The Return of the Display (Antonia Lock remix)

As a result of a series of unfinished conversations in the last few months during the gestation and production process of "The Return of the Display - The Meaning of the Exhibition in 2030", we have preferred to prolong the project's life in the form of a remix by Antonia Lock.

Press-release
"The Return of the Display - The meaning of the Exhibition in 2030" is the title of the project by the German artist Tilo Schulz (Leipzig, 1972), that took place during the summer of 2001 in response to a commission from D.A.E. (Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak).
Four curators, artists or art critics were invited by Tilo Schulz and D.A.E. to write about the concept of an exhibition for the year 2030 with the generic question: Could you conceive an exhibition for the year 2030? Or, What is the future of the exhibition?

The people invited to do this were: Charles Esche, Carles Guerra, Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt and Lisette Smits.
The propositions and texts were published on posters that were distributed at various places in the city of San Sebastián, both in the street and in clothes shops, record shops, bookshops and cultural institutions, libraries, tourist offices, museums and galleries where they were freely available. At the same time, the texts of the project were presented on the DAE website and communication with the media still continues through previews, summaries, interviews, articles, etc.

You can ask for posters by sending an e-mail to info@daeweb.org and indicating your address.

E-mail invitation. 4th of April
Dear...
I am writing to you about the project that I am carrying out for D.A.E. (Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak, which means something like Art Activities in San Sebastián). I have been invited by Peio Aguirre, who has recently become the new manager of D.A.E.
We would like to present you the concept of the project for San Sebastián and invite you to take part.
What is the future of the exhibition? I would like to ask you for a text about what exhibitions will mean in the year 2030. Exhibiting does not necessarily mean an exhibition or artistic event. You can, of course, look at things from your professional point of view as curators. But you can write about the act of exhibiting as a social phenomenon in general. The choice of viewpoint is free. You are free to choose what kind of text you want to write: art criticism, fiction, a concept or proposal for an expo ....there are no limits.
Your text will be published in various ways in San Sebastián. As a first step, I am going to design posters with the texts providing their main content. The posters will circulate around the city for a certain period of time. (...) it will be possible to read the texts on the D.A.E. web page
We will be carrying out a simple mailing for these "expos" as if it were a project or an exhibition that you are organising. The four texts will be published one after the other, so that there will be discussion in San Sebastián for a couple of months. In the end there will be an event with talks on the subject of exhibitions nowadays. (...)
The text will be restricted to a maximum of two A4 sheets due to the media that we are using (poster, website, e-mails).
I am sorry about getting in touch with you so late. I hope you find this interesting.
See you soon
Tilo

Background
E-mail from Tilo, 23rd of February: I think that the subject shouldn't be so restricted in terms of what exhibitions will mean in 30 years time. I think that developments in the last ten years have created an area in which art is less self-referential. A certain kind of art has developed a strategy that may be described as a fungus or a virus that operates in connection with other territories and contents. (...) There are certain questions that could come to light: What happens with an activity such as displaying work in the art system if there are more relevant ways of displaying work such as fashion or Big Brother (the real one and the one on TV)? What happens with the figure of the artist if there are no limits in terms of their position (producer, curator, adviser)? I think that it would be interesting if these questions came to light from the field of art but not necessarily by talking about art. Maybe because these developments are general matters regarding our idea of society and community.

Tilo asks Peio: The first time we met we spoke about Douglas Coupland and you mentioned Girlfriend in a Coma. It is funny that these early beginnings were to lead us to a project that works through research, with an interest in the idea of scenarios, display1 and the future. You have also written an article on Coupland... Can you describe your interest in his writing and his stories a little more?

Answer: I remember once when you told me that the best way to approach the project might be to focus on our most private or personal tendencies, for example in music or literature, not in art. Yes, I have been interested in Coupland for quite a while. His style of pop literature mixed with anxiety about the future gives me a sense of a human touch in the middle of the complexity of interpersonal relationships and technology. In Girlfriend in a Coma I like the story that turns from a romantic novel into an apocalyptic metaphor. Recently it has been translated into Spanish with the title "The Second Opportunity" so the book is highly topical. Art and literature negotiating with the future: this is the meaning of The Return of the Display for me. From the very beginning everything was left open so that I concentrated on your ideas and on my own interest in the future and in writing scenarios.

Peio asks Tilo: I am interested in the concept and specific meaning of display in your work. An original aspect of your work is the possibilities of the display-mechanism as a method or system that goes beyond installing a series of objects in a predetermined neutral space. This art without originals is closer to designing a discourse on space, that is both aesthetic and conceptual, and is not very far from what is known as information design or other fields of visual culture and advertising. All your projects have this idea of display on the inside, and so does The Return... with its title that recalls the Star Wars saga...

Answer: My ideas about display work on various levels. Sometimes in its physical sense, such as in Sunrise over the yellow stripes 2 in Münster, where alongside the events there is a real device: a blue wall with information/text on a table and the logos of the series of events at the Kunstverein. Another different use is in models such as Body of work: the ideal exhibition 3 or Reopening of Sture Johannesson 4. here it is more a kind of model that I usually develop that uses the display strategy as a visual solution. In other works I develop the idea of a platform, such as e.w.e. 5, where I develop a structure and invite artists to act on it. (...) What I am most interested in at the moment and what is most important in the work for San Sebastián and in the works that I have described is to define discourse as a kind of public. (...) I am against decorating space in cities as public art. Public discourse seemed to be and often still is the best way to do this. This is a basic characteristic of discourse. So society or the community become the display, if you like. And what is interesting is that if you read the texts that Charles, Lisette, Rebecca and Carles have written, they all talk about stimulating a public and stimulating people, about society and its new forms of communication. And this is what I find entertaining when I think about this.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. By display we are referring to the strategies and mechanisms used to disseminate a group of objects, visual elements and/or information.

2. Sunrise over the yellow stripes are events organised by Tilo Schulz as part of the exhibition Inside Out at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster. The background to these themes may be described as masculine and feminine societies: Homosexuality and public space, Women and football, On the myth of teenage gangs, Cowboy Serenade - Fiction and reality of the American cowboy in songs and texts.

3. "Body of work: the ideal exhibition uses various media categories to deduce a more general criterion about the characteristics of artistic practice. As well as traditional forms of expression such as painting, sculpture and photography, specific modern communication media (posters, books, invitation cards, etc) are also examined". Jan Winkelmann in German Open, Wolfsburg Museum, 1999.

4. Reopening of Sture Johannesson is an exhibition in Y1 in Stockholm, an art/design/film centre. Posters by the psychedelic Swedish poster designer from the 60's, Sture Johannesson, were reinstalled onto a sky-blue mural painting.

5. "What is the hole in Schulz's donut? Take for example Exhibition Without Exhibition, a project from 1997 and 1999. For e.w.e. Schulz invited six artists (Olaf Nicolai, Nathan Coley, Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Jens Haaning and Sandra Hastenteufel) to present various projects. These then were to take the form of small catalogues that would be accompanied by lectures, information posters, invitation cards, advertising... that is, as its title shows, this is an exhibition where absolutely all the classic peripheral aspects of an exhibition appear but its most important element, the object on display is missing". Miren Jaio in the Mugalari, 25-9-2001.

Peio Aguirre is the curator of Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak. He lives in San Sebastián.
Tilo Schulz is an artist. He lives in Leipzig.

Published in Zehar, an Arteleku magazine, San Sebastián, Winter 2002

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