110144
For press requests, please send us an email to
press@wdw.nl or call us at +31 (0) 10
4110144
Witte de With is funded by the City of Rotterdam
and the Dutch Ministry of
Culture.
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