intelligentsia catalog 4

THE RELEVANCE OFTHE CRITICAL MEDIUM

REN BO 任波WU YANG 吴洋COCO ESTEVEGEOFF OVERHEUVINZENZ REINECKE

INTELLIGENTSIA GALLERY智先画廊 4

批判媒介的相关性

2014 年 5 月 24日24 May 2014

THE RELEVANCE OFTHE CRITICAL MEDIUM

REN BO 任波WU YANG 吴洋COCO ESTEVEGEOFF OVERHEUVINZENZ REINECKE


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The Relevance of the Critical Medium

Intelligentsia Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition The Relevance of the Critical Medium with works by Ren Bo, Wu Yang, Coco Esteve, Vinzenz Reinecke and Geoff Overheu.

Ranging from public-interactive performance to objects, the exhibition dissects practices that seek aes-thetic emancipation through the liberation of the medium from predetermined discursive restraints. Through works that abjure classification, labeling becomes an obsolete act as art serves as a critical device helping rethink the relationship between artist, artwork and the public. The Relevance of the Criti-cal Medium reaffirms our interminable experience with artworks as their evolution is exposed by both, the multiplicity of tools and mediums and by our incessant cognitive movement. Diverse works raise a series of questions about conventionality, art and curatorial practices while mediums shift, evolve and transform.

Co-curated by Garcia Frankowski and Hao Chen the exhibition puts under the spotlight strategies of per-formative transgression that are able to withdraw from all encompassing narratives, as every medium is challenged, revealing the underlying potential of contemporary art practices and the Relevance of the Critical Medium.

Intelligentsia Gallery


智先画廊此次呈现的群展名为批判媒介的相关性，参展艺术家包括任波，吴洋，Coco Esteve, Vinzenz Reinecke and Geoff Overheu。从公众互动表演到预制品，此次展览剖析了一系列寻求美学解放的艺术实践，它们摒弃了分类，将媒介从既定却又杂乱的条条框框中解放出来。当艺术作为反思艺术家、艺术作品与公众之间关系的批判性工具之时，标签已成退化为一种陈腐的行为。批判媒介的相关性再次强调了我们对于艺术的无尽实验。这种演进过程同时被暴露于两种因素之下：工具与媒介的日渐多样，以及我们认知层面的不断变化。面对媒介的变幻、演进、转型，这些多样的作品对常规的艺术创作与策展实践提出了一系列的问题。由Garcia Frankowski和陈昊联合策展，此次展览将行为性的越界策略置于聚光灯下，脱离了所有一切叙事。各个媒介都在此被挑战，并由此显现出当代艺术实践潜在的可能性及批判性媒介的关联性。

智先画廊

Critical ImportanceFelix Cruz Marcos

If I could describe it with words I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.

-Martin Heines

In his “Introduction to social Anthropology” Marvin Harris points out that every human language pos-sesses universal semantic capacity. Contrary to opinions held for centuries, consequence of a shallow ap-plication of the Darwinian theories to the cultural sphere, this dissertation illustrates how languages with a rich written tradition (classical Greek, Chinese, Latin or German) play on a level field with those almost extinct tongues whose tradition has already disappeared.

The studies conducted by professor J.H.Bodley among the Campa Indians in the mid twentieth century further reinforce this view. Beholding the rhetorical contests given among this people, Bodley was startled by the beauty and richness of speeches delivered by illiterate men. He noted down the rhetoric figures employed by the speakers, counting up to fourteen classical figures. Separated by thousands of miles and years, the Campa speaker and Homer have no advantage over the other.

When we extend our vision to the languages of Art, to the Media, we find shocking examples of a parallel situation. Being no more than established human languages, painting, sculpture, architecture, graffiti, all of them possess universal semantic capacity. Every idea, every feeling can be conveyed in every Media. The example of classical masters, from Buonarotti to Picasso is of an outstanding value. Be it in a grotto, canvas or in San Pietro dei Vaticano, Miguel Angel never stops being a sculptor. And Picasso is always the multiplicity, the superposition, the exploded time frame, in collage, in bronze, everywhere.

