Morality In Fragments

By Aaron Schuster, Alex Ersan, Hu Fang and 2 more

The year-long Morality program at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art was structured as a series of interrelated Acts that began in the Fall of 2009 and ran until November 2010. After years of contemplation, deliberation and retrospection, this book Morality in Fragments, is the final Act that summarizes and concludes the loaded Morality project.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Witte de With
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9789073362970

Book preview

MORALITY

IN FRAGMENTS

WITTE DE WITH

CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION:What’s Morality?

ACT I:Beautiful from Every Point of View

ACT II:From Love to Legal

ACT III:And the moral of the story is…

ACT IV:I Could Live in Africa

ACT V:Power Alone

ACT VI:Remember Humanity

ACT VII:Of Facts and Fables

ACT VIII:Nether Land

ACT IX:Let Us Compare Mythologies

ACT X:Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality

Between You and I

Web-Platform

TEXTS BY:Aaron Schuster, Alev Ersan, Hu Fang, Michael Stevenson, Peter Wächtler

INTRODUCTION: What’s Morality?

Morality is a multi-faceted project that was presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) in 2009 and 2010.

While there are certain moral principles that are usually unquestioned (the right to life, for instance), morality remains ambivalent and amorphous in terms of the principles it provides for humans acting in the world. It is these amorphous areas, these gray zones, that this project sought to address, particularly in how they form a difficult aspect of our reality today.

Morality is an invitation to reflect and debate situations in contemporary life that refuse clear distinctions between right and wrong, what is and what ought to be. As a whole, this project has been defined by a desire – inherent to contemporary art – to open spaces for active, engaged forms of spectatorship that are not predetermined by either moral or ideological imperatives.

Morality is a provocative theme, especially in a world that is now determined by the experiences of war, displacement, political and economic crises, the rise of religious stereotypes, and the radicalization of seemingly old doctrines and ideologies. Morality is also a broad subject that affects everybody in many different ways. From the bathroom to the parliament, there is a total field of social engagement, in which morality functions without boundaries, between a set of abstract, intangible, and general ideas. Morality is neither a base nor a superstructure, but a smooth network of influences that operates outside the law, governing both regulated and unregulated social spaces, and affecting daily lives in subtle, seductive, unexpected ways. Yet, there is not a unique or purely affirmative sense that one can give to this notion. A number of moral attitudes – often at odds with one another – inform the positions that, as political subjects, we assume vis-à-vis the events that take place in our world.

Seemingly simple, but also disturbingly difficult to grasp, morality is an ideal leitmotiv for a project that sought to explore critical points of fragmentation in everyday life.

Rather than presenting statements that can be perceived as being right or wrong, good or evil, the project Morality aimed to create a space for showing a wide range of attitudes that problematize a total conception of morality, focusing on the less tangible forces and attitudes that shape common thinking and behavior.

The year-long Morality program at Witte de With was structured as a series of interrelated Acts that began in the Fall of 2009 and ran until November 2010. The project included six in-house exhibitions: Beautiful from Every Point of View (10 October 2009 – 10 January 2010); From Love to Legal (10 October 2009 – 7 February 2010) curated Juan A. Gaitán and Nicolaus Schafhausen, assisted by Anne-Claire Schmitz; I Could Live in Africa curated by Michał Wolinski, Anne-Claire Schmitz, and Nicolaus Schafhausen; Power Alone (both 20 February – 25 April 2010); Remember Humanity (13 May – 29 August 2010); and Of Facts and Fables (13 May – 26 September 2010) curated by Juan A. Gaitán and Nicolaus Schafhausen, assisted by Amira Gad. It included one satellite exhibition Nether Land (20 June – 11 July 2010) at the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai as part of the World Expo 2010, curated by Monika Szewczyk and Nicolaus Schafhausen, assisted by Amira Gad.

