Curatorial Ideas
Pascale Marthine Tayou | Cameroon b.1967 | Plastic bag’s 2001–10 | Plastic bags | 600 x 600 x 600cm (variable) | Commissioned for ‘21st Century: Art in the First Decade’ | Courtesy: The artist and Galeria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Le Moulin | Photography: Natasha Harth
Several interconnected ideas run through the '21st Century’ exhibition. They connect works to contemporary discussions concerning art, museums, audiences and life in the twenty-first century. The question of how to respond to realities that have confronted individuals and communities over the past decade has been taken up by many artists in the exhibition, as has the exploration of new ways to address longstanding aesthetic and philosophical issues.
Key ideas which have emerged from groupings of works in the exhibition include:
THE SHARED EXPERIENCE OF ART
The last decade has seen significant changes in how audiences’ experiences of art are understood. There has been a strong emphasis on exploring new forms of exhibition making and museum display, particularly with regards to the viewer’s sense of being implicated in a work. Artists have experimented with making the viewer more conscious of the way art is experienced and there has been a move away from the emphasis on the artist as an individual and towards collaborative processes. Art practice increasingly embraces all forms, media and strategies, and all geographies. Formal or media-based criteria for discussing and evaluating art have been surpassed by an emphasis on how artists enlarge the field of art, question limits and renew the relationship between art and life.
COLLECTING CONTEMPORARY ART
Drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, ‘21st Century’ reflects on a decade of both art-making and collection development. The past decade has been a period of extraordinary development for contemporary art, and has seen the fast expansion of an international network of biennales, art fairs, museums and galleries. This has facilitated dialogue between artists and enhanced audiences’ awareness of art from different parts of the world. New areas of collection development featured in ‘21st Century’ include Africa, South and Central America and West Asia.
MATERIAL WORLD
The recycling and repurposing of commonplace objects, sometimes rescued from the rubbish heap, is a recurring strategy seen in the ‘21st Century’ exhibition, reflecting a world awash in commodities and waste. Easily obtained and inexpensive materials such as plastic bags, fabric, cardboard boxes, pandanus fibre and carbon paper are employed by artists in the exhibition for their physical properties as well as for their connections to personal and cultural histories. Seemingly out of step with a world saturated by virtual streams of data and images, these art works present us with the evidence of actions and the labour of putting things together.
GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEMS
A concern to document and map the contemporary world and the often uneasy navigation between ‘local’ and ‘global’ runs through many works in the exhibition. Artists are responding to increasingly interlinked geographies by producing idiosyncratic and disruptive inventories of the world. These constitute erratic atlases of inhabited spaces which express perspectives on cultural ‘globalism’ and economic ‘globalisation’.
MEGA CITIES, MICRO CONVERSATIONS
In 2007, the world passed a demographic milestone: for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. Many artists have responded to alienating, routine or anonymous aspects of the experience of living in ever-larger cities. Others have emphasised the creation of relationships at a micro level that work against the homogenisation of contemporary life.
PERFORMANCE
Over the last decade, there has been a resurgence in video art of simple performance-based acts to camera, variously involving humour, physical gestures and feats of endurance. Using straightforward technical means, they resonate with the beginnings of performance art and video art in the 1960s and 1970s while also connecting to the recent advent of YouTube and other online video sharing. websites.
ART HISTORIES
The idea of art history as a singular progressive current of stylistic developments has been increasingly challenged in the twenty-first century. Rather than heralding ‘the end of art history’, this contemporary condition is generating more complex formulations of history. In place of a unified history of modern and contemporary art defined in Europe and the United States, there is a widening awareness of the many historical and geographic contexts for contemporary art practice.
DEMOCRACIES
Polish artist Artur Zmijewski’s 20-channel video installation Democracies 2009 features public demonstrations and celebrations in eastern Europe, Israel and the West Bank and problematises the idea of democracy, revealing its contradictions and limitations. Other works in the exhibition underline fractures in modern nation states predicated on democratic ideals, where the pursuit of equal rights continues to be of critical importance. Political theorist Antonio Negri recently suggested that the fundamental problem is ‘how to find ways of recreating an authentic democratic circulation and free movement’.
THE ART ANIMAL
In the last decade, there has been a heightened awareness of the relationships between humans, other animals and the environment. Many artists are contributing to contemporary art museum bestiaries of live, dead, photographed and filmed animals, and reflecting on what our interspecies relationships reveal about us. These animals often function as metaphors or mirrors for our own animal nature.
CONSTELLATIONS OF CULTURE AND HISTORY
Some of the key ideas emerging through artists’ works in the ‘21st Century’ exhibition include the rethinking of history in terms of a multitude of aesthetic genealogies; the changing experiences and understandings of geography at local, regional and global levels; and the highlighting of interrelatedness and mutual responsibility in regard to social and environmental issues. Many of these concerns relate to how humans share the earth with each other and with other species, and how they understand their place in history and ecology.
