Animism. Modernity through the Looking Glass
16 September 2011 - 29 January 2012
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| © Daria Martin, Soft Materials, 2004
Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley London |
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Animism. Modernity through the Looking Glass
16 September, 2011 - 29 January, 2012
Agency, Marcel Broodthaers, Adam Curtis, Didier Demorcy, Walt Disney,
Jimmie Durham, Eric Duvivier / Henri Michaux, Thomas Alva Edison, León
Ferrari, Walon Green, Victor Grippo, Candida Höfer, Luis Jacob, Ken
Jacobs, Joachim Koester, Maxim Komar-Myshkin/Roee Rosen, Yayoi Kusama,
Len Lye, Chris Marker / Alain Resnais, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos
& Maurizio Lazzarato, Ana Mendieta, Vincent Monnikendam, Jean
Painlevé, Hans Richter, Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Animism is a multipart exhibition project; after episodes in Antwerp and
Berne, it is now on display at the Generali Foundation. The exhibition
Animism. Modernity through the Looking Glass takes up the current
broad-based reassessment of modernity, examining the ethnological
conception of animism as it was framed in the context of colonialism as
well as the concept of animism in psychoanalysis. In Vienna, the city of
Sigmund Freud, one focus of the exhibition is on aesthetic approaches
that subject the distinction between the psychological "inside" world
and the material "outside" world to critical scrutiny.
The "old" animism—modernity’s vanishing point
By the end of the nineteenth century, animism is defined as a set of
superstitious beliefs, as a "projection" mistaken reality by means of
which the "primitive mind" populates the world with souls and spirits,
endowing things and nature with life, agency, and subjecthood. At the
height of European colonialism, animism becomes the quintessence of
civilization’s opposite, the exemplary expression of a primitive "state
of nature" in which psyche and nature appear as inextricably fused. In
the context of colonial modernity this image of animism operated as a
mirror, in which modernity affirms itself by showing what it is not. To
be modern meant to leave animism behind and to separate the world in
accordance with the dualist divides that have been in effect since
Descartes: soul and body, mind and matter.
The "new" animism—a reactivation
In the context of a critique of the dualisms and static categories of
modernity, anthro-pologists have recently begun to reassess animism.
Avoiding Western notions of what "life," "soul," "self," "nature,"
"supernatural forces," or "belief" are, can we understand animism as a
practice that revolves around different experiences of the relations
between subject and object? Around processes of subjectivation and
objectivation, for instance, rather than rigid categories? In light of
current ecological, technological, and biopolitical developments,
finding novel ways to rethink the boundaries between nature and culture,
between human and non-human (nature, technology), between psyche and
outside world, and between life and non-life represents an urgent
political challenge.
Scenes of an exhibition—lines of demarcation, thresholds, transitions
The exhibition Animism. Modernity through the Looking Glass negotiates
these boundaries by means of aesthetic processes that reveal what
happens once the rigorous divides between subject and object is
dissolved. The museum, as an objectifying and mummifying device,
likewise comes under critical scrutiny.
Candida Höfer’s photographs depict views from ethnographic collections,
and thus point to the continuity of preservation and the rationale of
knowledge with which this exhibition, inevitably, communicates. Jimmie
Durham’s installation The Dangers of Petrification (2007) holds up a
playful mirror to the mortifying museum apparatus and the Western notion
of stone as "dead" matter. Victor Grippo further displaces the concept
of inanimate matter by harnessing the energy contained in potatoes in
his works and highlighting their socio-political import as "givers of
life."
The archival installation Assembly (Animism) (1992–) by Agency displays a
selection of its vast collection of court cases in which legal disputes
around copyright, authorship, creativity, and agency turn into forums
that negotiate the very boundary between humans and things, between
nature and culture.
Len Lye’s animation film Tusalava (1929), which consists of thousands of
individual drawings, evinces the influence of Australian Aboriginal art
and may be considered a "primitivist" work of sorts. In the exhibition,
it appears in the immediate vicinity of Walt Disney’s The Skeleton
Dance, also created in 1929, a film that exemplarily articulates the
"laws" of the cinematically animated universe. Capitalism: Slavery
(2006), a video by Ken Jacobs, takes the question regarding the
possibilities of filmic animation one step further by linking the
technique of the animated image to the standardized monotonous gesture
of the slave laborers on a plantation. Joachim Koester’s work, My
Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points (2007), animating the drawings
made by Henri Michaux under the influence of mescaline, addresses a
growing divide between the representable and non-representable, between
symbolic structure and imagination.
Assemblages (2010) a video installation and research project by Angela
Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, follows the intellectual trajectory
of Félix Guattari—philosopher, activist, institutional psychotherapist
and co author of Gilles Deleuze. A further extension of the
installation, Déconnage (2011), produced for the exhibition in Vienna,
focuses on Guattari’s "precursor" François Tosquelles. The two works
bring together the two persistent strands that structure this
exhibition, the relations between self and world and between humans and
nature and trace them in the context of the history of psychiatry as
well as political resistance.
The many works in the exhibition use a variety of media and
heterogeneous strategies to trace lines of demarcation, thresholds, and
transitions across the canonical divisions, displacing, exaggerating,
and transforming them. Animism. Modernity through the Looking Glass
suggests a revision and decolonization of not only our traditional
understanding of animism but also the modern imaginary it articulates.
Concept: Anselm Franke
Curators: Anselm Franke with Sabine Folie
Assistant Curator: Georgia Holz
Animism is a collaboration between: Extra City – Kunsthal Antwerpen,
Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), Kunsthalle Bern, Generali
Foundation, Vienna, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and Freie
Universität Berlin.
foundation.generali.at
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