Testa di Pinocchio è il progetto proposto da Liliana Moro in occasione della mostra itinerante Playgrounds and Toys, organizzata dall’associazione con sede a Ginevra Art for the World e curata da Adelina von Fürstenberg, con l’intento di sensibilizzare il pubblico sul gioco come diritto fondamentale, spesso negato, di ogni bambino. In particolare la rassegna invitava artisti, architetti e designer di tutto il mondo a proporre progetti di parchi giochi e giocattoli destinati a bambini costretti a vivere in condizioni di ingiustizia sociale. Il progetto, proposto in occasione della tappa all’Hangar Bicocca nel 2005, prevedeva la realizzazione di una “casa gioco” per bambini a forma di testa di Pinocchio, con un’apertura sulla bocca da cui sarebbe dovuto partire uno scivolo, delle altalene realizzate con pneumatici pendenti dalle orecchie e dei finti mattoncini sulle pareti laterali per permettere ai bambini di arrampicarsi. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3443
Viene e va is an installation by Liliana Moro that won the 7th edition of “Premio ArteGiovane – Torino incontra l'arte. Una porta per Torino” – conceived for the Iveco roundabout in Corso Giulio Cesare, Turin. The roundabout - that already presented two commas made of stone chippings on the grass – would host two groups of street lamps with a fixed light, one yellow and one white, with two street lamps with intermittent light at the centre, representing two lighthouses, whose function is to serve as a navigational aid for the sailors. Read more.
DSpace: http://hdl.handle.net/1889/3446
The project consists of an environmental intervention proposed by the artist for the facade of the Merate School of Maternity at the “Concorso Legge del 2% Scuola Materna (ente morale) di Merate” [Competition of the 2% Law for Merate nursery School], as indicated by Scaccabarozzi in a photograph reproducing the maquette he made, and probably entitled “Da un’idea del 69” [From an Idea of the 69], shown in the Collection by Mr. Antonio Spini of Robbiate. This project starts from the research held by Scaccabarozzi from the end of sixties and first half of seventies, and belongs to the series of Fustellati. These works come from the analysis of the movement in the relation between surface, depth, light and perception, in a space conceived as field of possible and potential variations. These paths, both conceptual both processual, bring the artist to realize works formed by a series of cylindrical elements obtained working with a hollow cutter and making on the neutral support modular elements, both emerging both hollow, of different and gradual dimension and extension. Partially raised, inclined, orientated and colored, positioned in a rhythmic and sequential movement on the support itself, the Fustellati are an invitation to the eye and an incitement to the potentiality of perception. From that derives also the title of the project given by Scaccabarozzi for the nursery School of Merate in 1975: Rotazione continua orizzontale [Continous horizontal rotation]. From the analysis of the collage realized for the participation to the competition, the yellow completes and stresses the perceptive path of the cylindrical elements on the pictorial-environmental surface, thus intensifying the visual and cinetic-virtual potentialities of the project itself, if it would be realized. Writing about this phase of the artistic research by Scaccabarozzi, in the monograph dedicated to the artist, in collaboration with the Archive and published in 2016 by Corraini, Flaminio Gualdoni stressed the double presence of “[…] the physical objectivity of the work and the physiology of perception, un-aestheticity compared to current expectations, the spectator’s active participation and complicity in the work as a facilitator of aesthetic expectation, a not decisively random situation: most of all, the strong and complete involvement of the temporal dimension in a process which, until that moment, one’s own evaluation system was based on the space and the psychological duration of the experience, rather than the physical […]”. (Gualdoni 2016, p. 43). The fact that this specific project was devoted to pre-school children emphasized the educational, ethical and aesthetic value given by Scaccabarozzi to his artistic works, and needs further reflection on his artistic intention about the principles and value of the game. Two years before his participation to this competition, questioned by Ernesto L. Francalanci and Paolo Cardazzo about the ludus component in his work, Scaccabarozzi responded succinctly: “I play with people who want to play for real/I play very seriously”. (Francalanci 1973, s.p.). Read more.