Also presented as part of the Morality project were: A film cycle tilted And the moral of the story is… (4 – 7 February 2010) curated by Zoë Gray, assisted by Hessel de Ronde. Let Us Compare Mythologies (18 – 20 June 2010), a performance program curated by Renske Janssen and Dorothea Jendricke that took place at Witte de With and other venues in Rotterdam. Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality (19 – 20 November 2010), a symposium including master-classes organized by Juan A. Gaitán, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Monika Szewczyk, and assisted by Amira Gad. And four interventions on Witte de With’s façade under the umbrella of "Between You and I" (10 October 2009 – 31 December 2010) curated by Anne-Claire Schmitz and Nicolaus Schafhausen, in collaboration with Fulya Erdemci from SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte, Amsterdam) that presented works by AES+F, Ayse Erkmen, Isa Genzken, and Maider López. Beyond the exhibitions, online visitors were invited to participate by contributing to a web-platform, initiated by Belinda Hak, conceived together with Marijke Goeting, and designed by Richard Vijgen.

The Acts were structured and conceived as tentative hypotheses, casting an unusual light on important themes in contemporary political thought and realities. After years of contemplation, deliberation, and retrospection, this book Morality in Fragments, is the final Act that summarizes and concludes the loaded Morality project.

The title of Act I: Beautiful from Every Point of View derives from Horace’s famous aphorism of the first century BCE, nothing is beautiful from every point of view. Not so long ago, under a regime of the imagination that took Truth and Beauty to be inseparable, this statement would have seemed incongruous. Today, however, Horace’s sentence is little more than a platitude, increasingly deployed in a rhetoric, in which any point of view, and any action, can find its justification merely in its right to exist.

This first Act brought together a selection of works that refuse to assert an immediate, self-evident point of view on the subjects they represent. The works ranged from poignant simulations of the capitalist sublime, to humorous commentaries on the relationship between struggle and power, aiming at the grace that we inhabit between images and power.

Featured artists:

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Marko Lulić, Kris Martin, Josephine Meckseper, Sarah Morris, Ron Terada, Tobias Zielony, Artur Żmijewski.

Performances by Spartacus Chetwynd.

— Curated by Juan A. Gaitán and Nicolaus Schafhausen, assisted by Anne-Claire Schmitz. Performance program curated by Renske Janssen.

fig. I.1

Josephine Meckseper

Thank a Vet, 2008

Walker, mannequin legs, socks, toilet

mat, metal clip stand, steel wool, box

of underwear, toilet brush, mannequin

chest, T-shirt, motor oil container,

Plexiglas cube, 69 × 240 × 120 cm

fig. I.2

Josephine Meckseper

(left) Sanitätshaus Hofmann No. 1

2007

Photograph C-print, 160 × 233 cm

(right) Nußdorf Sanitätshaus

Hofmann No. 2, 2007

Photograph C-print, 160 × 233 cm

fig. I.3

Marko Lulić

Fragment of a Modernist

Monument made to fit the foyer

of Witte de With, 2009

Poplar wood, paint

Dimensions variable

fig. I.4

Ron Terada

(left) Voight Kampff, 2008

HD-DVD / Blue-ray disc

2’ loop

fig. I.5

Kris Martin

(right) Mandi VIII, 2006

Plaster

221 × 150 × 100 cm

fig. I.6

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

(left) Tennille, 2004

Fuji Crystal C-print mounted on Dibond

152.4 × 100.3 cm

fig. I.7

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

(middle) William Charles Everlove,

26 years old; Stockholm, Sweden,

via Arizona; $40, 1990 – 1992

Ektacolor print, 51 × 61 cm

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

(right) Ike Cole, 38, Los Angeles,

CA, $25, 1990

Ektacolor Professional print

40 × 60 cm

fig. I.8

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

(left) Mike Vincetti, 24, NYC or

Tulsa, OK, $30, 1990 – 1992

C-print

76 × 101 cm

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

(middle) Brent Booth; 21 years old;

