"Lateralisms" Exhibition
The Hogar Collection
This event has ended.
The Hogar Collection presents Lateralisms, a group show representing two generations of artists closely tied to the decisive contingency of minimalism, and to its redrawing of the parameters around both the artwork and the self/artist. The exhibition assesses a slice of the ever-shifting boundaries and implications of post minimal painting and sculptural installation.
In his essay, Art and Objecthood, Michael Fried famously decried minimalism for its theatricality. In Fried’s view the minimalist object was little more than the situation it composed. It is in this sense that Fried spoke of minimalism’s “hollowness” – its lack of self-sufficiency and autonomy from the everyday world. Art’s contingence on the viewer, history and site continues to resonate amid dialogues concerning interconnection and interdependence that globalization and postmodernism have made sometimes painfully, sometimes redundantly, apparent.
Whereas modern works purported a linear thrust focused on the new the works represented in Lateralisms foreground return as a formal strategy. This process of return privileges equation more than differentiation, and is part of an ongoing shift in the meaning of art. This shift also marks a change in our understanding of the artist, and of individuality more broadly. But whereas deconstruction spoke of the death of the author, the changes marked by the minimalist object expanded the boundaries and contingencies of the artwork, individuality and authorship, while retaining something essentially modern. Fried’s critique itself alludes to this connection to modernism. By framing the minimalist object as “hollow” Fried implies the existence of some essential vessel or form, however compromised. In this sense, the genealogy of minimalism over the past forty years is that of a restrained optimism in the wake of modernism’s failed dogmatism, and diligence in response to the vague nihilisms of postmodernism – an embrace of contingency, but a strong belief in the continuation of a distinct practice of art.
The subtle, ever more precise movements and shifts that characterize the work in Lateralisms is a kind of horizontal movement in many directions simultaneously. The results of this movement are artworks that seem more aware, closer to embodying the contradictions that enable them in the first place. This lateral movement across time and genre begins to account for how an installation and a painting may have come to mean the same thing; not in the sense of their most literal physicality, but in the demands they place on the viewer and the ways they interact with history and the physical world around them.
Media
Schedule
from July 09, 2010 to August 08, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-07-09 from 18:30 to 21:00