DSpace: http://hdl.handle.net/1889/3441
Five projects of environmental intervention in a interior space, formed by two walls ending in a corner and a floor, named from A to E. The first one, A, is dated 1978 and accompanied by the autograph and handwritten note of the artist: “Ambiguità dell’angolo contrapposta alla sua indicazione” [Ambiguity of the corner opposite to its indication] is a graphic reproduction of a parietal corner on which is drawn, joining the two walls, a straight line of dots. On the floor is drawn straight line of dots converging in the corner itself. The second, named B, consists of a graphic reproduction of a parietal corner, the two walls joined by a dotted passage of rectangular shape, open and not dotted on the base that ideally stays on the floor. The third, named C, consists of a graphic reproduction of a parietal corner, the two walls joined by a dotted rectangular shape whose base rests on the floor. The fourth, named D, consists in a graphical representation of a parietal corner, the two walls joined by a dotted triangle, with the base that joins horizontally the walls, and vertex which coincides with the corner in the meeting point between the two walls and the floor. The fifth, named E, consists of a graphic duplication of a double dotted parallel line that crosses the two walls and perpendicularly the corner of the environment. Through the use of a projector, the artist would have reproduced the pattern formed from points in succession using likely graphite. The dotted drawings deny the environmental depth and build illusively another perceptual space, a new environmental perspective. The project Ambiguità dell’angolo [Ambiguity of the Corner] critically analyses the real space and its theoretical conceiving through the perceptive operation, thus witnessing the enviromental vocation of the entire research by Scaccabarozzi. In 1986 was held a partial realization of the project for the exhibition “Die Ecke=the corner=le coin”, at Galerie Hoffmann, Friedberg, and in 1988 at Wallis Kantonsmuseum, Sitten, Switzerland. There, Scaccabarozzi tries to represent the direct intervention in the space, using pictorial dots on a corner of the room, and publishing on the catalog six different projects of enviromental intervention, called Ambiguità dell’angolo [Ambiguity of the Corner], and dated 1978.Only the first one of those published, has been realized by the artist in the gallery and consisted in a simple horizontal line of dots, that crossed the corner and reached the two walls, proceeding in parallel with the floor. The other projects, united in the book of unrealised projects by the artist, had more tecnical difficult for their realization, and they have never been realized. Recently, for the recent two-men show at Galerie Hoffmann in Friedberg, and dedicated to Scaccabarozzi and Gary Woodley in july-september 2016, Anastasia Rouchota, heir of the artist and founder and director of the Scaccabarozzi archive, reproduced in a room only the project already made in 1986. Coming back to this historical exhibition, and coherently with the exhibition program of the gallery, among the invited artists were the protagonist of the North and East European neo-concretist and conceptual: Getulio Alviani, Gianni Colombo, Maurizio Nannucci and Antonio Scaccabarozzi from Italy, François Morellet from France, Klaus Staudt and Ludwig Wilding from Germany, Julije Knifer from Yugoslavia, and Herman De Vries from Netherland. The catalog plays, also graphically, wuith the exhibition topics, containing handwritten texts, sketches and conceptual drawings. In her text, Verena Auffermann starts quoting the Philosophische Bemerkungen by Ludwig Wittgensteinand, and through the philosophical lens of the XIX century, from Artur C. Danto, Richard Serra to Gertrude Stein, she reflects on the relation between space and thought of space, retracing the function and the projectual and metaphoric meaning of the corner in the painting of the last century, starting from Cézanne and Malevich for introducing the 109 artists of the exhibition in 1986. “The corner Separates outside from inside The corner is dimensional The corner defines limits The corner Is a man-made design The corner Is a closure The corner Separates itself from the ‘out-there’ The corner Is essential to a triangle The corner Is the corset for spatial thinking The corner Is an ideal playground for optical illusion”. (Die Ecke = the corner = le coin 1986, s.p.) Read more.
