Exercises in Conceptualism

Curatorial Text

Exercise is an ambivalent concept. On the one hand, it can be something hollow, a simple warm-up for the body or mind. On the other hand, exercise is a necessary moment of any serious undertaking.

Conceptual art, by its very existence, raises the question of the ontology of art: in what sense and for whom is art? What is the relationship between the idea, the concept of the work, and its realized, embodied, artifactual part, which appears before the viewer in a certain medium? The concept, as a rule, is presented in the form of a text, which historically was intended to “transmit ideas.” However, does such a text need to be an integral part of the work, or can it take other forms? The presented exhibition strives to radically pose the question of the nature of this relationship. Radicality is achieved through numerous exercises that comprehend the artistic, institutional, epistemological and ontological status of such an important and little-studied element of contemporary art as explication, and also explore its possibilities as an agent of conceptual art.

Each of the explications relates in its own way to the “common” artefact — the nameless sound of mysterious origin — and together with it models a separate work of conceptual art. Thus, there are as many works of art in the hall as there are explications. It is precisely the merciless multiplicity of exercises that makes the exhibition’s approach truly philosophical.

Within each of the presented exercises — conceptual works of art — the explication texts create original and unusual epistemic and artistic situations. Some explication texts transform the sound-artifact into an audio installation, performance, documentation, solution to an ethical problem or the artist’s body. Some pose a riddle to the viewer or involve him in social movements, rituals, creative drunkenness and hallucinations. Some create unusual worldview systems and give many incredible explanations about the origin of the sound in the hall. Some raise complex philosophical and artistic questions: do animals and machines have art? does the explication text speak “about” sound? do words have meaning at all? is there “reality”? can art change the viewer, including bodily? what if the explication lies? Some texts contain homages to many famous practices and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries and enter into a dialogue with them.

The explications are written in different styles: in the first person, on behalf of the curator, as a biographical, technical or pseudo-artistic text, as well as in the forms that have rarely or never been tested in galleries, such as a spell, contextual advertising, Platonic dialogue, deliberate lie, satire of the usual forms of explications in different genres of contemporary art.

Taken together, all the conceptual works of the exhibition raise questions about the problem of exhibiting works of art: are there a hundred works of art in front of the viewers or one? just a gesture of institutional criticism, a prank, or something else?

The search for answers to these questions is entrusted to the viewers. After all, they, being between text and sound, receive many strange transformations of their spectatorial essence. They are all-knowing observers, accomplices of the performance, co-creators of art, deceived visitors to the gallery, victims of a dangerous experiment. They are both participants in the exercises and, often, their performers.

The exhibition title is an homage to the work of the French writer Raymond Queneau “Exercises in Style” (Raymond Queneau. Exercices de style, 1947/1963), in which one ordinary observation from the Parisian streets (“note”) is rewritten in 99 different “styles”, or more precisely, worldview optics. In this multiple relationship with numerous “styles”, the “written” original is lost, and knowledge of the world and language turn into a firework of “exercises”, and the border between the “note” and its stylistic variations becomes problematic.

In our project, instead of a “note” there is a mysterious sound, and Queneau’s “styles” become different explicatory approaches, accepted and not accepted in the practice of contemporary art. At the same time, the optics of Queneau’s narrators turn into creative conceptualist work. As with “Exercises in Style”, “Exercises in Conceptualism” is not an attempt to demonstrate the trivial idea that any object can be described in different ways. It is not a variation of Plato’s myth of the cave or the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which the “truth” is inaccessible due to the limitations of our knowledge. It is not a project on the “relativity” of text or knowledge. “Exercises” is a philosophical question about art and the world in its purest form, an endless creative work, an homage to artistic curiosity and labor. After all, not all exercises are successful, but without mistakes and wanderings nothing valuable is achieved.

In the deep hope of the authors, the exhibition is also an homage to the great tradition of Moscow Conceptualism, a recognizable part of which has always been strange epistemological situations, fictional characters and unique humor.

Maiia-Sofiia Zhumatina and Nikola Lečić

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