But.

There is indeed a relevance of the critical Media. It is not in the Media. It is in the critical part. Critical understood in its physic connotation, the necessary amount of a compound A to generate a reaction B.

No written report can stop a war. But a photographic series of an improvised summary execution of a “suspected” sniper stopped one in the seventies. Different Medias deliver the message with different in-tensity and speed to our brain. We all stand patiently muzzak we dislike at elevators. It is hard to imagine that we could tolerate with the same resignation other disagreeable stimulus; a smell, a corpse of a long time dead dog. Even if anybody with musical education will rate equal the quality of both stimuli.

Even more; as there are messages to be delivered that depend completely on the speed and intensity of the deliverance we can infer that there are messages that require, that can only exist in certain media. As with the Minotaur that Picasso built out of a bicycle seat; how can you express the primitivism underlying the mass production culture otherwise?

In the present exhibition at Intelligentsia Gallery five artists bring together a reflection about the art in the fringes of the media. We are invited to enter this fertile no men’s land holding their hands. They didn’t create this extension of the human spirit. But their critical approach to the media may as well open new paths for our shared understanding.

Bon voyage.

The Relevance of the Critical Medium

辩证性场域: 景观与抽象

Ren BoUntitled 30sponge, plastic, foam, led light 80 x 25 x17.8cm800 x 250 x178mm2013

Ren BoUntitledPlastic, Electric Lights400 x 500 x 500mm2013

Ren BoAuto Development 12Color negative, ink-jet onPhotographic Paper mounted on borderless Aluminum board 1100x870mm2006

Ren Bo25 Days DustPaper, Glue, Blue Velvet, Office Pins1045 x 750mm2008

Geoff OverheuStormOil Paint1300 x 1000mm2014

Coco EsteveSpeed Structure 04Acrylic Paint on PopSet Paperon Wood and Metacrylate Plate247x290mm2014

Coco EsteveSpeed Structure 01Acrylic Paint on PopSet Paperon Wood and Metacrylate Plate175 x 210mm2014

Coco EsteveSpeed Structure 03PhotographAcrylic Paint on PopSet Paper on Wood and Metacrylate Plate187 x 235mm2014

Wu YangWrapped #20Oil, Acrylic, Cotton threads, fabric and plastic foil on canvas, plastic container550x550x100mm2006

Vinzenz ReineckeUntitledHand written letter on paper210 x 297mm2014

Open Until 14:00Garcia Frankowski

There are works of art that fulfill expectations. Works that serve their role. Works that are at ease in terms of context, content, craftsmanship and especially in terms of what’s collectively expected from the artist, when the artwork fulfills the sole role of commodity. There are other works which question our understanding of the work of art. Works that challenge our expectations. Works that defy what is implied when the words context and content are uttered. Works that don’t seem to fit easily within the boundaries of local discourse and trends. Works that invite to revisit them, rethink them. The Relevance of the Critical Medium is dedicated to the latter type of works. It presents works that ques-tion the critical role of the medium, and the critical role of art as a medium.No stone is left unturned, as questions are thrown in every direction. No piece is easily labeled or clas-sified. Object making, photography, performance, painting, all come under scrutiny. Things are not what they seem, or they are, in fact, exactly what they seem. MediumEvery artist in the exhibition sets a strategic decoy in which we are invited to get trapped. Every piece is a mental landmine waiting to explode its surprise . The show presents photographs of photographs and paintings of paintings. There are piles of ready-made objects playing the role of sculptures, shapes play-ing the role of paintings, and paintings disguised as objects. Boundaries are blurred and territories are conquered in a sequence of performative operations. For instance, Coco Esteve paints shapes and paints on shapes. Her material palette oscillates from stone to paper to plastic, composite wood to acrylic. Sometimes the forms appear within the boundaries of the paper creating layers within the surface. Other times the surface painted is inside objects in geometric forms projecting new vectorial surfaces beyond the walls of the gallery. Material, form, composition, texture and colour are all equally valid attributes of the work of art. Every layer is protagonist in these pieces, every ex-periment seems to offer new possibilities and variations of a developing alphabet of an unknown language.