Veit Stratmann research makes use of the unrealised and the concept of unrealisability as a tool to deal with - in line with a conceptual tradition - political or economic-political discourses, often connected with the concept of security and with the structures of power, from a critical point of view and trying to give a clear form to the discourse while questioning the role of the artist himself, reflecting on impossibility and inefficiency as elements for the production of a project. The Rhine Swing is a project for a giant swing to be placed over the Rhine River, between the locations of Daubensand (Alsace, France) and Schwanau (Baden, Germany), a site identified by the artist for the relatively low amplitude of the river as well as the beauty of the landscape. A representation - not without irony - of the Franco-German cooperation, this project contains a first feasibility analysis through a study of the modalities of access, operation and use together with the security requirements, a study which reveal himself as a functional tool for the artist to criticise the design method and, more generally, the economic and political dynamics between the European countries. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3447
This project started from the interest of the artists around the village of San Damiano, near Piacenza, the birthplace of Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi. This area hosts both a NATO military base and a sanctuary dedicated to an apparition of the Virgin Mary during the early 1960s: this research was born from an attention focused both on the sound produced by the warplanes' exercises and the nature of the military space, and on the collective religious imagination, in search of a possible dialogue and common points, in the context of a small village alongside the Po Valley. The first version of the project took the form of a documentary based on several interviews and filming of the surrounding landscape: at this stage just two trailers were produced, based on two interviews, and a parallel version was conceived as a live media performance composed of two video projections and a live soundtrack. In 2007, after a first stop decided by the artists themselves, the project was rethought as an installation on two screens, where they could have worked with loops and small variations, starting from shorter narrative models. This also included two structures for the vision of the films and an ambient soundtrack. In addition, during the research, the artists had the opportunity to confront themselves with the artist William Xerra - who was born in Piacenza too - who in 1976 staged Le Apparizioni (Verifica del Miracolo) in San Damiano, a piece related to the Marian apparitions in the area, which included as witnesses figures such as Pierre Restany, Renato Barilli and Vanni Scheiwiller. While being used by Invernomuto in several presentations, publications, showcases and works - with images and references - Noises from Above has never reached a final form and has never been completed: still today the artists consider it stuck in a standby phase. Read more.
This project for an unrealised film was based on a Reiner Werner Fassbinder 1975 piece, Der Muell, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City and Death), an adaptation of Gerhard Zwerenz's novel Erde ist unbewohnbar wie der Mond (1973). The film's working title, Degna di Goebbels, is taken from one of the signs exposed during the violent protests that broke out in Germany and prevented the show from being staged in the country until 2009, due to accusations of anti-Semitism, linked to the character of the rich Jewish businessman, one of the main character of the representation, and the violent monologues on this theme. MASBEDO's work consisted in staging and shooting a performance with an actress, Silvia Calderoni, in a wood performing the theatrical text with a megaphone, until she reach a tombstone where the title phrase has been engraved, surrounded by a pack of wolves. The film should have had an original soundtrack composed by Carlo Boccadoro. This project is particularly significant inside the research of Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni between video and performative, and can now be reconstructed through some photos from the set - -, several e-mails excerpts which reconstruct the various processing and - also graphic - design phases of the tombstone. As declared by the same artists, "The shooting was interrupted during the first day, and the tombstone thrown into the trash”. Read more.
DSpace: http://hdl.handle.net/1889/3448
Giovane che guarda Eugenia Vanni dipingere Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto
Giovane che guarda Eugenia Vanni dipingere Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto is an unrealized pictorial work that returns to a “live" pictorial modality, in fact the project consists in painting Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto by Giulio Paolini from 1967. The project Giovane che guarda Eugenia Vanni dipingere Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto is therefore a short-circuit of meaning because Paolini’s work reproduces the Ritratto di giovane by Lorenzo Lotto. Read more.
Andrea Kvas donated to MoRE some unrealized works from his notebook. The design material in these sheets is very varied and includes sketches of shapes, the conception, and development of a new alphabetical code and some self-supporting pictorial structures. Although the projects are heterogeneous, the critical point of this material would seem to be the alphabetical code studied by the artist, this created by him to answer a question concerning abstract art. Read more.
