Tadej Pogačar / Quarter to two
13
April
2011
>
06
May
2011
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition of the 13th Year World of Art School on Wednesday, 13th April at 8 pm at the Alkatraz Gallery, Metelkova mesto.
You are also cordially invited to the guided tour through the exhibition of Tadej Pogačar Quarter to Two on Friday, 6th May at 6pm. Vladimir Vidmar, one of the curators and participants of the 13th year of the school World of Art, will present the exhibited art work. Other curators and participants will be present at the event, probably the artist as well.
World of Art; School for Curators and Critics of Contemporary Art; 13th year
Tadej Pogačar: Quarter to Two
Artist:
Tadej Pogačar
Curators:
Ana Grobler, Iva Kovač, Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Špela Pavli, Lara Plavčak, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko, Mojca Založnik
Tutors:
Jože Barši, Nevenka Šivavec
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In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art invited Tadej Pogačar and his institution P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. museum to intervene at the exhibition of works that had been recently included into the gallery’s collection. With his work, entitled
Fifteen to Two, Pogačar intervened in the exhibition by changing the gallery space into a waiting room. Above the main entrance into the room he hung a non-operating clock, set to fifteen minutes to two - the time when employees were already getting ready to leave their work posts for home. The exits leading into other exhibition spaces were marked with signs of the four directions, but not in the right order, and there were two rows of chairs in the middle of the space.
With minimal means and the formal gap between this work that has never found its way into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the exhibited ones that had become part of this collection, the artistic intervention appealed to the idea of waiting of the artist and the artworks for the competent institutions who have the authority to recognise, historicize, elevate or dump works of art.
Reformulation of the artwork
Fifteen to Two in 2011 does not mean the trendy
re-enactment, but stripping, radicalization of the position of production of knowledge. Pogačar enters the institution as a place of exposure, a space where classification and allocation are carried out, where there are mechanisms of institution at work: its order, its filters, codes and collections, enabling the construction of the history. That’s why Pogačar’s intention is not to pull down the institution, but - by showing the space that determines the methods and logic of selection – to show his position of entering and displaying at the same time. This is, however, an auto-productive discourse as the institution is not the one that produces the rules, but the rules themselves establish a certain phenomenon as an institution. In other words – it is the act of placing of some structural point under magnifying glass. If Pogačar has, with his original work within the pseudo-institution of P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. , entered into a specific, content-filled space, whose purpose was to lure from the invisibility into visibility, from ignorance into the system of knowing (the system of art), then today the intervention itself is all that’s left. There is no positive content needed to be historicised or granted a status through the mechanisms of institution. This does not, however, affect the mechanisms operating at a certain space permeated with institutional codes. The desire of the institutional apparatus after the production of value is resistant to any shortfall, as the mechanism operates universally, regardless of the accompanying changing parameters. The clock says “fifteen to two”, the work time is slowly ticking out, and the employees will soon leave for home, but the wheels of the mechanism still go on unobstructed …
Pogačar’s language infiltrates itself into the language of the museum. In such a way it compels the museum to reproduce and represent with its already conceived language simultaneously also a part of the speech and visual code of the artist. So, even though this intervention will also pass through the very same mechanisms that it has problematized and will thus enter into Knowledge, it will at the same time - with each reproduction of itself within this system - repeat its own basic critical gesture.
Ana Grobler, Iva Kovač, Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Špela Pavli, Lara Plavčak, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko, Mojca Založnik
Tadej Pogačar (b. 1960) is an artist and the art director of the Centre and P74 Gallery in Ljubljana. After studying Ethnology and the History of Art at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana he has graduated from the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design where he has also completed his postgraduate studies. In the period 1994-1999 he was the chief editor of M'ARS magazine, the main magazine in the field of contemporary art. He is the founder and director of P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., a museum of contemporary Art. He has participated at numerous international exhibitions of contemporary art, e.g. the 10
th Istanbul Biennial, San Francisco Art Institute, 49
th Sao Paulo Art Biennial, 3
rd Tirana Biennial, ZKM Karlsruhe, 49
th Venice Biennial, the Stedelijk Museum, the Arte Carillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. For his works Tadej Pogačar has received several awards, including the Franklin Furnace Award in New York (2001), the »Trend« award for exceptional achievements in the field of visual art (2008) and the leading national “Jakopič Award” for fine arts (2009).
