28/01/12 - 31/03/12
John Baldessari, Pierre Bismuth, Mario Garcia Torres, Robert Heinecken, Joachim Koester, Jonathan Monk, Stephen Prina
A Corral around Your Idea

Installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

A Corral around Your Idea, installation view at Jan Mot, 2012 ( from left to right: Pierre Bismuth and Jonathan Monk, Baldessari Sings LeWitt in Lithuanian, 2001, video projection, black and white, mono sound, 12 min. 33 sec., ed. of 4 + 2 AP ; Robert Heinecken, Lessons In Posing Subjects: (One Hand/Hip-Thumb Axis Variant), 1982, eight unique SX-70 Polaroid prints mounted on BFK paper, letterpress title and text, 15 x 20 in / 38.1 x 50.8 cm, ed. of 10 ;  Robert Heinecken, Lessons In Posing Subjects: Standard Pose #5 (Hand/Clothing), 1982, eight unique SX-70 Polaroid prints mounted on BFK paper, letterpress title and text, 15 x 20 in / 38.1 x 50.8 cm, ed. of 10 ;  Robert Heinecken, Lessons In Posing Subjects/Maintaining Facial Expressions (Male), 1981, five unique SX-70 Polaroid prints mounted on BFK paper, letterpress title and text, 15 x 20 in / 38.1 x 50.8 cm, ed. of 10 ; Joachim Koester , Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, 2011, 16mm film, black and white, silent, 8 min. 15 sec., ed. of 5 + 1 AP)

Installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

A Corral around Your Idea, installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

Installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

Mario Garcia Torres , Prop for a Portrait as Alighiero Boetti, 2011, guitar in wood; vintage gelatin silver print by Paolo Mussat Sartor, framed, guitar: 21,3 x 88 x 8,5 cm; photo: 15,4 x 19,3 cm (image), 52 x 42 cm (frame), Ed. of 3 + 1 AP, installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

Installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

Stephen Prina, Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet 85 of 556: Pivoines dans une bouteille, 1864 Private collection, New York, 1990, 1990, two panels: left: ink wash on rag, barrier paper, right: offset lithograph on paper, left: 63,5 x 53,5 cm, right: 66 x 83 cm, unique, installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

Installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

Stephen Prina, Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet 227 of 556: Baigneuses en Seine, 1874? Museu de Arte, Sao Paulo, March 7, 2011, 2011, two panels: left: ink wash on rag, barrier paper, right: offset lithograph on paper, left: 132 x 98 cm, right: 66 x 83 cm, unique, installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

Installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

John Baldessari, Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), 1973, Fourteen offset prints in letterpress printed slipcase, 24,1 x 32,1 cm, Published by Giampaolo Prearo editore – Galleria Toselli, Milan, Ed. of 2.000, installation view at Jan Mot, 2012

A Corral around your Idea

Using John Baldessari's seminal Throwing Three Balls In The Air To Get A Straight Line (Best of 36 Attempts) as a starting point, the exhibition intends to investigate several possible uses of reference within post-conceptual practices, highlighting a condition of coming-after that characterizes numerous contemporary positions and pointing to different ways in which it can be embodied.

The exhibited works put into function various ways of interacting with the presence of a precedent, constituting forms of living-on of the historicized works from which they depart while building parallel systems of meaning onto them. These relationships are neither genealogical nor historical - nor even diachronical, since older works can constantly be reactivated - and is equally distant from the anxiety of influence characteristic of high modernism and the postmodern joy of citation. Rather, it seeks to reactivate the open-endedness of the precedent, building on strategic analogies or deconstructionist intent more than literal connections, and to recontextualize it within new frames of reference.

Some of the works, such as in Mario Garcia Torres' photographs Saying Goodbye to Ships, are in almost literal reference to Baldessari, while others bear more oblique marks of his practice: Joachim Koester's Variations, for instance, may be considered as an indirect reference to Baldessari’s rendition of Sol LeWitt's Sentences and points to the centrality of appropriative strategies in his own work.

The show included works by John Baldessari, Pierre Bismuth, Mario Garcia Torres, Robert Heinecken, Joachim Koester, Jonathan Monk and Stephen Prina.