This material complexity is shared in a different form by Wu Yang. Her Wrapped Series consists of plastic boxes containingmixed-media paintings made out of raw canvas, fabric, plastic wrapping and paint. Abstract geometries can sometimes be spotted within these captive hybrids. Sometimes they remind us of landscapes, other times of fragments of the visual environment that dominates our lives. The multiplicity of layers and the presentation device that contains them bring these paintings closer to the domain of tridimensional objects made for us to get lost in wonder. Geoff Overhue also plays with the boundaries of painting. His mixtures of oil paint and silica take the form of pieces that are equally part sculpture part paintings. These texturized surfaces invite the pub-lic to become immersed in the object through the visual senses, but also—contrary to the traditional medium of paint—to touch it. Overhue’s paintings are fully sensorial experiences that invite us to en-gage with them through their smell, sensuous surfaces, and their visual production of the aesthetic properties of the material and the colour used. Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that the onlooker who stares momentarily at the work of art doesn’t exist. In his terms, the work of art is always revisited, changing. The critical medium stems from the continuous revisiting of the work of art. It is as if not only the onlooker has an interminable relation-ship with the artwork, but as if the artwork itself changes from one moment to the next. Sometimes through visual pieces, other times, as in Vinzenz Reinecke’s interactive performance, through the activation of several of the other senses. In his performative playground the public is blindfolded in order to be exposed to a wider sensorial experience. Music and human interaction are the basis of this piece that not only questions the role of the artwork but that of the public in the way an artwork is both created and understood.

Last but not least, Ren Bo’s pieces are a crystalline reflection of the multiple forces coming to play on the critical medium. Her work seems like a tireless subversion of convention. One could even sug-gest that Ren Bo’s work is critical even of the critical medium. In ‘Auto-Development’ she presents abstract images of photographic film. As opposed to photographs that use film as a vehicle to capture the environment around us, Ren Bo deflects the purpose of the film, and transforms it into the end, the finality of the work of art. The film becomes the object of attention as in the amplification of the ready-made. She makes the medium the end. She takes photos of photos. In a similar strategy with a different outcome she presents lint collected with a dust-roller. Here again what is usually discarded acquires unprecedented protagonism as if reaffirming a new dogma: beauty is in the medium. She collects, develops, stacks, and arranges the pieces. She flips stuff upside down and shows up front what is usually left backstage. She piles up cardboard and plastic packages with a miniature electronic screen that reads: “Open Elke 14:00” (Open from 14:00 in Dutch). What is open from 2:00pm? One wonders. Questions, it would seem, are the obvious response.

Bio

Ren Bo (Xi’an, 1974)Ren Bo is an artist working with a wide range of mediums. Born in Xi’an in 1974, she studied at the Moscow State University and at China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing.

Recent exhibitions include White White, Jiali Gallery in Beijing; Body Development at Yishu 8 Space in Beijing; Facing East, at Ausin Tung, Melbourne Australia; Memory_Identity at MK2 Art Space, Forget Art at the Dragon Fountain Bathhouse in Beijing, Screening for Ladyfest at Rome Italy and Sewn+In/Out_China at the East Asia Contemporary Art Centre in Chile and Shanghai.

http://ododobobo.com/

Wu Yang (Anhui, 1973)Wu Yang was born in Anhui Province and started to learn art from the age of 10. In 2000 she was enrolled in the post-graduate class for assistant lecturers at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Bei-jing where she currently resides.

Solo exhibitions include Flying White at FANGART, Beijing; Sweet Slice of Still Life, Nanjing Art Museum; A Fairy Tale, Imagine Gallery, Beijing and Tranquility and Pureness, Joey Art Gallery, Beijing.

