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Warren Neidich
Librarie, Library.
Project commences: Tuesday, June 14th in the ICA Bookstore.
The
English translation of the French word ‘Librarie’ is a bookshop, whereas
‘Library’ means a place where one can borrow a book. As such these terms,
which share common roots, manifest and organize very different economic
exchanges, social processes and institutional connections.
Blurring the boundaries between exhibition space and commercial units
within institutions, and commenting on the interchange of pure and
commoditised knowledge, Warren Neidich reconfigures notions of value,
possession and exchange at the ICA bookshop.
Neidich has asked each of the nine curators
of I.D.E.A.London to choose one book from the bookshop that they feel most
concisely and incisively helps delineate the theoretical and conceptual
underpinnings of their curatorial project. Those nine books will remain in
the same ‘subject’ contexts and places already assigned to them by the
bookstore staff. They will be labelled to distinguish from the other books
on the shelves and made available to the public as books, which can be
borrowed. If the users get interested in one of these books, they won’t be
able to buy it, they could instead borrow it.
The
visitors will be asked to leave some symbolic identity details to sign the
book out, but are kindly expected to return the book within a day, so that
more people can borrow the books. The work will ‘fade out’ after the end
of I.D.E.A.London on 17 June 2005…
Warren Neidich,
Goldsmiths College, London. Neidich believes that a role of the artist
is to enlarge the notion of what art is and what it can be. Art is a
continually expanding universe of possibilities that through its
interaction with other discourses generates new languages with which the
mind can play and create. He uses photography, cinema, and new media to
discover the ways that aesthetic practice, philosophy, architecture, and
design interface in abstract ways with new ideas of perceptual becoming
such as neuro-plasticity and neural Darwinism. Together they reconfigure
and revitalize conceptual based practice as new means to produce and
distribute information… In the end these co-evolving systems form a
collective choreography produce ways to understand the construction of
global subjectivities, what he refers to as Earthling. He calls this
methodology "Neuroaesthetics" a term he coined in 1995 in a series of
lectures he presented at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. His
work has been internationally exhibited in such institutions as the
Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Ludwig
Museum, Köln, Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and
the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota just to name a few. Recent
group shows include Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway,
the Institute of Contemporary Art, London and the Contemporary Art Center,
Vilnius. A planned one-person show will occur at the Michael Steinberg
Gallery, New York City this fall where he will present his "Earthling"
project for the first time. He is the American representative at the
Glenfiddich Artistic Residency, Scotland for the summer of 2005. He is the
author of Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (2003). |