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It was in April 2010 that we started with the 13
th year of the rearranged school of the
World of Art, based on the solid foundation of a several-year long research of various curatorial courses, analyses of curatorial practices, consultations with competent local and international experts as well as the evaluation of the past course. The 13
th year has two terms: the 1
st term (April–June 2010) was devoted to the acquisition of art-historical, theoretical, and methodological knowledge, the 2
nd term (September 2010 – May 2011), however, to curatorial and critical studies as well as practical tests. The first term was attended by 11 participants, and there were 8 candidates registered at the second term. They were dealing with the conception and execution of the final exhibition under the tutorship of
Nevenka Šivavec and
Jože Barši.
The attendants of the course, namely
Ana Grobler, Iva Kovač, Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Špela Pavli, Lara Plavčak, Vladimir Vidmar, Asta Vrečko, and
Mojca Založnik,
have chosen a monographic exhibition, a rare occasion in the history of the school (all the exhibitions with the exception of the one in 2008 of a Romanian artist Mircea Nicolae, were group ones).
The final act of the one-year curatorial education is a solo exhibition of
Tadej Pogačar, and the co-operation will continue in June at the artist’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad.
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Tadej Pogačar: Quarter to Two, 1994
In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art invited Tadej Pogačar and his institution P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. museum to intervene at the exhibition of works that had been recently included into the gallery’s collection. With his work, entitled
Quarter to Two, Pogačar intervened in the exhibition by changing the gallery space into a waiting room. Above the main entrance into the room he hung a non-operating clock, set to fifteen minutes to two - the time when employees were already getting ready to leave their work posts for home. The exits leading into other exhibition spaces were marked with signs of the four directions, but not in the right order, and there were two rows of chairs in the middle of the space.
With minimal means and the formal gap between this work that has never found its way into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the exhibited ones that had become part of this collection, the artistic intervention appealed to the idea of waiting of the artist and the artworks for the competent institutions who have the authority to certify, historicize, elevate or dump works of art.
Production:
SCCA, Center for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana / World of Art
Co-production:
KUD Mreža / Alkatraz Gallery
Support:
Municipality of Ljubljana City, Department for Culture, Ministry of Culture of the RS
Thanks to:
Tea Finžgar Plavčak, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, Railway museum - Slovenske Železnice, Mladen Bogič, Miran Verbinc
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Since 1997
World of Art, the School for Curators and Critics of Contemporary Art has been establishing a wholesome and internationally conceived infrastructural system of education for young curators, critics, theoreticians and researchers of contemporary art. The
Curatorial course – as one of the school segments – on a long-term and systematically establishes a platform for the understanding of contemporary art, teaches young, future curators, organizers, theoreticians, critics etc. the knowledge and skilfulness for expert functioning in the world of contemporary art. The programme consists of lectures, seminars, workshops, research work, and modules about curator’s practical work, study excursions and gallery practice. The process is composed of event organization, studio visits, meetings with curators, artists, theoreticians and writers as well as group work at conceptualization and the execution of the exhibition of contemporary art under tutorship.
School leader:
Saša Nabergoj
School coordinator:
Sonja Zavrtanik
MORE ON THE WORLD OF ART WEBSITE
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SCCA Center for Contemporary Arts - Ljubljana, Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana, http://www.scca-ljubljana.si
Tel.: (01) 431 83 85, contact: Dušan Dovč, 051 361 681,
production.manager@scca-ljubljana.si
The SCCA-Ljubljana programme is supported by Municipality of Ljubljana, Department for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the RS.
Photos of the opening: Sunčan P. Stone