D.X XY is a dialogue on painting between two subjects, X and Y, presented in the first file, while in the second file provided by the artist the dialogue becomes a performance, enacted by two actors who perform a text written by the artist himself. The project thus consists of a dialogue between two figures who, somewhat in the vein of Didi and Gogo – the protagonists of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett – develop a surreal, sarcastic, and often sensual discourse. The two interlocutors challenge each other in a nonsensical exchange in which the act of painting becomes the central generative force behind a series of references to painterly action, and often to the impossibility of bringing that action to completion. The performance revolves around a movable structure designed to display Baruzzi’s drawings, which are continuously replaced by the two performers. Read more.
Studi per quadri non realizzati. Quaderno 16
Thomas Braida donated some pages from his notebooks to the MoRE Museum. This type of donation sobering to what we might call the pictorial projects in our imaginary, where the notebook (rich in literary references and artistic influences) in the hands of Braida is enriched with drawings and design sketches. Leaving the romantic vision of the artist who depicts life, from Braida's design material emerges not just a simple and quick pencil stroke on a white sheet, but rather pages of notebooks which have a design characterized by a complex use of techniques and colors thanks, pastels, watercolors, markers, pens, and nibs. In all, there are three donations, notebook 16 of 2015-2016, notebook 17 of 2016-2017 and the number 18 of 2017-2018. Read more.
Studi per quadri non realizzati. Quaderno 17
Studi per quadri non realizzati. Quaderno 18
Petar Dabac began by tackling the issue of conserving photographic heritage to protect the legacy of Tošo Dabac, his uncle. He proposed the establishment of a Museum of Photography in Zagreb to collect, store and copy photographic documents. The Museum would also have exhibitions, a library and a permanent display. Read more.
Ambivalentna tautologija is dated 2013. The idea was to display a picture of Martek’s studio in the studio of Goran Trbuljak (Varaždin, Croatia, 1948). Although it was never carried out, thanks to documents describing it, we can say that the work was realised in the form of a statement. Read more.
arte arte arte (art art art) should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. Read more.
Mislim na umjetnost (I think of art) should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. Read more.
Ništa [Nothing] should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. Read more.
Pjesma se ne vraća u abecedu (Poem is not coming back into the Alphabet) should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. Read more.
Prazno miesto [Empty mind] should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. Read more.
Project for a book (2017) consists of three A4 sheets of paper, the draft for a book which was never published, donated as source of inspiration and research. Read more.
In October 2004, Marko Pogačnik created a series of urban sculptures in Zagreb as part of the "Urban Intervention" project. They were part of a cycle that the Slovenian artist had been developing since the 1980s, entitled Lithopuncture. He saw this as a kind of acupuncture applied directly to the Earth's surface at certain "energy points", rather like acupuncture practised on the human body in relation to the chakras. Four years later the works were partially removed. Read more.
The Room is a film created by Marko Tadić using stop motion animation technique, but it was abandoned by the artist during the editing phase. The video represents a seance, or rather what happens in the room after everyone has left. The animation reveals furniture and objects moving, candles burning down, light effects and flashes similar to explosions, and the appearance of figures - toys and knick-knacks. In the closing scene, a small pottery cat looks into the fixed camera and in the background we can see the almost destroyed room. Read more.
The Moons is a video that should have been part of a larger, realised project We used to call it: Moon. It consists of five short films which are almost drafts. The same scene is shot from the same standpoint, but with different lights and background music. In this scene, a strange landscape is composed of small sculptures that look like monuments. Two wooden spheres move and change position, representing the two moons of the title. Read more.
Richter developed the idea of Synthurbanism in the early sixties as a result of his in-depth analysis of the legacy of the historical avant-gardes and the synthesis of arts, through the principles of Modernism, along with the experience he acquired working on several pavilion and urban planning projects . As the neologism suggests, it was a visionary, but not utopian project, synthesizing urbanism to provide for the lives of ten thousand people in a single, poly-functional, urban structure consisting of multiple units in the form of a ziggurat. This gave rise to the idea of the Heliopolis, a four-dimensional, constantly revolving residential structure which would provide its inhabitants with an constantly changing view. Read more.
