26 AUGUST - 18 SEPTEMBER 2011
PREVIEW: 26 AUGUST 6.30-9PM
Open 12-6pm Sat-Sun (or by appointment)

Valentinas Klimašauskas
Raimundas Malašauskas
Jonathan Monk
Museum of American Art
Paul O'Neill

An exhibition centred on the work of conceptual artist Robert Barry.
A reinvention of the solo show.
Re-workings and re-interpretations of Barry's work will be presented in the only exhibition in the EAM programme that will remain in a static form.
A focus here lies more in what a solo show can constitute, in this case focusing on artists and thinkers who have utilised Barry's ideas in order to create new work or re-imagine original works.
This curatorial premise of re-thinking the solo show abolishes the ongoing contentious issue of whether (ordinary) solo shows can ultimately be curated. Through the original curatorial premise, and the process of selecting artists and works, this is much more an experiment in curatorial practice than an invited and 'organised' solo exhibition.

Barry, more than any other artist, lends himself to this kind of reworking of the solo exhibition.
Through his early works in the 1960's, he recognised the importance and playfulness of authorship, often claiming where, or how artworks could be experienced, rather than physically showing something. 'Red Square (1967), a single small canvas, includes the specification that it be installed at the centre of the wall.' Other paintings from the same period were sent with instructions on where they should be hung in a particular space, 'the background wall in both cases becoming thematically accommodated within the totality of the work.' His Telepathic Piece (1969), leaves nothing more than the artist's intention of how the work will exist, and probably his most well-known work Closed Gallery series (1969), in which was written on the invitation card for an upcoming exhibition, 'During the exhibition the gallery will be closed', he 'shrewdly and clearly played on art's conditions' , leaving nothing but an empty gallery, maintaining complete control over (the non-existent) exhibited product.

Through not showing any Robert Barry works in a Robert Barry solo show, authorship and control, the things so avidly investigated and so articulated expressed originally by Barry, pass back onto the curator. The curator pretends to be the solo artist, alongside the group of participating artists pretending to be the solo artist. The solo artist is still the solo artist.

15 JULY - 8 AUGUST 2011 (Open 12-6pm Fri-Sun and whenever an artist is working in the gallery)
NOEL CLUEIT
BOB LEVENE
DAVID MARTIN
DAN METHTHANANDA
WOODMILL (Alastair Frazer, Naomi Pearce and Richard Sides)

A group exhibition presented as a series of cumulative solo exhibitions. Each artist produces and presents new work in the gallery space at different times during the exhibition, choosing either to use or disregard what has gone before.
For the curator, importance is shifted from spatial or thematic concerns towards the exhibition's time frame.
For the artist, this format of group exhibition instigates and supports a much more active decision-making role than usual, asking them to respond physically to others' work in the space, so shifting elements of curatorial (spatial, aesthetic and thematic) control over to the artists. The curator's role becomes insignificant other than setting the initial parameters, passing all control of exhibited product back to the artist.
The artist takes on the gallery as a temporary workplace akin to that of a studio, in which they find things already, which they must work with in some way. They do not bring along pre-made works ready to hang on the white walls or place on the floor - instead they become an ongoing work themselves in the space in amongst the visiting public.

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People first

'One shudders at the thought of increasingly 'professional' artists, curators, directors, critics, etc' whose schooling is aimed at producing prescribed museum quality final exhibitions, performances, exquisitely professionalised displays of cultural resistance, perfectly honed critically positioned texts which are publication worthy. One shudders not because this is dull, though it certainly is that, but because the idea of being able to foresee the expected outcome of an investigative process, is completely alien to the very notion of what [art] is about.'1

Artists are people first - let us destroy the (Kantian) notion of the 'artist as genius' locked away in a separate world of myth and fantasy (more often than not their studio). For over fifty years now, artistic practice has shifted far away from this notion insofar as practice could easily replaced with the word living. Through the happenings and situations originating in the sixties through Allan Kaprow and fluxus, through to today's (quotidian) relational artists of which there are too many to name, artists have and are working with everyday realities far outside the concerns of narrow artistic trends and styles. How different really is On Kawara's I AM STILL ALIVE series made where the artist sent these telegrams to his friends throughout the seventies, to the regular 'updates' we currently post on facebook and twitter? 'Today, more people are interested in image production than image contemplation.'2 Art and life = the same.

Artists are of course, people, yet through what Jurgen Habermas coined the 'bourgeois public sphere', of which the art-world is a component, we have created a few other preconceptions of what artists are. Through the galleries and museums that constitute the art-world, we have placed the artist on a pedestal as a great thinker or communicator of our times. In the world probably much closer to our actual realities, the artist is conversely known as a scrounger or lay-about, sponging off the state to do what they like to pass the time of day.
Both of these are untrue. Artists are the same as other people - they are interested in things. What makes them artists' is that they make things out of their interests. The problem with viewing the things they make (in Habermas' bourgeois public sphere) is that we rarely meet or speak with them.
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16 APRIL 2011
Toby Huddlestone
Paul O'Neill
Binna Choi
Valentinas Klimasauskas
Anthony Gross

TOBY HUDDLESTONE - Introduction to EXHIBITION AS MEDIUM
Audio file

PAUL O’NEILL- THE EXHIBITION AS AN EMERGENT, CO-PRODUCTIVE MEDIUM AND THREE PRINCIPLES OF ORGANISATION: the Background, the Middle-ground and the Foreground
Audio file

BINNA CHOI - ART INSTITUTION AS GENEROUS STRUCTURE:
Against the grain of neo-liberal ideologies of ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘work as play’, how can we dream of an institution as a generous structure?
A text file of this paper will be available soon.

VALENTINAS KLIMASAUSKAS - IT STARTS HERE: AN INVITATION TO AN IMAGINARY EXHIBITION:
Audio File

ANTHONY GROSS - STRUCTURES FOR ENABLING:A survey of the curatorial projects by temporarycontemporary and Anthony Gross including modular structures, social clubs and entrepreneurial ‘do-it-yourself art centres’
Audio file

16 APRIL 2011
Toby Huddlestone
Paul O'Neill
Binna Choi
Valentinas Klimasauskas
Anthony Gross

Toby Huddlestone introducing the START Symposium.
Further images>>>