Seth Siegelaub: Exhibitions, 2069
Collection of paintings from the Museum of American Art in Berlin
29.1.11 – 27.2.11
The Museum of American Art – Berlin presents the inaugural exhibition at xero, kline & coma, a new project space run by artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv.
The Museum of American Art, which opened its doors in 2004 in Berlin, contains a collection of paintings and objects that ‘repeat’ significant works from 20th century American-cum-International Art History. The Museum of American Art is the museum of The Museum of Modern Art, where “American” stands for “Modern” in the sense of “individualism”, “internationalism” and “progress”, an American story which was originally based only on European artifacts. It inverts the logic of the ready-made: in the case of the ready-mades, non-art objects are transformed into art objects by changing their context, while in MoAA traditional art objects like paintings are transformed into non-art artifacts. These exhibits function like souvenirs from an obsolete practice of art, selected specimens of our collective memory, set within a destabilized chronology of meta-art-history. From the future perspective of MoAA, the shock of the new is the shock of the old.
For Seth Siegelaub: Exhibitions, 2069, the Museum of American Art – Berlin will stage an exhibition about the history of exhibitions, based on Siegelaub’s exhibition catalogues from the late 1960s. These exhibitions expanded not only the notion of the artwork, but also the notion of the art exhibition.
