7/2/2007
Jonathan Monk
Y8, Hamburg
Without title
Without title
As Stefan Berg phrases it in his introduction to the exhibition in Hannover (March
2006) “his works are irritating games with language and ideas”. This places Monk in
the tradition of Conceptual Art. At the same time the artist undermines the strict
principles of this movement, when he imbues them with aspects of everyday life and
confronts them with his biography. His photographs, drawings, objects, installations
and films reproduce existing works and seminal works of art history in the 20th
century.
In fact Jonathan Monk initially proposed for Y8 to repeat John Armleder’s recent
installation (80 fir trees were suspended from the ceiling), except Monk would have
turned the installation around, so the trees would have been planted firmly on the
ground: “Maybe we should do it again, but the right way…”, he suggested. His
artistic process is less about finding/inventing new objects, rather he is concerned
with finding again what potentially was at the beginning of creating an art work and
went missing as a result of modes of perception and mystification. Strategies of
recontextualisation, appropriation, reflection, criticism, doubling and shifting of
proportion could certainly be read in a distanced manner, if they were not connected
with autobiographical facts. This connection releases Monk’s works into a hybrid
field of tension and creates a place, which manages to juxtapose and thus confront
concepts and elements.
The floor of Y8 is divided into a grid of 36 equally large fields. They point
towards the East and serve for the orientation of daily yoga practice. While
Armleder decided to paint over the floor with golden paint so that the slightly
elevated marks of the grid appeared as a relief, Monk decided to adapt an iconic
late work by the constructivist artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) for the grid
structure. Inevitably discontinuities occur. In addition his earlier works A journey
from here to there and Zero O’ Clock (both courtesy Galerie Meyer Rigger, Karlsruhe)
will be shown together with new works by the artist, which relate explicitly to Y8
and its function.
Y8 developed from the long-term project <i.participating, at the same time (since
1995 at Pat Hearn Gallery, NY). With this project Benita-Immanuel Grosser explore
the possibility of launching the philosophy and practice of yoga into the context of
art, as well as transferring it to the architectural and socially coded situation of
exhibition spaces. After this project several public yoga sessions took place at a
variety of international art institutions. With the intention of opening up a
discussion of contemporary art in the context of yoga Benita-Immanuel Grosser
founded Y8 in 2000.
Y8
Kleiner Kielort 8 - Hamburg
Opening hours: Mon thru Friday 5 –10 pm