The Yugoslav Pavilion designed for the Paris Exposition in 1950 reflected the social and cultural climate following the Second World War, when the country was distancing itself from Stalinism and embracing the ideology of real socialism. There was a strong cultural revival, and the abstract and concrete historical avant-gardes were being reclaimed and analysed, especially Constructivism and the Bauhaus method. The search for a synthesis in the visual arts and architecture characterised the EXAT 51 programme and related 1951 Manifesto, signed by the Pavilion’s authors. Read more.
Total Portrait of the City of Zagreb was a project for a documentary film on the city of Zagreb. The only document which has survived is a sheet of paper typed and signed by Tomislav Gotovac himself. He states his intention to observe the city as though it were a human being. The aim was to produce a “21st-century” film, a total vision of the city as a living organism. Read more.
David Maljković's unrealized work was a reconstruction of the American Pavilion designed and built by John Johansen for the 1956 Zagreb Fair. The pavilion was meant to represent American presence at the fair, which had for many years, symbolized a bridge of exchange between Yugoslavia, Europe, the USA, USSR, Eastern and Western Bloc and non-alligned countries. David Maljković decontextualized the pavilion and proposed rebuilding it as part of a public art project in the city of Lyon, GrandLyon Habitat. Read more.
The project was born upon request and on the initiative of Michy Marxuach, curator that in the summer 2000 invites Oreste to participate at PR ' 00 [intervenciones múltiples - múltiples intervenciones] in San Juan (Porto Rico). The one-week event provided a program of shows and activities dedicated to the affirmation of an alternative art scene, where local artists were joined by international artists, curators, critics and institutions. Oreste proposed an installation made of objects, texts, photocopies and images displayed on a wall, that would have interacted with the public like an analogical hypertext: after the selection of an element a member of Oreste would have told its story to the visitor. The curator never answered to this proposal and the project remained unrealised for reasons that have not been clarified. Read more.
The project, which can only be reconstructed today through a series of e-mails preserved inside the archive of Giancarlo Norese, consists of a proposal for an event at the Tate Modern in London andstarted from an invitation sent by the curator of the events section of the museum, which opened the previous year. The project should have initially taken place in June 2001 and initiaaly consisted in two days dedicated to the creation of relationships between spaces, artist-run and independent ventures, at an international level, through a convivial moment that should also have included the sharing of food, as well as content, publications and projects. Subsequently reduced to a single day, it is not finally realized because the responsible curator finds a lack of focus in the project. Read more.
City centre of Hamburg, Germany. Until the early 1990's there were still "empty places", brownfields, remains of World War II. One of these wastelands I loved very much. A square in the middle of the business centre. It was raw and unkempt, hardly used. Significantly, it had (unlike today) no name. It was so beautiful, because it was a rare place of the unresolved and unclear in the chic, rich inner city. On it the hidden traces of its past paired with the still unthinking possibilities of a future. I began to observe and document it closely. I went into archives and searched for everything that had ever been on this square in past years and centuries. Around 1990, new buildings began to be erected in the immediate vicinity and on the larger part of the square. Office, commercial and hotel buildings. Thus the inner city centre lost its last (aesthetically) open, disorganized area. I made two suggestions for the remaining part of the square. A) The remaining wasteland was to be surrounded by an extremely high fence. I should have the only key to the piece of land. B) A panorama building was to be erected on the square for my extensive archive on the fallow land and on "everything that had ever been there". Read more.
Proposal for Balboa Park Centennial, San Diego
The project proposed to mark the Centennial of the building of Balboa Park with a construction which bring aspects of the various cultural institutions under a single roof. Read more.
Journey from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan
Daniel Maier-Reimer's art is travel. Most journeys are summarized in a single photo, some in a small group of pictures. There is no picture of some journeys. Since 2013, Daniel Maier-Reimer leaves it to others to determine how his travels appear in exhibitions and publications. Read more.
The project involves the construction of a 33-meter observation tower as an open construction (the construction method should have included a steel skeleton frame) at the highest point of a landscape. The tower should have been open to the public at all times. Read more.