Des Moines; Iowa; $30, 1990 – 1992

C-print

76.2 × 101.6 cm

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

(right) André Smith, 28 years old;

Baton Rouge,Louisiana, $30,

1991 Ektacolor print

76 ×101 cm

Featured Artists

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs focus on relatively marginal subjects – pole-dancers and hustlers, for instance – with a strange logic based both on an aesthetics of glamor (Helmut Newton, for instance) and an aesthetic of individual emancipation (Richard Avedon), refusing to opt for either of these strategies. The subjects in the photographs are thus left in an ambiguous process of fictionalization of the body that is inimical to the emancipation of an individual subjectivity.

Marko Lulić’s Fragment of a Modernist Monument uses the bombastic and abstracted modernist monuments from the Communist era, under Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, as a point of departure. These monuments, idealized and heroic, were scattered all around the country in the public realm. He strips these monuments or fragments of them out of their original context, shrinks them, and reconstructs them with cheap materials into new locations. Lulić’s work explores the connection between form and ideology, architecture and power politics, and reflects the failure of systems and ideals.

Kris Martin’s Mandi VIII is a plaster-cast replica of the famous classical sculpture Laocöon and his Sons. The snake has been removed, leaving the actors of this epic drama to wrestle an absent or intangible force, suggesting a panoptical theme of power and struggle: the disappearance of an identifiable origin, and the replacement of an ethereal, intangible power whose effects are disturbingly real. Martin’s sculpture thus adds a contemporary allegory to a figure whose allegorical connotations had for a long time been reduced to a specific Greek tragedy. It also reinforces the fact that our present continues to expand its relationship to that remote past from which we are ontologically distant yet fatally tied through a lexicon that informs most of our political ideologies.

Josephine Meckseper’s sculpture and photographs make reference to the ease with which our culture brings together images of power, militarism, home, and consumption, replicating thus the contemporary drive to make power operative in every available social space. Yet, Meckseper indicates this by creating sculptures and arrangements, in which the different elements are kept clearly distinct, making it impossible to perceive them as a total system. In other words, Meckseper’s work aims to reveal the non-identical nature of the systems that operate in our everyday lives, presenting a perhaps naïve or hopeful alternative, in which distinctions between different modes of living and different experiences of everyday life may be able to regain autonomy vis-à-vis the totalitarian system that capitalism presents us.

Sarah Morris’ Beijing is an epic eulogy to a corporate aesthetic intensely involved in displacing all other relationships to reality. The film reveals how a cold, clinical construction of society intersects with ostensibly disinterested events such as the Olympic Games. Adopting the neutral, uninvolved mood that is commonly presented as intrinsic to high-definition audiovisual technology, Morris’ film points to the capacity we have to observe the world without taking part in it.

Ron Terada’s Voight Kampff is a videowall on which an image of a geisha plays in an endless loop. Upon closer examination, one realizes that there are three different women dressed almost identically. The title comes from the machine used in Blade Runner to identify replicants based on whether they are capable of having emotional responses. Terada’s work plays off ideas of the future that are at once archaic and impossible to dispel: the loss of emotion, overpopulation, and more importantly, the idea that humanity will only be able to see itself as one once it is confronted with an absolute other, be it an extraterrestrial or a cyborg, as long as this other is made, as it were, in the image of man.

Tobias Zielony’s Le Vele di Scampia is a neo-realist-inspired stroll through the Vele di Scampia, the infamous modernist housing project by architect Francesco di Salvo taken over by the Mafia since the 1970s. Commonly photographed from a distance as a decayed and abandoned project of post-World War II modernism, Zielony produced instead a stop-motion animation from thousands of photographs taken at night of the building’s exterior, interior and its inhabitants, producing a narrative of approach that starts with images taken from a distance, surrounding the building, entering, and finally revealing the people who inhabit it. Consistent with his former work, Zielony here presents us with a surprising, counterintuitive image of these marginal social spaces.

