The salon is a living room

04.06.2014 - 30.06.2014

Atelier Julius Caesar, Wien / Österreich (venue)
Fanny, Berta, Wien / Österreich

The living room is a place where actual life, fantasy and virtuality meet each other in an instantaneous overlap. There, coinciding images, contents, and surfaces exist in an equalized, multifocal sphere of simultaneity – the only common denominator is the inhabitant’s transitory preference. The material remnants of momentary decisions and choices, are gathered there, much like in the open tabs of the browser to resume yesterday’s online session. Such moments of scattered ephemerality are reiterated in contemporary art.... A new realism, as Manuel de Landa describes it – not cynical but observing– has entered the aesthetic vocabulary of contemporary art. Current information economy is cultivating moves of arbitrary sharing. It is shaped in return, by the aleatory syntax of browsing and social networking. This intantaneous nature of information without apparent discourse has put criticism in crisis. But how useful is discourse and framing in today’s constitution of the networked rhizome? Might this gathering repetition of visual instants be the chance to ultimately dismiss idealistic, dichotomic thinking? Let’s claim art to be singular theatrical extracts of particular moments in time. Wouldn’t these extracts say more about contemporary culture than potentially dangerous genealogies evoked in discourse? Attention deficit syndrome may be the disease of our time. Maybe, though, what we call disease now, is the beginning of a change in perception, a change in the way how we react to, and how we enact in the world. On the grounds of a new realism, of everything that is there and possibly exists in the realm of virtuality, art may become avantgarde once again.

[Quelle: fannyberta.com]