"THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH"

"Thoughts for the Month" is the title of a new special program instituted at the MSUM.
It brings together educational events into a rounded whole, with the chosen quote of the month indicating the theme all the activities (guided tours, talks, workshops) revolve around. The title itself is a quote: Thoughts for the Month was a project carried out between 1964 and 1977 by the Croatian artist Josip Vaništa, a member of the group Gorgona. The members of Gorgona had a special habit: they would send one another literary quotes (which they called "thoughts for the month") that reflected the spirit of their Gorgonian community and that they wanted to share with other members of the group.

January 2012
Sad Passions
Inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power. (Gilles Deleuze)

February 2012
Technology to the People
Media art is not about new ways of presenting the world, it is about the availability of previously accumulated media and the new ways of using them. (Lev Manovich)

March 2012
Energy Field
A lot of people think that performance is the easiest art form, that it can be done by anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not everyone can create an energy field with an audience. A performance may be bad, uninteresting, boring, it can make people say this is just silly. Things like that have happened. But a real, good performance always shifts something in the viewers' awareness. It never leaves its viewers indifferent. (Marina Abramović)

April 2012
Privileged Relationship
Thus technology produces pure ideology in artistic use, while in other uses it produces something else as well. This "something else" is actually ideology in its purest form precisely because it looks natural and self-evident. (Rastko Močnik)

May 2012
Gained in Translation
A lot of the art of our time has often been described very generically as conceptual or postconceptual. In my view, its nature is much more affected by the complexity of the relationships between the visual and the nonvisual than by some direct linkage with the actual conceptual artistic practices of the 1960s. (Igor Zabel)

June 2012
Parallel Universe
Art is not about performing visual gymnastics but about changing meanings. (Mirosław Bałka)

Archive:

Friday, 27. 1. at 17.00
+MSUM Lecture room, Maistrova 3, Ljubljana
Alfred Barr, "Abstract Cabinet and the Modern Narrative"
Lecture

Thirty years ago the Gallery of Abstract Art in Hannover was probably the most famous room of the twentieth-century in the world.
Alfred Barr, 1958
This is a story about a collaboration between a museum director who completely changed the appearance of art history through innovative museum displays and an avant-guard artist who invented a new way to exhibit abstract art. It is also a story about an ambitious dictator who passionately believed that "art is noble and up to the fanaticism demanding mission". His desire was to shape the course of art by building a huge temple of art and staging exhibitions of both "false art" called degenerate and "real art" he thought was truly for the people. Finally it is a story about a young director of the modern museum on another continent who reinvented modern art by abandoning the notion of "National Schools" and introducing instead "International Movements" as basic principle for both the museum and the history of modern art that became widely accepted and remained until today.
http://szenografie.hfg-karlsruhe.de/uploads/media/0306.pdf

Alfred Barr was a found director of the Museum of Modern Art who in recent years became closely associated with the Museum of American Art in Berlin giving lectures on art and art history.
www.museum-of-american-art.org