How could you be angry while grooming a dog?
Are Blytt, Drawing Guts, Ingo Mittelstaedt, Huseyin Sami, Tomomitsu Tada
Curated by Declan Rooney
Galerie Perpeteul
Oppenheimer Str. 39
60594 Frankfurt am Main
http://www.perpetuel.net/
Email: info@perpetuel.net
Tel: 0049 69 620609
Fax: 0049 69 617585
Opening May 29th 2008 at 6.00 pm
Exhibition runs until June 28th 2008
‘Dog grooming as pacifier’
If we look at the term pacifism as the belief in the opposition to war and to pacify as in bringing to a spate of peace, both may be applied on an international and domestic scale, the global and the interpersonal. It has been suggested by many social theorists and cultural commentators that there has been pacification in what is considered the construct of ’maleness’. Its re-evaluation has been linked to many influencing factors from excessive demands on performance to what has been described as a growing feminisation of culture. We have been presented with the idea that men have lost their useful role in public life, experiencing changes in appreciation in the home and being increasingly deprived of earning a reliable living. There have generally been two reactions to this shift in roles; excessive outward displays of violence and inward acts of self-harm. The opposite extreme is the retreat from society into a more introverted world.
The notion of pacification, may be addressed both in its negative and positive sense; negative in the deliberate use of pacifist ideology as the validation of inaction and positive in its rejection of violence and its belief in any war as unjustifiable. What may be the conditions leading to and stimulating ‘pacifist activity’ on a personal and community basis? Pacifism through a lack of engagement or indeed the opposite may be proliferated through the advancement of dislocating technological mediums such as the internet, allowing virtual communities to emerge united in ideologies but often not in a corporeal sense. Bedroom empowerment often fails in its transformation into physical action. When is it now permissive to take to the streets and when can social disturbance and civil unrest again be legitimised in an era of anonymous disembodied opinion.
A perceived trait of contemporary visual art is to present work that seeks to insight, challenge and disrupt the status quo. While it is a role it dually deserves, the opposite approach may equally occur, where artwork may act as pacifiers, rejecting the loud protest and the violent kick and simply reflect a silent renegotiation of it’s impetus and motivation in the appeasement of anger. Applying this on an individual basis this exhibition looks specifically at artists and works, which give voice and perspective to these particular set of issues.
The title of this exhibition itself refers to a model of training young males with severe behavioural problems to develop social skills and encourage calmer tendencies through the maintenance of dogs. Children are enrolled in specially developed programs where they have full responsibility for the daily wellbeing of the dogs in their care. After a short period the children’s aggressive tendencies have been proven to dramatically change, with one child remarking in a documentary on the subject: “How could you be angry while grooming a dog?”
‘How could you angry while grooming a dog?’ implies several questions about the notion of pacification, its implicit moral principles, and the proposition that it’s philosophical grounds are not solely based on inheritance, but socially acquired, environmentally guided and often chosen by proxy.
Embracing the constraints of a thematic show each of the artists hailing from five different countries engage in a dialogue with the ideas of the show, each other’s work and the audience itself. The exhibition seeks to both question and celebrate the diverse cultural climates each of the artists hail from, presenting a multiplicity of individual practices, occupying a shared space and articulating a common set of concerns and subject matter.
http://areblytt.org/
http://www.myspace.com/drawingguts
http://ingomittelstaedtnow.blogspot.com/
http://www.huseyinprojects.com/
http://www.zenshi.com/artists_eng.html/
How could you be angry while grooming a dog?
Exhibition Zine
Limited Edition: 100
Black and White
A4
5.00 euro (excluding postage)
Published by Kunstprojects 2008
Order From: info@kunstprojects.com