Two sentences, “Everything that happens” and “Always all around”, are printed on both sides of two banners, carried by two planes while performing some basic aerobatics manoeuvres. The two sentences are perceived as emotional quotes, auspicious signs, appearances in the sky of mind. An air show and an environmental, ephemeral art installation at the same time. Read more.
The project A Lighting System attempts to bring together the discourse on security and the machinery for producing good conscience — and control — into a single structure, as the ecological discourse is often used for that purpose. Read more.
Do it yourself confession is the idea of a confessional in which it is possible to self-administer the sacrament of confession. Conceived by Gianfranco Baruchello in 1967, the project is unrealised, like many others of the author, and it can be considered a theoretical exercise. In this proposal Baruchello borrowed the philosophy of DIY (Do it yourself), which at the end of the 1960s was growing in popularity, preaching self-sufficiency and opposition to consumerism: a complex of positions of libertarian and anti-capitalist orientation extended to various fields - from housework to cultural production - canonized after a few years by the punk movement. With a paradoxical approach, the artist extends this ethics to the spiritual sphere, implicitly moving a critique to the ecclesiastical institution to which he opposes the values of self-determination of the individual ("CHOOSE YOURSELF TO WHOM OR TO WHAT YOU CONFESS!" as stated in the text of the project). Do it yourself confession is a project created during the period of political militancy of the artist, close to the revolutionary left and to groups like Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, which brings together the protesting forces that will culminate the following year in the 1968 season. The proposal is made of two drawings, which present different elaborations of the same project. Read more.
The unrealised project Artisti coraggiosi proposed by Pablo Echaurren in 1974 to Galleria La Margherita in Rome, involved the participation of the artist who, seating at a table inside the bare spaces of the gallery, equipped with papers, scissors and glue, would have asked the audience to join him in a performance: the visitors were asked to buy one of his work, deciding the price in advance, without knowing what they were going to buy. The hypothetical buyer was supposed to pay the artist in cash, with one or more notes, depending on his choice. The banknotes would become the artwork: cut, torn or intact, they would have been glued to sheets of paper and signed, as if they were traditional still lifes. Read more.
The idea of the wall painting by Ericailcane was born in 2014 and meant to fit into the second edition of FRONTIER - The Line of Style, an open and evolving platform, based on two complementary operational phases: one dedicated to the artistic development of urban art and one dedicated to a deeper theoretical background. The artist, invited to conceive a pictorial work for the city's historic Gasometer, imagines a continuous narrative centred on the figures of two enormous dogs biting their tails and carrying on their shoulders the allegory of two cities or two sides of itself (Bologna?): one that lives in joyful harmony and one that, as a character shows, walks in a balance on a wire. Read more.
UNTITLED aims at creating a photo archive of places and monuments which are significant for foreign citizens based in Italy. Geography, iconography and memory are pivotal for this project, created to give a visual identity to the rich cultural diversification characterising Italian contemporary society. At the same time UNTITLED focuses on landscape and monument identity in this era. This installation had two chances to be shown and presented: in Milan, Quartiere Giambellino, in 2011, and in 2015 in Trieste. Read more.
Bosetto worked for a whole year to design an exhibition presented through living sculptures in a few apartments in Via Eustachi, Milan. The exhibition should have been visited with a map that would have shown to the visitors a series of places, where they could have enjoyed a series of performances. Read more.
The Rolls Royce project, proposed and never realized by the artist, comes from the need to create an exhibition for the Rolls Royce Art Programme, an initiative related to the famous brand of automobiles, which was created to support bold and innovative ideas related to contemporary art. Read more.
stazione is the title of a public intervention conceived by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir for a collateral project of the 53rd Venice Biennale titled Palestine c/o Venice in 2009 but never realised. Jacir’s initial idea was to translate the names of each of the 24 vaporetti stops along route #1 of the water bus route into Arabic and to place the Arabic translations on all the stops next to their Italian counterparts. Read more.
