15–16 February 2012, 19:00 / Casco HQ
De Rooie Rat, Oudegracht 65, Utrecht (5 min away from Casco)
Casco organizes the book launch of Commerce by Artists published by Art Metropole, with editor and artist Luis Jacob. The book investigates the ways artists have been enacting commercial transactions through their work over the last few decades. It includes works by artists featured in the GDR exhibition: Martha Rosler, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Luis Jacob’s talk will contextualize his interest in the idea of “commerce by artists” with a discussion of the work of two Canadian artist collectives. Image Bank (Vancouver) and General Idea (Toronto) participated in the correspondence-art network of the 1970s. Their “network aesthetics” enables us to conceive of artist production in a new way. Instead of focusing simply on the discrete objects that artists produce, this “network aesthetics” permits us to address questions of process, flow, and circulation in the formation of artistic projects.
Luis Jacob will then discuss three questions that have guided his work while assembling Commerce by Artists. Those questions, referring to the work of Robert Morris, Chris Burden and Cornelia Parker, are: Can artworks bring hidden realities to light? Do artworks also bring things to darkness, and thereby raise the issue of value (between dark and light)? What do artworks tell us about the relationship between material “things” and immaterial “values” (or “meanings”)?
Luis Jacob is a writer, curator, and artist whose work has been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), the Hamburger Kunstverein (Hamburg), documenta12 (Kassel), and at the Animism exhibition that toured to the Generali Foundation (Vienna), Kunsthalle Bern (Switzerland) and Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen (Belgium). His solo exhibition A finger in the pie, A foot in the door, A leg in quicksand is currently on view at Kunsthalle Lingen, in Germany. For more information on Commerce by Artists visit the website of Art Metropole.