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Jayne H. Baum

Susanna Cole and Erin Donnelly

Elena Filipovic

Ingrid LaFleur

Trong G. Nguyen

Olu Oguibe

Chika Okeke

Sandhini Poddar

Praxis

Ashkan Sahihi

Marketa Uhlirova




 Tomorrow the work (tomorrow the one) will come
Elena Filipovic

Typically, the work of art is present and visible, it is shown in an exhibition. Such is, after all, the idea behind the act of “exhibiting” (verb. to demonstrate, to put on display). Beginning and end dates define the duration and the gallery’s (often) white walls establish the site of the work’s presentation as part of an exhibition. But what if the show opens and then closes and a participating artist’s contribution—listed somewhere so that there is seeming evidence of its existence—couldn’t be seen or otherwise aesthetically experienced? What if it will only exist as such, which is to say, as an aesthetic object, at another time and in another place and yet its participation in the exhibition (and your participation as the visitor) is crucial to that existence? Could one consider that it had been exhibited there and then, at that moment and in that space of the exhibition when you saw it on the work list?

These and other questions haunt the work of Croatian artist Tomo Savic-Gecan. Time and space (architecture is again and again probed in his questioning) as well as the object (the “work of art”) and the experience of it are often dislocated and disconnected in his various projects. Visitors that entered an exhibition in Utrecht unknowingly set an escalator in a Zagreb shopping mall in motion (untitled, 2001). Each visitor in an art center in Amsterdam was asked to decide on the entry price for the visitor that would come in next (untitled, 2002). People who called a New York exhibition’s information number heard the curators’ interpretations of a work of art that had no material existence except insofar as the communication about the non-existent work, as one critic has pointed out, conjured its existence in print and through reference to it over time (untitled, 2004; some references ex nihilo endowed it with the title, Phone work). For a recent solo show in Brussels, the front window of the artist-run space was removed and sent to a Slovenian factory where it was transformed into 150 banal-looking drinking glasses; these were then sent back to Brussels and used for drinking during the duration of the exhibition in which the windowless opening was the evidence of what had taken place before the show began in order to constitute the “work” when the exhibition finally opened (untitled, 2005). In Venice for the current biennial, a line of text was placed on an exhibition space’s wall; it recounts that the number of visitors at that very moment entering an art center in Amsterdam impacts the temperature of a public pool in Tallinn (the pool having been programmed to receive the real time information and alter its temperature, ever so slowly and perhaps altogether imperceptibly, but nevertheless for real) (untitled, 2005). Between present and future, here and there, gallery space and shopping mall/telephone line/public pool/factory: distance dissolves and time stutters.

What more prophetic a work than one that exists in the future? And who more likely to be “the One” (messianic, announcing what will be) than the artist whose oeuvre consistently undoes stable notions of where and when we and the work take place, pressing us to revise the idea that the work of art can or should be experienced as a totality and in the present. To inaugurate the NGC 224 gallery, Savic-Gecan is having every entry and exit in the gallery recorded, timed, and memorized. The device used to do this is not a work of art. The information gathered will be used to determine the form and details of something that one might call an artwork. But only later and elsewhere. In the meantime, there will be no label for the recording device and, as might be expected, no title. The project itself will never be able to be collected or preserved or even exhibited in the usual sense of those terms. And, given what I’ve told you, you will understand, perhaps, that it could not be otherwise. Do not forget, however, that the present as you, dear visitor, determine it with your comings and goings in the space in which you now stand is, then, nothing more or less than the condition of possibility for a work of art that will one day become...And the paradox is that that already is also a work of art.


About the curator
Elena Filipovic is an art critic and independent curator based in Brussels and completing a Ph.D. in art history at Princeton University. She was assistant curator for Utopia Station (50th Venice Biennale 2003 and Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2004) and Do You Believe in Reality?(Taipei Biennial, Taipei, 2004). She contributes regularly to Frieze and has published articles in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, Perfect magazine, Artpress, and Domus. Most recently, she curated Ideal Standard (Brussels, 2004) and co-edited The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (Roomade and MIT Press, 2005).