Die Kristallader (The Crystal Vein) is a project in public space that Helen Mirra developed in 2014 as part of a competition for the city of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The assignment of the competition was that the artistic intervention should connect the newly built Natural History Museum, which is located in the periphery, with the city center. Helen Mirra's project proposal was an irregular "line", a crack in the asphalt filled with a shiny metal that leads from the city center to the Natural History Museum on a path carefully defined by the artist. The shiny crystal vein guides the visitors on a 3 km long walk through St. Gallen, allowing them to perceive the surroundings, time and movement in a different way. The jury ultimately chose another submitted project, so that the Crystal Vein was never realised. Read more.
This project, presented directly by the artist via email, consists of a single idea: to pull one of Los Angeles’s old trolley cars out of the ocean, where they were dumped after the closure of the city’s streetcar system. Reflecting on his native city—now completely devoted to cars—its past, and its processes of forgetting, Horvitz seeks to bring back to light an episode—the dumping of the trolleys into the ocean—that clearly serves as a metaphor. The Los Angeles Railway was a streetcar system that operated in central Los Angeles and the surrounding neighborhoods between 1901 and 1963. Several articles and photographs confirm that, during the 1950s, a few of the discarded streetcars from the Los Angeles Transit Lines (created in 1945) were thrown into the ocean. In particular, the July 1959 issue of Mass Transportation magazine[1] featured an informative article about six “old” Los Angeles Transit Lines streetcars being placed off the coast at Redondo Beach to create an artificial reef. This work by David Horvitz can also be seen as part of a broader reflection by the artist on the concepts of water and time—one that draws upon conceptual practices and applies “the fluid and impermanent dimension of the Fluxus movement and of Oriental culture”[2]. The search for and recovery of a discarded trolley car thus become a poetic and surreal performative gesture—an ephemeral action meant to leave several different traces, much like David Horvitz’s postal artworks, his stamps, or his attempts to mimic the sound of the ocean using the human voice. Read more. [1] Metro Digital Resources Librarian, Before “Subway To The Sea,” There Was “Streetcar In The Sea”: Creating Artificial Reefs Off The Los Angeles Coast In 1959, Metro's Primary Resources, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, May 18, 2011, Available at: https://metroprimaryresources.info/before-subway-to-the-sea-there-was-streetcar-in-the-sea-creating-artificial-reefs-off-the-los-angeles-coast-in-1959/1324/ [2] M. Vecellio, The Water in you, in David Horvitz, nuvola, nuvola, oceano, nuvola, foschia, tu, Loom Gallery, Milano, 2018, s.p.
Untitled (svjetlosni štafelaj, light easel)
Attempting to find the “way out” of painting, and depict “the oscillation of matter”, Antun Motika tried to get closer to “the culture of light”. For Antun Motika one of the important and consistent fascinations was the obsession with “pure light” which in various manifestations stretches through his artistic production. Antun Motika’s experiments with light and the optical fascination shape his idea of liquid painting. Motika formed his most important breakthrough outside the field of painting in his various experiments with projections, light and movement, his various lumino-kinetic experiments. Proposals and sketches for different light devices, like light easel, and different apparatuses of projection are found in Motika’s notebooks, gathering many notes on his utopian, imaginative propositions that remain that, designs of unrealized projects. Motika’s notebooks and experiments direct us outside the known artistic canon towards the the changes of artistic cartography of in 1960s. Pages from Motika’s notebook bring into light sketches for lumino-kinetic works, his experiments with light and projections, as plans for various dispositifs and possibilities of their display. Motika produced his projections with various customised projectors (slide projectors, diascopes, episcopes, overhead projectors), transparent backgrounds onto which he applied materials of different sources, organic and inorganic, insects, plants such as herbarium, then pigments, resin, liquids, in order to achieve surprising results upon their enlargement, projected to surfaces as screens. Read more.
