image: Adam David Brown, Core Sample: The History of Art (detail), 2006, Janson's The History of Art (modified), video projection, table
I was in Toronto for 2 short days this week, right at the start of the heat wave that also greeted me in NYC.
I crawled around to a few galleries including A Space, and saw the current show, titled "Obsolete Concepts". It features 7 artists whose work deals with the possible obsolescence of books.
From the press release, "This exhibition brings together seven artists whose works, through various interventionist strategies, present new challenges to the authoritative functions of the book. Through sculpture, audio, paper works, digital imagery and documentation of a conceptual art project, the artists question the relevance of published textual knowledge and the limitations of the book as a finite, bound object currently faced with potential dematerialization."
1 comment:
Hi J,
This show was curated by a former student of mine, Melissa Bennett. She took my seminar "Questions of Obsolescence" in 2002. I was going to bring it up during my presentation but I ran out of time. I googled the term "Obsolete Concepts" (a term usually associated with Walter Benjamin) to see how badly obsolescence was being treated as a genre. There was a grad student symposium at UBC with the same title running concurrently with the exhibition. What can I say - obsolescence is so over.
B
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