Céimseata an phobail

Frankfurt/Main 2003, Revolver, 12 Seiten, 20 Abb., 36 x 28 cm, Zeitung gefaltet, 1000 Exemplare, gälisch

Among the social uses of modernist abstraction, none is more contentious than that of "public" art -- the last bastion, it has been said, of modernist controversy. What happens when this type of abstract, utopic, idealized geometry is projected into a public/social space is something artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda have set out to record in a tabloid newspaper they call Popular Geometry, which was initially conceived and put together for an exhibition in October 2003 at the Platform Guranti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul.
Reprinting a selection of the popular press's responses to abstract public sculpture - to "plop art," as it has been disparagingly termed in the 70’s - Popular Geometry is the chronicle of a disarticulation and friction - of a language whose signification has largely evanesced and whose translation falls a beat or so short of conversion, where it becomes instead a kind of a circus in which signs and gestures, aping sense, become parodical.

Popular Geometry is the broadsheet of this circus, with its range of largely negative (and unwittingly humorous) catalogue of articles from the last three decades culled from the Internet, as well as a cut-out insert of a do-it-yourself abstract geometric paper sculpture. But while Popular Geometry's reprints may be chiefly negative in tone, it itself in no way aims to critique the abstract or public art that forms its subject. Rather, it functions to illuminate a disjunction that operates to decouple appearance and meaning, and within which "the complex dance," in Joshua Decter's words, "of art and politics, of culture and ideology, of form and function" endlessly and namelessly swirls.


Eagrán idirnáisiúnta (Gälische Sonderausgabe); hrsg. von Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle; mit Texten von Robert Hughes, Dave Lieber, Debby Rosenthal, Saul Wenegrat und Jeannette Winterson.