Először sorra vettem azokat az éppen abban az időszakban létrejött kiállításokat, melyek hasonló témát feszegettek, vagyis a történetmeséléssel, a narrativitással foglalkoztak. Kapcsolódásuk az én kutatásomhoz néhol igen laza, ámde akkor is szerettem volna látni, hogy ki hogyan értelmez egy ilyen "beszédes" címet, ilyen megkapó leírást.
3. Prágai Biennálé - 2007 - Storytellers szekció:
In the era of the information, it’s becoming harder and harder to find a story able to embrace a big audience. However, the loss of a grand narrative (or a grand utopia) could be considered an opportunity to privilege individual narration over mass narration.
Following in the steps of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the curators collected five personal art-like contributions. The following two projects were presented for the first time in Prague: Massimilano Buvoli’s multi lightbox is a group of landscapes presented using the language of the Italian furniture design of the ’60s while the true storyteller Matthew Sawyer – who plays and sings in a band called The Ghost – proposed a contemporary archive with the same legacy of the medieval street-singers.
Presenting the series Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, Luke Fowler’s practice is like that of a ‘scientist’ of human memory who distills visual panoramas from a past that is both veiled and recent. With his homage to John Chamberlain (and the legend behind his famous crashed-car sculpture) Jonathan Monk recounts the birth of an American icon with an ironic flavor.
Lastly, Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave is meant to be a sort of visual soundtrack of the section, a masterpiece dedicated to the power of documentation; by recreating an historical event the artist presents History as a fluid phenomenon instead of a static record. The more you narrate the truth the more you realize it is fake.
Learn To Read, Tate Modern, 2007:
Learn to Read draws together artists who play with text and erasure. The exhibition presents work by 29 international artists, some of whom are exhibiting in the UK for the first time. It offers a dense and playful exploration of language and meaning, one as much to be seen as read. Each artist questions language through miscommunication (shifts and slippages through translation, repetition, memory and humour) and erasure (subtraction, reduction, alteration). Much of the work in the exhibition is informed by the strategies employed by Modernist and later artists to elide the distinctions between the textual and the visual. These include Stéphane Mallarmé’s reconfiguring of poetry into something resembling a musical score by playing with its typography. In Mallarmé’s work the visual and literary were intertwined; margins and silence played a crucial role in his work and in the work of those Conceptual artists he influenced, such as Marcel Broodthaers and Robert Barry. Guillaume Apollinaire also used text to generate images, exploiting the tension between the words themselves and the way in which they were displayed on the page. Finally, Raymond Roussel’s deconstruction of the rules of language in works such as Locus Solus 1918 was a crucial influence on André Breton and Surrealist artists.
With the inclusion of texts in the paintings and collages of Cubism, Futurism and Dada, and the interplay of words and poetic texts in Surrealism, the first half of the twentieth century offered a vital precursor to the use of words in contemporary art. In the 1960s Conceptual art radicalised this visual use of words. Language was established as a primary medium of aesthetic production by artists whose play with words resulted in radical propositions, redefining the production and reception of the art object. More recently, language has become a favoured medium for many contemporary artists, a tool with which to criticise systems of communication, the production of meaning and notions of authorship. The research of artists such as John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman has been crucial for the development of a younger generation, as some of the works in the exhibition testify.
The featured artists are: Saâdane Afif, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Carol Bove, Peter Coffin, Annelise Coste, Shannon Ebner, Simon Evans, Mario Garcia Torres, Graham Gillmore, Mauricio Guillen, Kevin Hutcheson, Bethan Huws, Július Koller, Christopher Knowles, Friedrich Kunath, Glenn Ligon, Maria Lindberg, Kris Martin, Jonathan Monk, Lia Perjovschi, Philippe Parreno, Kirsten Pieroth, Damien Roach, Vittorio Santoro, David Shrigley, Frances Stark, Sue Tompkins, Jordan Wolfson.
