P2P

Etienne Bossut, ‘Grand Laocoon’, 2004.
Photo: Aurelien Mole.
To the right: Laocoon translucide, 2005.

REVIEW

Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg
26 January – 6 April

Reviewed by: Natacha Wagner

After the much debated exhibition ‘Cloaca’ by Flemish artist Wim Delvoye, the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain presents three new projects, amongst which is the exhibition ‘P2P’ conceived by a Paris-based group of young curators Le Bureau/, whose aim is to question the form of the exhibition as a medium. Their project explores the notions of reproduction, perpetuation and circulation of shapes, gestures or processes in space and time. They started out from a reflection on the P2P downloading system, also known as peer-to-peer, which they apply to and confront with the discourse on the sites and forms for constructing, experiencing and understanding works of art; that is, the medium of the exhibition itself. Thus the curatorial group tries to reproduce the file-sharing system of peer-to-peer by activating a network of exchanges over the course of the exhibition’s duration, which engages mainly other art centres or museums in various European countries. This is achieved by the addition of works of art coming from the network as well as the withdrawal of others for circulation in the same network – a tendency that has increased significantly in recent years. Indeed, many museums and art galleries such as the Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum in New York now display their permanent collections as a series of temporary exhibitions to challenge the seemingly fixed characteristics of their permanent displays. A change of display at Casino Luxembourg was thus performed on 17 February.

But above all, the very notion of reproduction, as in Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, is being questioned here. For example, Keith Sanborn’s four-minute long video montage of copyright warnings recorded from commercial videotapes The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin as told by Keith Sanborn (1996), deals with one of the outcomes of peer-to-peer practices: copyright infringement. Or Jacques André’s wall installation Achats à repetition, no 23 (2008) comprising 100 copies of the same record by a group called Cluster, which challenges the authority of originality and thus involves the loss of the original due to repetition. The notion of multiplication also appears in his showcase Neu! Neu! Neu! (2008), displaying a collection of the last 100 records, videos and books he purchased.

While Walter Benjamin argued that the ‘aura’ of the original, unique work of art was lost to reproducibility by means of the typical and central new forms of the twentieth century that emerged through the technologies of mass reproduction including printing and photography, the ‘P2P’ project also presents several works that were once regarded as a quintessential example of the ‘authentic’ work of art: that is, painting and sculpture. Thus Etienne Bossut’s multicoloured sculpture Grand Laocoon (2004), consisting of a series of casts of a chair designed by Marc Newson, raises questions about the dominant postmodern artistic practice of the appropriation of forms. Employing a single material (plastic), he faithfully reproduces objects taken from daily life or the history of art. In other words, modern technology has allowed Bossut to capture objects and reproduce them as often as he likes, thus subverting the traditional conventions between original and copy. As does a series of five paintings by Italian artist Gabriele di Matteo, reproducing a 1950s photograph of Jorge Luis Borge, his eyes shut tight. In The Blind Man (1998) the portrait of Borges is repeated in five nearly identical paintings, each slightly different from each other due to the painter’s inevitably uneven execution. As such, painting itself has become the dreaded reproducing agent, generating copies of images like the mechanical or digital means of reproduction.

Though the ‘P2P’ project deals with the worldwide phenomenon of technical reproduction, which reached a standard throughout the twentieth century that permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art, the exhibition is lacking in one element. It fails to explain how the revolutionary means of reproduction not only caused the most profound change in their impact upon the public but also captured a place of its own among the artistic process. Indeed, few of the proposals in the exhibition engage a critical understanding of the historical transformation of the function of art and artistic production in the age of mechanical reproduction. To put it somewhat differently, the ‘P2P’ project only succeeds to a limited extent in showing the repercussions that the reproduction of works of art have had on art in its traditional form. As Walter Benjamin has argued, mechanical reproduction emancipated the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. That is, the work of art has become the work of art designed for reproducibility.

Moreover one gets the impression that Le Bureau/ has put too many a curatorial concept in the exhibition, while it would have been worth considering only one or two aspects of peer-to-peer practices. One gets lost in and overwhelmed by the great diversity of pieces, which raise too many different issues of the peer-to-peer system though their interrelations, and the project remains incomprehensible and inaccessible to many people who have no artistic background. One is indeed most likely overcome with a frustrated feeling of not necessarily understanding the dialogues between the works of art. Furthermore the exhibition ‘P2P’ provides practically no information about the works on display except for a short press release, thus allowing the visitor to experience and appreciate the works of art in their cultural, social and historical context only to a certain extent. Nevertheless, the ‘P2P’ project takes an interesting look at some of the questions foregrounded by the development of peer-to-peer strategies in the field of visual arts.

INTERFACE

REVIEW

P2P

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