SiQ 1999
SiQ 1999 is an exhibition of works by seven young Slovene artists. The presented works were created especially for the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna.
The Exhibition Concept
In the nineties it has become consequential to reconsider the post-modernistic credo of 'anything goes'. At the end of millennium we witness a new heterogeneity of artistic production.
If post-modernism endeavoured to depart from the modernistic, or neo-modernistic, classification of visual creativity into categories, such as painting, sculpture, photography, happening, performance, installation, ambience, and alike, in the nineties these categories have become potentially intertwined, undividable, and often meaningless as characterisations. The term 'cross-over' is a temporary solution (it denotes everything and nothing at the same time). The notions, such as 'conceptual art' or 'process art', are antiquated tools used by the interpreters of art who still feel the need for formal classification of artistic creation. The terms used in the early nineties - 'interactive art' or 'new media art' - sound like populist coinages, and they hardly describe the state of affairs: art is always interactive (basically it always comprises production and reception; the very act of reception changes, or influences, the work of art), while 'new media' is a highly relative term.
The heterogeneity in the nineties has not been expressed merely in the fact that the work of artists can no longer be formally (and historically) classified, but also in artists' relationships to institutions (and sub-institutions) of art, or to the so-called 'operational system' of art.
Every protest withdrawal from the (bourgeois) institution of art in the past proved to be unsuccessful. The protest utopias of historical avant-garde that explicitly denied the gallery system, have continued in the activities of 'Land Artists' well into the nineties, when 'Net.artists' (activists) tried once again to undermine the bases of the temples of art (galleries and museums). The situation we have been witnessing at the end of millennium clearly shows that art is not opposed to society, but rather integrated in it; that art is one of the 'social systems', and thus essentially and a priori integrated in society as an institution. To be an artist can only mean one thing: to be integrated - in one way or another - into this institution.
Today, pragmatism of artists is expressed precisely in the recognition that art is not capable of revolutionising the social-institutional system as a whole, for it forms part of this system itself. At the end of millennium, artistic pragmatism shows itself as the fact that artists react flexibly and instantly to newly-formed social, political, institutional, and individual situations. Artists do not confine themselves to a priori ideas of absolute departure from art institutions into the field of activism and political-social engagement, but rather freely choose their space-institution-field, the mode and the reason of presentation of their work. We could claim that we witness a new step in the emancipation of art, or a synthesis of emancipation of art in the so-called aesthetic modernism: art can bear a social meaning without being inevitably forced to directly or evidently enter into the service of politics or social system (and thus to oppose the institution of art), although it is free to do so if it finds it necessary. On the other hand, art can be a product of aesthetic exploration and subjective expression (representable merely in the gallery and museum frameworks), which does not mean, however, that it could be described as serving its own purposes, or being elitist. Artists in the nineties ingeniously move between these two formal and institutional clichés, and they pay attention to their artistic positions, for this is the only way they can express their attitudes, solutions, and aesthetic dimensions of their creativity.
In the name of heterogeneity at the end of the nineties, the programmatic basis for the selection of the artists presented at the SiQ exhibition was equal evaluation of different artistic positions, statements, and media (means of expression): digital media vs. archaic elementariness, hi-tech vs. low-tech, political engagement vs. accentuated individuality, awareness of institutions vs. private contemplation; or, known vs. unknown, local vs. global, communicative vs. formally completed; reflective vs. aesthetically constructed.
The SiQ exhibition does not attempt at the instrumentation of artists through the subject of the exhibition; rather, it primarily aims to present current production of the selected artists. The chance of exhibiting in the Kunsthalle Exnergasse served merely as a platform and framework for the SiQ 1999 project.
The artists at the SiQ exhibition cannot be classified within any historical and formal system; the freedom of movement between artistic media and institutions/spaces of presentation enables them to flexibly react to new political, local, social, and individual situations.
The SiQ 1999 exhibition brings together artists of a common geographical origin. This fact is written in the title of the project: SiQ is a paraphrased quotation from the Slovene economic system. SIQ means Slovene Institute of Quality and Metrology, which measures/evaluates quality of certain Slovene products according to European standards. The exhibition title wishes to question the validity of global criteria for art that exclude local qualities, characteristics and particularities. At the same time it points to the fact that a work of art is not a 'product' which could be rationally and objectively evaluated.
The question remains: Which authority could bestow the seal of universally valuable (European) quality to young Slovene art, so that this art would become 'exportable', and what kind of standards should it follow?
Vanesa Cvahte