PLAYING THE CITY
20 April–6 May 2009
Press Conference: Monday, 20 April 2009, Schirn Kunsthalle, 11:00 AM
How does the public participate in political dialogue? What constitutes public opinion? What do people understand “public space” to mean? The significance of the social plays a central role in the discourse on art. Concepts such as participation, collaboration, the social turn, and community-based art have clearly influenced both the production and the reception of art. The exhibition project Playing the City reveals public space to be a collective, free, and designable
space. From 20 April to 6 May 2009, twenty-three international artists, such as Ulf Aminde, Dara Friedman, Dora García, Cezary Bodzianowski, and Sharon Hayes, will turn central Frankfurt into the site of countless activities and situations, ranging from performances by way of installations to “guerrilla actions” that involve the audience in a wide variety of ways. Playing the City can also be followed on the Internet, as a digital extension of public space: the Web page
www.playingthecity.de—created especially for the show—brings together all the video, text, and visual materials, an exhibition calendar, and a blog. It is thus a catalog and exhibition forum in one. An office and exhibition headquarters has been set up in one of the Schirn’s gallery space where the exhibition team can do its work in public: fine-tuning the Web site, answering questions about the exhibition, and organizing, commenting on, and documenting all the actions. In addition, works by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nasan Tur, among others, and videos of the actions that have already taken place will be shown in the gallery as a film loop.
The idea that Playing the City realizes on various levels is a continuation of the ideas of important avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Dada movement rejected “conventional” art and art forms as well as bourgeois ideals, taking instead to the street. Movements such as the radical leftist intellectuals and artists from the circle around Guy Debord’s Internationale situationniste operated on the line of intersection between art and politics, architecture and reality from the late 1950s onward. The Situationists developed, among other things, a concept of the “theoretical and practical production of situation” in which life itself was supposed to become a work of art. In the 1960s the Fluxus movement proposed the maxim of art and life as a unity and thus considered the diverse processes of everyday life to be as relevant as the banal. In parallel with that movement, action
art, happenings, and performance art strove to bring art and the reality of life closer together.
Especially when art was combined with politics—which along with the employment of the body represented an important strand of action art—collaboration and the incorporation of the public played important roles.
Since the 1990s, under new social conditions, a practice of art based on participation has become increasing important, in parallel with an increase in the interactive and collaborative media forms on the Internet and the realities of the nomadism of contemporary globalism. The viewers are integrated into the production of art works in many ways, and the division between traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipients are being broken down
as much as possible. This has produced diverse forms of interactive, cooperative, and interdisciplinary approaches, though they resist clear categorization. In L’esthétique relationnelle from 1998 (translated as Relational Aesthetics), the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud developed a fundamental theory of these art forms, which he subsumed under the concept of “relational art.”
He sees utopian potential in their developing of alternative spaces in which other forms of social relationships, critique, and sociability can be tried out. By opening up a new possibility for communication through common activities, relational art can counter social alienation.
The exhibition project Playing the City offers a current look into the wide-ranging varieties of participatory and collaborative art and is itself an experiment. As a clandestine “guerrilla tactic,” spectacular surprise, or temporary place of encounter, it makes central Frankfurt its own. For example, the Vienna-based artist Leopold Kessler has invented a “beer garden” especially for Frankfurt. Parasols, tables, and chairs invite visitors to linger. Those who sit down hoping to order
something, however, wait in vain. This Ghost Terrace, as he calls the work, is merely the formal repetition of a traditional urban inventory. Changing the perception of reality by means of unexpected musical interventions is the objective of the artist Dara Friedman. In her “Ballad of See Ya,” also created especially for Frankfurt, she presents the Rolling Stones song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” in public spaces at various times—performed by soloists and street
musicians, the carillon of the Alte Nikolaikirche, the organ of the Kaiserdom, the public intercom system of the Kaufhof department store. In addition, the artist will place an advertisement seeking singers and musicians for a ”heartfelt performance”. The artist Nasan Tur will also operate in public spaces. His Backpacks project is realized not by him but by the public: Tur has packed socalled active backpacks with equipment for various actions in public spaces and make them
available for loan. One backpack has material for a demonstration; another makes it possible to cook on the street; a third is packed items for a soapbox orator.
First realized in 1967 and performed again as part of Playing the City, Fluids by the American artist and theorist Allan Kaprow should be understood as a historical reference. Fluids exemplifies the terms “happening” and “activity” that Kaprow coined as well as a radical extension of the traditional concept of art. A group of volunteers constructs a minimalist outdoor sculpture that slowly melts once finished. The collaborative work on the piece plays a role that is just as
important as its finished and ultimately melting form.
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