Vinzenz Reinecke (_, _)A trained stonemason and artist, Vinzenz Reinecke studied at the Scuola Professionale per Scalpellini e Scultori J. Steinhäuser and at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He was a participant at the Institut für Raumexperimente with Prof. Olafur Eliasson from 2012-14 and at the 89plus Marathon Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets at the Serpentine Pavillion in 2013.

http://www.vinzenzreinecke.net/

简介

任波（西安， 1974）任波的艺术作品跨越了广泛的媒介。1974年出生于西安，她毕业于莫斯科国立大学以及中央美术学院。

近期展览包括：白色白光，家里画廊，北京；身体彰显，艺术8，北京；面向东方，Ausin Tung画廊，墨尔本，2012；记忆自我，MK2艺术空间，北京；FORGET ART龙泉洗浴，北京；、Screening for lady-fest，罗马；SEWN + IN/OUT，上海东亚艺术馆，上海。

http://ododobobo.com/

吴洋（安徽，1973）吴洋出生于安徽，自10岁起接受系统绘画学习。她于2000年进入中央美院助教研究生班，并居住于北京。

她的个展包括“飞白”，FANGART,北京；一物一境，南京美术馆；童话，想象画廊；心裹霓裳，石沁花，今日美术馆，北京。

Vinzenz Reinecke (_, _)VinzenzReinecke是一名接受过系统训练的石匠与艺术家，曾就读于the Scuola Professionale per Scalpel-lini e Scultori J. Steinhäuser和the Universität der Künste Berlin。他参与的活动包括：2012-14，Institut für Raumexperimente，随Prof. Olafur Eliasson；2013，the 89plus Marathon，由 Hans Ulrich Obrist与Simon Castets 策展，于Serpentine Pavilion。

Geoff Overheu (Perth, 1955)Geoff Overheu graduated in Fine Arts at Central TAFE in Perth Australia in 2001. A fourth generation farmer for twenty-five years he went on to obtain a degree from Curtin University in 2003 and a BA Hons in Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 2004.

Solo exhibitions include The Virtuous Peasant at Bunbury Art Gallery and Geraldton Art Gallery, Dream-ers and The Inevitability of Laughter at Turner Galleries, Thirty Pieces at Hammer Gallery, Basel; Every-body knows… and Fourth Generation: objects in a deluded landscape at Counterpoint in Melbourne and at MOP Projects, Sydney; Reflections of a disposable landscape at Riseborough Gallery, Gingin; We agree completely, absolutely at Kings Artist Run Initiative, Melbourne; and DELIcate pop-ecology 3 at Ocular Lab Inc., Melbourne.

His work has been part of more than forty group exhibitions including the Heysen Sculpture Biennial and shows in Sydney, Perth, Kellerberrin, Melbourne, Gingin, Bunbury, and more.

http://geoffoverheu.com/

Coco Esteve (Alicante, 1987)Coco Esteve studied at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, obtained a Fine Arts Degree from the San Carlos School at the Polytechnic University of Valencia with a Final Project of ‘High Grade in Photography’ held in Münster, Germany.

She obtained a ‘High Grade in Photography’ from the EASD (School of Art and Design) in Valencia. Recent Exhibitions include A_Lugares. Espacios colaterales at Carmelina Sanchez-Cutillas EIC., Valencia; Mono-tipos group exhibition at Kessler-Battaglia Gallery, Ecos Visuales at Galeria Espacio; and Fotoilettes at Contemporary Culture Centre L’October. She has been twice finalist in the Photo Contest ‘Urban Human Tissue Factor’ at the MuseumMuvim Valencia.

http://cocoesteve.tumblr.com/

Geoff Overheu (珀斯，1955）

Geoff Overheu2011年毕业于澳大利亚珀斯Fine Arts at Central TAFE。作为第四代农民从事25年农耕后，他2003年取得Curtin University学位，2004年取得Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts学士学位。