Rouge Selavy is the title of a work that Echaurren designed in 1977, a fundamental year because on that very date the artist decided to (temporarily) abandon art to devote himself to politics. The artist writes with a blue pen over a lined notebook one of the first projects where the figure of Marcel Duchamp emerges. In fact, the unrealized work consisted of a performative action: to be exact, a parade. In the Eucharren notebook he writes: "making Duchamp banners", then creating "silent" banners (conceptual, we could say), which had to show only verbal elements such as the question mark and question mark made with a red marker. This because? Echaurren explains the reasons in the points below. The artist speaks of the concept of imagination and develops it under various aspects, affirming that the imagination does not stop at a banner, that the imagination must be brought onto the banner itself and finally the same banner is defined as "doubtful" and "without certainties". The title of the work is a distortion, one of the first distortions made by Echaurren on the titles of Duchamp's works (see Mon Alice, a project on display inside MoRE). Indeed, the famous portrait as a woman by the French artist Rrose Selavy is transformed into Rouge Selavy. There is a desire to highlight red as the color of life, in fact the marker strokes on the page that draw the exclamation and question marks on the banners are red. Furthermore, this continuous use of the word imagination can only bring to the mind the famous slogan of the seventies "the imagination to power". Read more.
The project consists of a combined installation of two spinning wheels that move a system of threads, the threads descend from a chrysalis attached to the ceiling. The quote is clear and obvious. In fact, Echaurren mentions the famous ready-made of 1912 but also the International Surrealist Exhibition held in 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid mansion in New York, organized by André Breton with the collaboration of Marcel Duchamp. This exhibition, in addition to being considered a "landmark exhibition" (Tate Papers, 2009; Stedelijk Studies Issue, 2015), presents an installation curated by Marcel Duchamp and created through a complex system of ropes woven throughout the exhibition space. This system allowed the visitor a partial and complicated view of the pictorial works set up on the wall. The French artist's operation was entitled “Sixteen Miles of String”. Echaurren's work combines the two Duchampian operations through the creation of an installation that, like the original design, wanted to occupy the entire exhibition space. In addition to the combination of these two famous works by Duchamp, Echaurren also mentions “The Large Glass”, not directly but by elaborating an installation in which the string came out of the chrysalis that define the sex of the insects. In fact, the threads would have started from the chrysalis to be subsequently taken from the two spinning wheels placed in the center of the room. Echaurren writes a handwritten note: “The insect bride Þ the male molds Þ females with wings”. This reference to the chrysalis also brings out the artist's attention to entomology. In fact, Echaurren has stated several times that as a young man he wanted to be an entomologist. Read more.
Pablo Echaurren's project, like many others, is elaborated through notes written in blue pen on a page of a squared notebook. The artist's intent is already clear from the title "Monumento Fortuito". In fact, in 2015 the artist plans to create a monument dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, an artistic operation that is rooted in the intentions and artistic methods typical of the French artist. For this work Echaurren thinks of the concept of “chance”, wanting to create the monument through the action of "picking up a leftover, a human waste from the street and electing it as an urban monument. The words "rectify it" and "place it on a pedestal" also emerges from the short text, all definitions come to Duchamp's work. With this operation, Echaurren works in the conceptual framework of the French artist, dedicating a work to him with his own design methods. Read more.
Mon Alice is a small plastic sculpture measuring a few centimeters (8 x 4 x 3 cm); it is a maquette for a larger sculpture designed by Echaurren in 2018. The sculpture represents Alice in Wonderland in the Disney version, the one now ingrained in the collective imagination of adults and children alike. To this small sculpture, the artist has painted in ink on the face two mustaches and a slight stubble. Right from the start the work recalls the famous L.H.O.O.Q. the rectified ready-made made in 1919 by Duchamp that depicts Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa with a fine mustache and a goatee drawn on her face by the French artist. A game of ambiguity is hidden in both works. Indeed, both Mona Lisa and Alice change identities by adopting elements typical of the male sphere, Echaurren as Duchamp adopts a well-known figure, an icon of contemporaneity to make changes dictated by a simple and essential gesture. If Duchamp works on language through the play on words in the title (L.H.O.O.Q. pronounced in French sounds like Elle a chaud au cul - She is hot in the ass), Echaurren always works through a written part but only mentioning Leonardo's work in the title of the work, Mon Alice instead of Mona Lisa. The medium clearly changes from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, but Echaurren's intentions would seem to be the same as those that moved the French artist. Read more.