Today's topic is media art in relation to more traditional art institutions and I was asked to introduce the institution I am directing, how I have developed it over the past few years and how we are dealing with media art and the digitalization of art in general.
The Generali Foundation is a private non-profit art association which is - and this is maybe special -100% funded by corporate money. Our structure is based on the 19th century model of the so-called "Kunstverein", an organization - very common in Germany and Austria - in which a group of bourgeoisie people got together in order to support the arts, or other things of interest. Our members are certain corporations of the world wide insurance corporation The Generali. These corporations pay a yearly membership fee, which is the budget for our art center, our exhibitions and other activities. We also have a certain budget in order to establish a collection of contemporary art. The Generali Foundation was founded in the late eighties and in fact we are a typical child of that era, when corporations started defining their public image by means of various activities. Our members and financing corporations are not our Maecenas but they do have very precise expectations about what they wish to gain by supporting contemporary arts: to obtain a new, modern and innovative profile.
The first and given concept of the Foundation was to establish a (national) collection of Austrian sculpture dating from "now", the late eighties, to post World War II. I found this rather peculiar in view of the expectations of the sponsor. Very soon I was able modify this concept. I started to organize small-scale exhibitions in my office - that was all we had - mostly site specific installations, because I believed the best way to deal with contemporary art is as a producer. Very soon we produced the first video instead of a catalogue to document an exhibition by a video artist. In the nineties I started to work on the concept for an art center for the Generali Foundation, an exhibition building which could also house our increasing collection. In early 1995 we opened our new building in a former hat factory which, besides the exhibition space, features a public reference room including archives and our video library as well as storage space and workshops for our collection.
At the same time we opened our new building we launched our first website. We were one of the first art institutions with their own website. Our homepage was packed with information and hypertext like most sites were during the first enthusiastic stages of the Web. Since we have our own space we have produced a number of, in my opnion, extraordinary exhibitions and we have established a quite remarkable collection.
One of the greatest changes in the arts came along with new media - photography, video, TV and, as we will see in the future - computer technology. These media have not only triggered the debate around the "mechanical reproduction of the artwork" (Benjamin), but also function as an extension of physical and mental possibilities. As a consequence, and along with the new social thinking that emerged in the sixties, the notion of sculpture has changed fundamentally. In Austria we have a very interesting history of media art in the late 60's and 70's, along with performance art and of course avantgarde film of this period. This is a section of our local scene that did not receive the attention that for instance Vienna Actionism got, which is continuously quoted as THE Austrian avantgarde. So it was more than obvious to work with this material in relation to the international context.
The core objective of the Generali Foundation is to set up an international collection focusing on contemporary sculpture as well as its research and documentation. Exhibition program and collection are related to each other and follow a dialogue. The works in the collection date back to the mid-sixties, representing historical positions, which are juxtaposed with current ones of the nineties. The collection's aim is not to present a complete overview but rather to emphasize certain artistic positions or issues. These include conceptual and performative aspects, the crossovers of architecture and design as well as approaches that critically explore the role of the media and social parameters. The term sculpture is not confined in the traditional sense to object art or the plastic arts but is broadly defined to embrace other media. Photography, film, video, and installation are thus keynotes of the collection as well. Preservation and, if necessary, restoration of important historical bodies of works are among the Generali Foundation's most notable achievements. Special attention is paid to artists, especially women artists, who have made substantial contributions to contemporary art but have not received commensurate representation in institutions.
I would like to present some examples of our exhibition history as well as of the collection:
Art / Architecture / Performance, a retrospective exhibition of Dan Graham
Graham designed this functional sculpture or installation for the presentation of his own videos at his retrospective and for the video collection of the Generali Foundation. "New Design for Showing Videos", a room for the social gatherings to watch videos, ties in with a series of earlier pavilions and is Graham's largest video showroom to date.
White Cube / Black Box
The concept of this exhibition that took place in 1995, was dealing with the notion of sculpture and the way in which this was modified since the sixties, with the emergence of the new media, and how this was introduced into our collection. The exhibition space was divided into two sections, a more traditional exhibition space, the "white cube", in which works of art were permanent on display, and the "black box", a space in which we have organized lectures, film screenings, performances or other events nearly all evenings. The opening hours were different from the usual ones, we have opened at 2pm and closed at 10, 11pm.
In the program I emphasized two positions that play an important role in our collection: Valie Export and Gordon Matta-Clark. A third series was featuring films by Michael Snow, Yoko Ono, Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland.
Valie Export is a media and performance artist and a filmmaker. As one of the most radical female artists, she uses her body and media technology to engage with mostly feminist issues. We have acquired and partly restored her entire cinematographic oeuvre, including the early film installations.
Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978, New York) became known for his so-called "cuttings", interventions he carried out on buildings. The artist documented these transitory works as well as his actions and performances on film. Some of them were even conceived for the camera.
