‘Nelle nostre camere vengono a cadere
Sfiniti dopo lunghi voli sui mari
Gli uccelli sconosciuti di lontane regioni.’
Giorgio De Chirico
(The Absence of Birds)
This is an exhibition about difference, a working visual and thinking catalogue of the different practices of artists of different generations, nationalities and genders, of artists whose work reflects different concerns in the artistic process. In this grouping these differences become clear and articulated. More importantly, however, by providing a vista of such difference one sees, between and within, the shape and dynamic of what comprises the artistic process itself. One begins to understand that in spite of such obvious differences there is a shared understanding, albeit individually formed, of the relevance and power of the authenticity which comes from a consciousness for each artist of their own cultural location. In a space that articulates the discourse of art that transcends formal and visual similarities, one can then confront those ideas which defines art for each of these practitioners.
The American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth has organized for Vistamare, in Pescara, an exhibition which continues the internationally acclaimed series of curated installations he began, in 1989, with ‘The Play of The Unsayable’ at the Vienna Seccession and the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels, and ‘The Play of the Unmentionable’ in 1991 at The Brooklyn Museum. In this installation at Vistamare he has chosen artists from a variety of countries. Wolfgang Berkowski from Germany, Artemis Potamianou from Greece, Giorgio de Chirico and Giovanni Anselmo from Italy, Sanna Marander from Sweden, Ronald Jones and Cindy Smith from the United States, Marc Goethals from Belgium, and Meret Oppenheim from Switzerland. There are five men and four women. Some of the artists work reflects Modernism, some Postmodernism, and some the transition between the two. Some of the works are definitive of the 20th century while others begin to define the 21st. An individual’s approach to the question of ‘what is art?’ is here formed with all of the diversity with which one human, anchored to a moment and a discourse, can hope to achieve. From the political metaphor of appropriated stuffed teddy bears with needlework muzzles by Cindy Smith, to the painted depictions of De Chirico’s architecture of dreams which can add or subtract, to Sanna Marander’s projection room with the philosophical discourse of large thoughts within small fictions, to Meret Oppenheim’s fragmented and complex surface of the artistic ‘other’, to Wolfgang Berkowski’s linguistic puzzle of signifiers both accessible and inaccessible, with notions of abstract and concrete in equal play, to Ronald Jones’s linguistic faux-formalism from the beginning of his project on meaning, to Artemis Potamianou’s stark graphic appropriations constructing a model of the ways art, even life, works, to Giovanni Anselmo’s enigma which is of the earth but could only live within culture, and to Marc Goethal’s interior view of an exterior flight, showing us birds through their absence.