Another objectivity
Photography, Contemporary Art
EXHIBITIONS
June 24—August 31, 1989
Curated by Jean-François Chevrier e James Lingwood
Artworks by Robert Adams, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Hannah Collins, John Coplans, Günther Förg, Jean-Louis Garnell, Craigie Horsfield, Suzanne Lafont, Thomas Struth, Patrick Tosani, Jeff Wall
Another objectivity, is an exhibition of artist who use photography, one of the privileged mediums and materials of contemporary art. ''Photography, contemporary art'', as the subtitle of the present exhibition suggests, is a recent perspective on an artistic method inscribed within the modernist project. It is parallel to the concept of the avant garde and photography, which have lived through the 20th century hand in hand. Leo Steinberg stated that ''every art is about art'', so this exhibition is about an art which uses a technical achievement whose seeds were planted 150 years ago. Photography as a concept and technique of art passed through radical experimental phases from Man Ray, who among others worked within the circles of Duchampian Dada, and Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus, to a wide partecipation in the art of the sixties, up to our time. Photography is now conceptualised in two different ways as the major vehicle of the media and electronic images in the present information-consuming post-industrial society, and as the art itself which is the result of this society.
Another Objectivity strives to point out artistic approaches to the concept of the image as object and as a picture while accepting the complexity of the visible.
The artist whose works are in the show are eleven: Robert Adams, Bernd e Hilla Becher, Hannah Collins, John Coplans, Guenter Foerg, Jean-Louis Garnell, Craigie Horsfield, Suzanne Lafont, Thomas Struth, Patrick Tosani e Jeff Wall, for a total of about one hundred large-scale works. The curators are Jean-François Chevrier and James Lingwood.
The exhibition is co-produced by Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Paris. The works have already been on show in Paris, from March 14 to April 30 1989. This time it’s turn of the Museum in Prato, where the exhibition will be opened from June 24 to September 18 1989.
The Prato exhibition will show a larger number of works than the previous Paris showing. In addition, each artist will have an individual hall, except the Bechers and Adams who will be exhibited together. This is a choice based on an equality principle already followed in the exhibition Spaces ’88 :installations, an which should allow a correct reading of each artist’s work, since each hall will have its own atmosphere according to the works it contains.
