Art Metropole

#09433

Before the Curtain. Avant le rideau

Artist

mark

Price

$17.00

Date

2011

Publisher

Passenger Books

Format

Artists' Books

Details

Softcover

ISBN

978-3-940215-14-7

Size

13 × 18 × 0.5 cm

Length

0 

Description

mark is a collective consisting of five artists, working between Berlin, Bremen and Vienna. Some of its members have run spaces in which installations, performances, and lectures by other artists have been happening in Bremen.

Their own interventions, performances and installations are often an investigation into seemingly common, banal events as they happen every day, and they might take place where these events happen. In their own words: “Gestures, tools, a form of communication which is concentrated on the moment. Our impulse is an idea of understanding the ‘world’ and its rules in order to question them. We don’t want to get answers nor to re-enact. Questioning the immanent rules, moving the frames and resuming the discussion are methods that built our art practice. And of course express our attitude. There is no doubt that we are involved in the art market’s economy. Whether we benefit from it or not. We always have to deal somehow with a kind of absorption. So we develop a practice which could also absorb those conditions: As a specific framework, a system of rules and parameters that we and our various collaborators that we share it with can work from. Sometimes we even forget that critical conceptual arts are not as familiar and established for others like they are for us. So we work from a general understanding and from a broad knowledge, rather than on the edge. We wouldn’t exclude other techniques if they are necessary, we can hardly imagine not to work from a concrete context. We can’t predict the future and we surely are not aiming to. We are quite focused on the moment while developing a work and not worrying about our professional future while doing so – this might also be a remarkable difference of the collective.“

In Montréal, in 2009, with the help of Regent Photo Studio on Avenue du Parc, mark took a snapshot of itself by recording the photographer’s directions. This recording it transcribed and transformed it into a poem. The same text has been subject to an installation it set up at WE LEFT THE WARM STABLE AND ENTERED THE LATEX VOID (WLTWSAETLV), which is located around the corner from Regent Photo Studio. It is also the material, out of which this artists’ book consists.

Numbered edition of 500

APC

1.