"What’s new in contemporary art? Old. We’re in an age of remake culture, an epidemic of re-enactment fever. Young painters are working in styles that were hot half a century ago. Yesteryear’s performance art is being re-performed. Exhibitions that have been done and done — on Matisse, Picasso, European abstraction — are being done again.
"Has the art industry, noted for its nanosecond memory, suddenly become
history-conscious? Is the art market, like Hollywood, nervous about
anything but proven brands? Is art just plain out of ideas? Whatever the
answer, the replicants keep arriving, a recent and particularly
ambitious one being an ultrafastidious reconstruction of the 1969 show
“When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Prada Foundation in Venice.
"The original version, which took place in Bern, Switzerland, has a
near-mythical reputation as a late-20th-century landmark. It brought
together some of the most adventurous young European and American
avant-gardists of the day, exponents of post-Pop, post-Minimalist,
supposedly anti-market trends like Conceptual and Process art. It
presented them at a high moment of political and cultural turmoil
internationally, and in what has been perceived as a radically
loosened-up exhibition format, with art created communally,
spontaneously, on the spot."..."
And the remake occurs in a context characterised by the absence, or outright inverse, of all those things!
The writer Holland Cotter notes that some of the work was so abrasively radical, outraged staff "effectively forced
the resignation of the institution’s director, Harald Szeemann, who was
also the exhibition’s curator.Too late. Word had spread through the art world. The show — its full
title was “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works,
Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information” — was instant history, a
radical moment."
Contrast "created spontaneously, on the spot" with Prada Foundation's archivist graft - "laboriously tracking down existing art,
commissioning artists to recreate pieces and asking the estates of
deceased artists to supply duplicates of lost or fragile work" - to build a Monument to the (Passed) Future. The art world equivalent to "Giorgio By Moroder". An anti-Event, anti-Rupture.
The Venice show is a partial replica of the entire space of the original exhibition:
"The Bern galleries have been reconstructed on
exact one-to-one scale within the palazzo, but are spread over three
floors, rather than two, as in Bern. In addition, the kunsthalle annex,
the Schulwarte, which in 1969 held work that arrived too late for the
main show, has been reimagined as a loftlike space on a fourth floor. And while details of the Bern galleries — door frames, floor designs,
all-over white paint, even radiators — have been copied, the gallery
walls are treated like stage flats, with their edges cut out as if with a
jigsaw, to accommodate the palazzo’s ornate columns and cornices. Also,
the inserted galleries have no ceilings: Look up and you see
18th-century Italian arches and frescoes."
Cotter finds some merit in this huge, involved, scrupulous undertaking, including discovering that:
"far from being a countercultural bootstrap affair, the show floated on a
cloud of money. A selection of documents displayed on the Prada
foundation’s ground floor reveals that Philip Morris, the tobacco
company, footed a chunk of the bill, in an early example of big business
wearing avant-garde art as a feather in its cap.... enshrined by history, now re-enshrined by Prada, [the original exhibition] was not quite the
avant-garde ideal it was cracked up to be.... It was the end of a brief,
illusory effort by art to create an existential economy outside the
market, and the beginning of art business as we know it now"
Maybe such demystification and disillusionment is useful, I dunno. One thing's for sure though, nobody will look back to the Prada reenactment in years to come. A reenactment abdicates itself from the field of possibility out which which myth and legend, now and then, emerge.