Artur Żmijewski’s Democracies poses a radically different image of the present, one that is at once more concrete and more expansive. Through a series of 23 vignettes, Żmijewski’s film presents a world, in which democratic ideals are at odds with the enactment of democratic rights. Quickly one notices in Żmijewski’s poignant video that the right of expression (manifestation, protest, self representation) often intersects with ideologies of power and supremacy, xenophobia, irrational nationalism, and especially with the replication or even revival of historically problematic symbolisms and sentiments. Consistent with his other works, Żmijewski forces the viewer to confront a series of moments that are aesthetically similar but profoundly different in content, asking us to question which of these will gain the upper hand, or reminding us of Marx’s dictum that, unable to invent everything from scratch, revolutions must by necessity begin as a costume drama.

Spartacus Chetwynd or Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (born Alalia Chetwynd, 1973) is a British artist known for reworkings of iconic moments from cultural history in deliberately amateurish and improvisatory performances. In 2012, she was nominated for the Turner Prize.

List of Works

fig. I.1

Josephine Meckseper

Thank a Vet, 2008

Walker, mannequin legs, socks, toilet mat, metal clip stand, steel wool, box of underwear, toilet brush, mannequin chest, T-shirt, motor oil container, Plexiglas cube, 69 × 240 × 120 cm

Courtesy Arndt & Partner, Berlin

fig. I.2

Josephine Meckseper

(left) Sanitätshaus Hofmann No. 1 2007

Photograph C-print, 160 × 233 cm

Courtesy Sammlung Klein,

(right) Nußdorf Sanitätshaus Hofmann No. 2, 2007

Photograph C-print, 160 × 233 cm

Courtesy Sammlung Klein, Nußdorf

fig. I.3

Marko Lulić

Fragment of a Modernist Monument made to fit the foyer of Witte de With 2009

Poplar wood, paint

Dimensions variable

Courtesy of the artist

fig. I.4

Ron Terada

Voight Kampff, 2008

HD-DVD/ Blue-ray disc, 2’ loop

Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery,

Vancouver

fig. I.5

Kris Martin

Mandi VIII, 2006

Plaster, 221 × 150 × 100 cm

Courtesy of David Roberts Art Foundation, London

fig. I.6

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Tennille, 2004

Fuji Crystal C-print mounted on Dibond, 152.4 × 100.3 cm

Courtesy Galerie Rodolphe Janssen,

Brussels

fig. I.7

(left) William Charles Everlove, 26 years old; Stockholm, Sweden, via Arizona; $40, 1990 – 1992

Ektacolor print, 51 × 61 cm

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York and Sprüth Magers, Berlin

(right) Ike Cole, 38, Los Angeles, CA, $25, 1990

Ektacolor Professional print 40 × 60 cm

Courtesy Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels

fig. I.8

(left) Mike Vincetti, 24, NYC or Tulsa, OK, $30, 1990 – 1992

C-print, 76 × 101 cm

Courtesy Galerie Almine Rech, Brussels/Paris

(middle) Brent Booth; 21 years old; Des Moines; Iowa; $30, 1990 – 1992

C-print, 76.2 × 101.6 cm

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York and Sprüth Magers, Berlin

(right) André Smith, 28 years old; Baton Rouge,Louisiana, $30, 1991

Ektacolor print, 76 × 101 cm

Courtesy Galerie Almine Rech,

Brussels/Paris

Sarah Morris

Beijing, 2008

35 mm / HD, 84’47"

Courtesy of the artist

Tobias Zielony

Le Vele di Scampia, 2009

PAL HD, 8’47", loop

Courtesy of the artist and Galeria

Lia Rumma, Milan-Naples

Artur Żmijewski

Democracies, 2009

20 videos shown as single-channel video projection (23 films), 2’26"

Sound, color, with English subtitles

Courtesy of