Modelling Agency

09.09.2011 - 12.10.2011

68squaremeters, København / Danmark

Curated by guest curators Janus Høm and Martyn Reynolds

Everybody today who engages with culture via Facebook, fashion etc., filters it through their own experiences to model a subjective expression of their relationship to society. This exhibition is an attempt to use these common strategies by which cultural consumers and artists use popular culture today. Høm and Reynolds are taking this subjective mindset literally into the act of curation. Unscrupulously using artworks and cultural ephemera as equivalent materials for new entities: their original configuration and meaning is intentionally corrupted....

We are using the situation of a Modeling Agency to highlight the relationship of the curator to the artist; a Modeling Agency provides representation for its models, and the models are regarded as both products and producers. Furthermore we are modeling agency itself, to implicate the agency of the curator with that of the artist. We are modeling agency. We are a Modeling Agency.

To clarify, Høm and Reynolds are still curators and the artists remain artists exhibiting their work. The curators intend to maintain this division of labour, even if it is somewhat farcical in this context. As an artistic strategy these previously mentioned appropriation processes are familiar to artistic production today. At the same time curatorial production has increasingly moved towards the instrumentalising of artwork beyond a simple art historical narrative. Modeling Agency fuses these two parallel conventions in artistic and curatorial production, which are accepted within the frames of their own discourses, but not each others.

Høm and Reynolds are not, however, proposing a new model for curating; a bad idea made good. Rather a commonplace process with complex consequences, appropriation gone gung-ho.

(Gung-ho from Chinese gonghé, taken to mean ‘work together’ and adopted as a slogan by U.S. Marines.)

[Quelle: http://68squaremetres.org/]