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20/6/2014

I Take Part and the Part Takes Me

Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin

curated by Abigail Christenson

Galerie Tanja Wagner is pleased to present I Take Part and the Part Takes Me, a group exhibition with works by Ulf Aminde & Shi-Wei Lu, Liz Glynn, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Kateřina Šedá, and Jacques Derrida, curated by Abigail Christenson.

When artists produce art involving other people, or produce works which encourage participation, what is that ‘part’ which is taken or given? Do collaboration and participation in the production and reception of art create and maintain mutual regard and respect, or serve to reinforce and amplify the artist’s voice?

The art works chosen for I Take Part and the Part Takes Me explore interactions between artists and spectators, in turns ephemeral, poetic, confrontational, and explore a basic need to give and to receive, to take and be taken from, to relate to others? Liz Glynn proposes that each visitor ponders the idea of stage directions and by extension, artistic direction, hinting at staging a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, or a work embracing-all-art-forms within the gallery space. Her silent film, Emotional Register, 2010, relocates Wagner’s opera Die Walküre in the imagination of each spectator. Ari Benjamin Meyers’s new work DUET is based on mutual regard and the effect of a distance between one and another while momentarily bridging it. Adrian Piper’s video work My Calling (Card) #1: A Double Metaperformance, 1987-88 consists of two audience-participartory performances encouraging gallery spectators to confront their own prejudices, while witnesing challenges to racism on the screen. Piper’s iconic work suggests the necessity of maintaining respect for those both present and present in absentia. Ulf Aminde and Shi-Wei Lu with Performing Labor Contracts (to love is give), 2013, present us with a dialogue exploring cultural and racial preconceptions, east-west tensions, and the rights of workers, drawing analogies to collaborative and socially engaged practice. Their project proposes the construction of the self as narcissistic as well as inquisitory, showing an argumentative side to reflection, an inner struggle made external. Kateřina Šedá’s installation Mom, Look at Me, 2013, addresses the absence of attention, and the inherent need for relating one to another. Her work raises the possibility that at the base of all relationships is the persistent memory of the one-to-one parent-child regard. As part of I Take Part and the Part Takes Me, Martha Rosler has offered a questionnaire, posing a query to the audience as a provocation of institutional critique.

I Take Part and the Part Takes Me acknowledges theatricality and the addressing of each art work to real or imagined spectators. The work points to a definition of participation in visual art that goes beyond the idea of a group taking part in the production or reception of an artist’s work. I Take Part and the Part Takes Me proposes that the act of addressing and the reception of that address are themselves acts of participation. In this sense, when has art not been participatory, when does art not consist of an address from one to another, even if that other might be one’s own imagined alter ego?

Nearly two decades following the publication of Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, collaborative and participatory approaches in galleries, museums, and the public realm continue. As the art works presented here attest, this could be due to the fact that art is at its core participatory through an address of the artist to another. I Take Part and the Part Takes Me explores the strength of that persistence.

Image: Ari Benjamin Meyers, sketch to DUET, 2014

Opening: June 21, 2014, 6-9 pm

Galerie Tanja Wagner
Pohlstraße 64 - 10785 Berlin
Opening hours:
Wednesday to Saturday 11—18
and by appointment

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