个展包括：正直的农民，Bunbury Art Gallery与Geraldton Art Gallery；做梦者和笑声的不可避免性，Turner Galleries；三十件，Hammer Gallery, 巴塞尔；所有人都知道和被蒙骗的景观中的物体，Counterpoint，墨尔本和MOP Projects，悉尼；即弃景观的反射，Riseborough Gallery，Gingin；我们完全完全同意，Kings Artist Run Initiative，墨尔本；脆弱的波普生态学3，Ocular Lab Inc。

http://geoffoverheu.com/

Coco Esteve (阿里坎特，1987）

Coco Esteve曾就读于北京中央美术学院，在巴伦西亚理工San Carlos学院获得工艺美术学位，其毕业作品在德国明斯特和巴伦西亚EASD获得 ‘High Grade in Photography’ 。近期展览包括：A_Lugares. Espa-cioscolaterales at Carmelina Sanchez-Cutillas EIC.; Monotipos群展，Kessler-Battaglia Gallery；EcosVisuales，GaleriaEspacio; Fotoilettes， Contemporary Culture Centre L’October. 她曾两次进入‘Urban Human Tissue Factor’摄影竞赛的决赛，Museum Muvim，巴伦西亚。

http://cocoesteve.tumblr.com/

智先画廊智先探索艺术与生活，观念与创作的关系。概念在这一空间中孕育和传播，并以当代艺术的方式得以展现。智先的思想通过文本、出版物、影像、图片、摄影、油画、表演、视频、物体、活动的形式呈现。智先提供具有收藏意义的素材，传播艺术生产的理念。智先的空间兼容了立场与对峙，对话与矛盾。智先作为开放的平台，兼有趋同的项目、并置的叙事、冲突的艺术。智先认识到当代艺术的智慧源于项目的多样性。智先关注艺术生产及其产生过程。智先以艺术的思辨讨论为驱动。智先将活动作为一种艺术生产。智先是位于北京的独立艺术空间。

Intelligentsia

Intelligentsia explores the relationship between art and life, between concepts and creation. Intelligentsia is a space for the conception and diffusion of ideas and their manifestation in the realm of contemporary art. Intelligentsia presents ideas in the form of texts, publications, images, pictures, photographs, paintings, performances, videos, objects, events.Intelligentsia offers collectible materials that communicate the ideas of artistic production. Intelligentsia creates a space for positions and oppositions, for dialogue and contradictions. Intelligentsia is a platform for converging projects, juxtaposing narratives, and conflicting art. Intelligentsia recognizes that diversity of projects create an intelligence of contemporary art. Intelligentsia is concerned with artistic production and artistic process.Intelligentsia is fueled with the intellectual discourse of art. Intelligentsia presents events as artistic production. Intelligentsia is an independent art space in Beijing.

www.cargocollective.com/[email protected]

致谢智先画廊感谢以下诸位对实现此次展览的帮助：小静, 张照松, 南开, 李珊, 张燕平, 陈昊, Ronald Frankowski, Joao Dias Pereira, Felix Cruz Marcos, Guido Tesio, Sophie Salamon, Christian Melz。你们的热情和帮助使“辩证性场域:景观与抽象”展览得以实现。

AcknowledgementsIntelligentsia Gallery would like to thank everybody involved in the realization of this exhibition. Without the enthusiasm of Ronald Frankowski, Kyle Nan, Zhang Yanping (Diego), Janson Zhang, Hao Chen, Amanda Wang, Lingbo Liu, Joao Dias Pereira, Li Shan, Amanda Wang, Guido Tesio, Sophie Salamon, Christian Melz ‘Dialectical Territories: Landscapes and Abstraction’ wouldn’t be possible.

www.cargocollective.com/intelligentsia

intelligentsia catalog 4

Documents

critical device

languages of art

human languages

classical figures

critical medium

curatorial practices

group exhibition

diverse works