이태리의 유진 비올라는 아브라모빅과 폴 매카시, Sk-Interfaces의 전시를 올해의 베스트로 뽑았다.
Eugenio Viola is a critic and Project Room curator at Madre Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, Italy.
Marina Abramović, Paul McCarthy, “Sk-Interfaces”
Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, 2010, Performance view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Photo: Marco Anelli.
“The Artist Is Present,” Marina Abramović’s dazzling retrospective at MoMA, was certainly among the finer exhibitions of 2010. Beyond the complex and constant play of references in her oeuvre, the show spectacularly reasserted the presence of the artist/shaman through a durational performance and a controversial decision to re-enact her historical performances. This was a solution that succeeded on a curatorial level, where the effect was unquestionable, as well as on a theoretical level: Abramović affirmed the radical subversion hic et nunc of the performative act while managing to stall the attenuation of “presence” that is a consequence of theatrical recreations.
“Pig Island,” Paul McCarthy’s first retrospective in Italy, was also noteworthy. The exhibition at the Palazzo Citterio (organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi) was a journey into the artist’s hallucinatory weltanschauung, made via residual traces of past performances and found objects, all staging outrageous situations, verging on the obscene. Each installation presented pairs of figures that challenged boundaries and broke interpretive registers. The space as neutral container was transformed by the convergence of McCarthy’s works, and therein the social dynamics of politics and culture were subjected to symbolic, devastating, tragicomic and self-satisfied bad taste.
By contrast, “Sk-Interfaces,” which closed in early 2010 at the Casino Luxembourg, disrupted the present state of affairs and exposed artistic practices thriving on the margins. The exhibition investigated the best of Biotech art by focusing on an abrupt rematerialization of the art object in the passage from net art to wet art. Here, artists––faithful seismographers of their own time––absorbed the speed of technological innovation with a lucid madness, appropriating biotechnologies and genetic engineering while participating in the gradual spread of technology and science to the world of art. Standout pieces in the exhibition by Eduardo Kac, ORLAN, Stelarc, and Art Orienté objet, among others, were emblematic of these contemporary approaches.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