The exhibition brought together works which involved different parameters of reception (film, video, and installations). Time as a variable and the aspect of collective perception vs. individual consumption of works of art played a significant role. In contrast to traditional exhibits, films are usually shown and consumed during pre-determined periods of time. Moreover, films are normally seen by groups of people, solitary viewers are an exception. Exhibition openings are occasions where people meet, view visual art together and discuss it. Otherwise - unless you take a guided tour or go in a group - visual art is usually the object of solitary reception. Video as a medium introduced to the exhibition context by the artists is a kind of hermaphrodite. For example, loops and short clips enable permanent availability during certain opening hours. One of the ideas of this exhibition project was to bring the discursive and social character (in the sense of bringing people together) of art and art reception to the fore.
"translocation (new) media / art", an exhibition I have commissioned to a group of people who are editing a very interesting arts magazine, the Springerin, which covers new media like the Net in a very interesting way but is also aware of history.
The objective of this exhibition was to cast light on the relationship between society, contemporary art and new media in a Europe that still remains divided - divided not merely along economic lines, but above all by cultural and political divisions and the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia. The exhibition presented itself on different levels: Eight invited artists, media theorists, activists and networkers from Budapest, Milan, Ljubljana, Lodz, Prague, Sofia, Tirana, Zagreb and Vienna presented themselves and their material. A selection of central works of art was displayed in large-scale projections and formed a "classic" exhibition. Each of the eight presentations featured local site-specific or thematic areas and presented internal debates and the regional differences in their individual contexts.
The geography of their places of origin, the protagonists' biographies and the thematic focus of the material all contributed to the formation of a map and panorama of specific areas of media art. Thus not only was the curatorial choice of works for large projections anchored in individual contexts, but also the different forms of artistic expression and regional scenes and their development within various regions and networks became evident. Moreover, "translocation (new) media/art" reflected the levelling effects of new communications technology on a sense of identity of media art. This is apparent in many Net art projects of recent years, which could also be viewed at a special terminal in the exhibition.
Martha Rosler. Bringing the War Home
Series of photomontages. News photos of war combined with images from architectural and design magazines. Originally disseminated in underground newspapers and flyers. The work is an inquiry into the relation between the media, the state and the family. As a woman feeds her small son, a radio host interviews an art dealer. Family photos are juxtaposed with a written crawl text that compares life in Chile with life in the USA.
Into Art (1998) Dorit Margreiter
In her installation for the exhibition "The making of", Dorit Margreiter developed a proposal for a late-afternoon television series set in the milieu of art institutions. The scenario links into the pre-existing socio-topos of the Generali Foundation and invents a series of fictional characters whose professional and private involvements define the narrative scope. A sketch for the series, presented in the form of a trailer, reveals the fundamental medial potential of social formations - with the field of art as a backdrop which, though compatible with the mainstream, has yet to be exploited.
I tried to introduce the position of the Generali Foundation in relation to "new media", our critical position in terms that "media are not the message" and that we do not want to contribute to the fact that media art often functions as a simple PR-instrument for technology industry.
I would also like to talk briefly about the practical aspect of an institution that collects and maintains works that are for the major part videos and films, whether this material is an installation or just shown on a monitor. Several questions come up, like: What is the original version of this material, Super8mm, Normal 8mm, 16mm, or was it video and which format? Some of you might remember Open Reel.
Is it important to use the original formats? Is this material still available and will it keep operating through a whole exhibition period? Or is this not important and can we play a film also in video?
Very often questions of copyright do come up; video or film often involves works of other artists, e.g. music. Very often the artist does not even know exactly what kind of rights we will get with the piece, for instance do we get a negative or a master and the right to loan or distribute a film or a video and to make copies? Who takes care of the original master and so on...?
If we want to present works from the collection or loan them to other institutions we can not just take the piece and install it. We have to make copies from the master; we have to think about the right presentation and we usually have to construct something, not to mention acquire the necessary equipment. Every time we buy another set of video monitors or film projectors or video cameras we think: now we have everything. But the next time it turns out we do not have the right equipment or not enough of it.
All this of course involves a lot of money. Often more than you need to hang a painting or place a sculpture. Recently we have started doing research on whether we should digitalize our video collection. Our position at the moment is that a video is still best stored in Beta SP and that a digital version is just useful for the presentation. We usually show film as film (this was actually the title of a famous exhibition in the late sixties). Often we have to show 8mm in 16mm due to problems in projecting 8mm material. Only as an exception we show film as video. More and more we need staff that is trained in certain technologies. We have already launched which I think is the 5th version of our homepage and increasingly it seems that this is a full-blown enterprise of its own. We still print flyers, posters and invitations as well, as we still do not have a paperless office or archive.
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