Projects 1998
A Seminar on the Vernaculars of Representation
10 October 1998,
seminar at Casino Luxemburg –
Forum dī Art Contemporain in Luxemburg
In the last weekend of Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg, NIFCA organised a seminar in which three speakers addressed the issue of the vernaculars (or local languages) of representation in contemporary art.
Speakers: Ina Blom (NO), Jari Ehrnrooth (FIN) and Koen Brams (BE).
Concept: Mark Kremer
NIFCA'S SEMINAR FOR MANIFESTA 2
Date: Saturday, October 10, 1998
Place: Casino Luxembourg, Info Lab Manifesta
Time: 14.00 - 17.00 hrs
Title: Sancho Panza says: "History is a minor thing." A seminar on the vernaculars of representation
The Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA) is organising a seminar which will take place in the final weekend of the exhibition "Manifesta 2" in Luxemburg. The seminar will address the vernacular languages of representation that are brought into play by artists in the 1990s. This issue connects to one of the goals of "Manifesta", i.e. to be a platform for emerging artists from various European contexts.
Three speakers were invited to consider the following statement:
"In discussions about interesting art of the 1990s, the emphasis has been put on a new, international context which supposedly informs the work of contemporary artists. Art professionals have been eager to relate the art production from what used to be called the periphery to this context, to the effect that characteristics of art, in particular the way it relates to a local context and local histories, have been underemphasized."
PROGRAMME
14.00 Mark Kremer, exhibition coordinator NIFCA Introduction
14.15 Ina Blom, critic, writer, art historian Talk: "Vernacular's Double-Bind"
15.00 Jari Ehrnrooth, author, docent in Cultural History Talk: "Waiting for the Last Reality"
15.45 Koen Brains, chief editor De Witte Raaf Talk: "Manifesta 2 and the Notion of the Local"
16.30 Discussion Time
Before and after the seminar, the artist Natasja Boezem presents her sound installation "PESC - PESC - PESCI !" in the Info Lab.
Apropos of the seminar talks:
14.15 "Vernacular's Double-Bind"
Ina Blom: "The constellation of the terms `vernacular' and `local' poses several problems, which I will address by focusing on the art of an artist whose basic working material should be `close' to me in every way. So I will discuss the work of Olafur Eliasson. Its direct use of Icelandic (or high-mountain nordic) nature-experience is for me the essence of such a local vernacular. Yet, at the same time this vernacular is also difficult to define as such because of its equally immediate link to all the varieties of the sublime.
The nature-experiences one finds in the work of Olafur Eliasson hover very uncomfortably between the extreme local and the presumed 'universal'. Daniel Birnbaum has pointed out phenomenological aspects of this work, but beyond this assertion lies the more crucial question of what subjectivities these `phenomenological' objects evoke or address. It involves the difficult issue of cultural closeness and distance, and aims to take up the question of the binds and compulsions that are at the core of what we refer to as the vernacular."
15.00 "Waiting for the Last Reality"
Jari Ehrnrooth: "Ever since my childhood I've been waiting for real life, and now I can see what it has been in reality.
Why, I ask, this obsession for life as an unlimited narrative, a notebook of meanings in accidental fragments, put together post festum? And add opponent Macbeth: `Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.' Why this sincere echo always walking the way of a joker?"
15.45 "Manifesta 2 and the Notion of the Local"
Koen Brains: "I would like to find other ways to define the local, the exotic or provincialism, the problem being that the local, the exotic or provincialism are always defined negatively. If we stop thinking of the local as the opposite of the centre, what would be the result for our understanding of the local? Elaborating on the work of the fifties and sixties of a Belgian artist, Roger Raveel, I will try to reconceptualize the notion of the local.
After this account on the work of Roger Raveel, I will invite the public to travel with me to the nineties. In this decade globalization has become the keyword. What are the implications of this shift for our understanding and appreciation of the local and the vernacular? I will try to answer this question by going into art works which are shown at Manifesta 2."