The Content of Form. A Reading by Ian Wallace

Ian Wallace, Lecture at Generali Foundation, 2013 © Generali Foundation. Photos: Dario Punales

May 17, 2013, 7 p.m. (English)

In the architecture of the installation, which I will take to be the formal framework of the exhibition as a meaningful statement, I will consider the ambient bodily movements of a spectator in the exhibition space. I will draw attention to the indeterminate (yet guided) flow of the intellectual attention of the spectator (of the image-reader in space) as the completion of intentions of the artist (the initiator) and the collector (or curator) who re-presents these works for contemplation. This spatial movement involves proximity and distance, coming close to the object and drawing away to contemplate the installation as an architectural whole. This “entanglement” of producer, presenter, and spectator comprises the “knot” of signification.

Additional documentations of events held at the Generali Foundation since the 1990s—lectures, symposia, conversations with the artists, guided tours, and performances—is accessible via two terminals at the Study Center.

Symposium: Beyond the Canon. The Paradoxes of Conceptual Art

Beyond the Canon. The Paradoxes of Conceptual art. Photo: Dario Punales

March 22, 2013, 4–8.30 p.m. (English)

Guillaume Désanges, Curator
Camiel van Winkel, Art critic
Luke Skrebowski, Art historian
Sabeth Buchmann, Art critic
Moderation: Christian Höller, Art critic

Based on the exhibition Amazing! Clever! Linguistic! An Adventure in Conceptual Art, the symposium raises and discusses questions around curating and exhibiting Conceptual art, examining its definitions, canonizations, and reterritorializations, its paradoxes and its aesthetic. The curator Guillaume Désanges uses his current show as an example to explain what “conceptual” curating can mean today; Camiel van Winkel talks about the paradoxes—the successes and failures—of Conceptual art and about its afterlife in contemporary art. Luke Skrebowski, meanwhile, proposes that, as part of the historicization of Conceptual art, we reassess the status of aesthetics. And Sabeth Buchmann discusses the exhibition practices that were established in the context of the historic Conceptual art, focusing on presentation and reception as well as on new media and publication formats and their consequences for the emergence of a new type of curator.

Additional documentation of events held at the Generali Foundation since the 1990s—lectures, symposia, conversations with the artists, guided tours, and performances—is accessible via two terminals at the Study Center.