The Raft, Martini Projects, May 2012, Göteborg
Interview April 2012
Jane Philbrick: Why did you come to art school?
Verena Gillmeier: Maybe I can tell you why I did not come to art school for a very long time before. And that’s actually quite a funny logic that I unconsciously built in my thoughts, which is that I always wanted to work with art and it’s such a cliché but it’s true. It was just always the place where I wanted to be in my thoughts and with my work and the people surrounding me. Somehow I didn’t let myself do this for a very, very long time. I was thinking everyone should want that, being with the arts, probably everyone wants that already but not so many people do that so maybe you need not to do that.
So I didn’t do it straight away. I took a path that seemed to me a little bit more realistic. And then I was struggling with the fashion (…), although there were things that I really loved about this programme – the human, the projection, and the surface. Things are applied to and taken, extracted from. I like this giving and taking from the human body. Not only the body but also the psychological aspects, historical aspects, and of course aesthetically. I like humans. I like, just, geometrics. Art you can always enter in a free way.
JP: What does “free” mean to you?
VG: There’s more depth and you’re free to choose which depth you want to be in. That’s what I appreciate so much about the artists Fischli & Weiss – that there are different depths to enter the piece. You can think about it forever or for just one exhibition. I think that’s a quality. But of course with the arts it’s difficult.
I remember once we had a conversation about – ah ! so naïve – I think it was in the first year, in a classroom, and we talked about what art is and I remember I got really upset and I said, “Why even talk about that? Why not accept that there are different kinds of art and the links to that, like talking about, I think it’s George Dickie who explains about the appreciation of art that art has to be an artifact plus it must be appreciated by a certain group – and that’s what I related to. There has to be an art scene. And there are different art scenes. There’s an independent, like an alternative art scene, there’s a deeply institutionalized art scene, one that we’re thrown into now coming from an academy.
So for me, there’s a mature approach to art, like art for the creation’s sake or just for the joy of creation. There’re so many, there’re so many art scenes. And for me, it’s, like, where do you want to be? It’s like starting a relationship with somebody. Like, anywhere it’s fun to work with what you have and what you get.
Verena Gillmeier’s (born in Germany, 1984) work display a preoccupation with the elusive immaterial features of the artwork, combined with an incantation of the always-insisting aesthetics that lay down the conditions for any (artistic) utterance. Through a revisiting of the production modes of, for instance, the ready made, conceptualist strategies, or creative writing, Verena has in her Valand projects continuously negotiated between the aesthetic and the conceptual, taking us from meditations on modernist sculptural and pictorial idioms, consumerism and commodification, to collective practices and “bohemian research.”
In Verena’s Masters Thesis project, Art School, this pervading tension between an anti-aesthetic stance and hands-on production, theoretical abstraction and practical process, manifests itself in the form of an actual educational institution. The generically titled project addresses learning as a shared experience, by means of a post-relational aesthetic that underscores immateriality, resisting documentation. Here she puts into practice the momentary and collectively defined social aspects of the educational situation, zooming in on the increasingly ambiguous location of the “art school” – within or in the vicinity of the art world – an ambiguity all the more obvious with the notion of the ‘art school’ becoming an increasingly important facet of critical discussions on contemporary art. As much as one can sense a longing to revisit the classic examples of Bauhaus or Black Mountain College, there is also the urgent quest of reshaping outdated models of art education in the face of a reality that demands new and different skills from a nebulous character sharing the title “artist” with his or her precursors.
Inspired by a Platonist notion of the academy, a seemingly democratic form of education based on dialogue, Art School offers a setup where the double and supplementary function of the art school/student (being both outside and inside the general art institution) is brought to the fore by addressing the educational aspects of art as such. Not as in didactics, conveying a tendency, but learning as a basic form of art production, where the communal functions as a platform for production – of things, forms, concepts, experience, knowledge, and social relations.
This can of course only take place through actual production and collective experiences, and thus Art School offers a series of different classes that comprise an exhibited curriculum – where the seminar, lesson, and workshop becomes a democratic teaching/learning machine that serves as the medial support of the work. From conducting an Ikebana workshop to dramatically staging artist’s confessions, from slapstick research to creativity seminars – Art School is an inquiry into possible modes of art production that can renegotiate the ineffective paradigms of student/artist, art/research, art school/art world.
Nils Olsson, May, 2012
28th April - 19th May 2012
Opening Speech 28th April 2012 3 pm at Vasa Konsthall, Göteborg
Opening hours:
Tue - Thu: 12 noon - 6 pm
Fri: 12 noon - 5 pm
Sat - Sun: 12 noon - 4 pm
Programme:
Sunday 29th April 2012: Ikebana Workshop
Saturday 5th May 2012: How Nice
Saturday 12th May 2012: Press Show
Sunday 13th May 2012: Shared Seminar
Saturday 19th May 2012: Champagne Closing (TBC)
Cantine Zanieri Red 13,5°
90% Sangiovese 10% Merlot (Italy)
Curated by Verena Gillmeier (Germany), Max Ronnersjö (Sweden)
Tuscany is without doubt one of those wine regions that give some of the most important reds in the world. It is a region full of tradition, known for its beautiful landscapes, its rich artistic legacy and vast influence on high culture – and wine. The term “Super Tuscan” describes any Tuscan red wine that does not adhere to traditional blending laws for the region. For example, Chianti Classico wines are made from a blend of grapes with Sangiovese as the dominant variety in the blend. Super Tuscans often use other grapes, especially cabernet sauvignon, making them ineligible for DOCG (Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita) classification under the traditional rules. For this exhibition we have curated one red wine from this region. Visitors are invited to enjoy, discuss and drink.
