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Roy Arden, The world as Will and Representation, 1989-2007 |
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The Order of Things takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled The World as Will and Representation, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden, who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition, selects the visual motifs for his recent digital photo-collages.
In The Order of Things, this image archive’s use of a stringent classificatory logic – alphabetical and thus eminently logical, yet also often bizarre in its ordering of one ‘class’ of images after another – operates as a curatorial trigger for a sustained reflection upon the various uses of archives, databases, encyclopaedias, typologies and other ‘ordering devices’ [the title being an allusion to a well-known book by the historian of dis/order, Michel Foucault] as methods and strategies for confronting the delirious spectacle of the contemporary image world.
The conceptual horizon of the Internet figures as one of the exhibition’s defining parameters – hence the centrality accorded to Arden’s own The World as Will and Representation in the exhibition, hence also the inclusion of one of Thomas Ruff’s emblematic “jpeg” photographs, or of Joachim Schmid’s exploration of the aesthetic of the ordered everyday in the depths of flickr. In some sense, The Order of Things views the world as a universe entirely made up out of images/pictures and only made accessible to us through images/pictures.
Two types of profusion are at work in this exhibition. One pertains to the brute fact of the visual abundance characteristic of contemporary society proper – the realization of the world’s overwhelming visual riches, and the mirror effect it creates in any art that seeks to respond to this relative wealth by replicating it. Here we find the rationale for the exhibition’s own character of visual overload – the sheer quantity of work on display that consists, precisely, of picturing [or imaging/imagining] quantity. Secondly, there is also the fact of the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual abundance that characterizes the image-world – hence also the heterogeneity of artistic responses to this fact: not only is it an art of visual plenty, it is also one of irreducible differences and differentiations.
Photography will be the dominant medium in the exhibition; it is the technical innovation of photography and of the ideally limitless reproducibility of its images, that has transformed our experience of the world into an overwhelmingly visual one. Furthermore, photography has also contributed decisively to the democracy of imagery that is implied in the exhibition’s conceptual make-up: as a project, The Order of Things would be entirely unthinkable without the democratization of image production that was ushered in by the popularization of photography.
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Richard Prince, Untitled, Cowboys, 1990 |
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Roy Arden, Down There, 2007 |
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Robert Rauschenberg, Signs, 1970 |
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Marjolijn Dijkman, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Gestures ongoing photgraphic research since 2005 |
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Marjolijn Dijkman, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Gestures ongoing photgraphic research since 2005 |
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Cameron Jamie, The Neotoma Tape, 1993 |
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Cameron Jamie, The Neotoma Tape, 1993 |
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view with Cameron Jamie and Christopher Williams |
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Hans Eijkelboom, Photonotes, 2006 |
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Hans Eijkelboom, Photonotes 8.November.1992 |
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Daniel Faust, United Nations, 2006-2007 |
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Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece # 70 In Process 1971-1974 |
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Julian Rosefeldt, Global Soap, 2001-2002 |
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Peter Piller, Installation of Zeitungen + Bookworks : a complete survey of publications by Archiv Peter Piller |
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Luis Jacob, Album II, 2004 |
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view with Els Van Den Meersch, Peter Piller, Steven Shearer |
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Arthur Lipsett, N-Zone, 1970 copyright National Film Board of Canada |
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Mark Manders and Rogier Willems, Newspaper of 5, 1999-2001 |
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Tine Melzer, The Complete Dictionnary, 2003 |
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view with Tine Melzer and Roma publications |
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Sanja Ivekovic, Double Life (1959-1975), 1976 |
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Steven Shearer, List, 2006 |
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Marc Nagtzaam, A certain Amount of Words within a ertain Amount of Time 267-351, 2006-2008 |
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Batia Suter, Parallel Encyclopaedia |
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Batia Suter, Parallel Encyclopaedia (detail) |
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Els Vanden Meersch, Rooms, 2006 |
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Gef Geys, Alle zwart-wit foto's tot 1998 |
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Gef Geys, Alle zwart-wit foto's tot 1998 |
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Noland, Cady, Oozewald, 1989 |
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view with Thomas Ruff and Richard Prince |
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Roy Arden, Collages 2007 |
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Sigmar Polke, Amerikanisch-Mexikanische Grenze, 1984 courtesy Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden |
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het M HKA is een
