Bernhard Rüdiger at Summer School as School 2019
12 August, 2019, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club
Summer School as School
5 - 21 August, 2019
Stacion - Center Contemporary Art Prishtina has the pleasure to announce "Resilience and the Practice of Art Apprenticeship of the Form as Dialectical Approach to the Subjective and the Collective" by Bernhard Rüdiger, part of the Public Program of Summer School as School 2019.
The notion of form is at the heart of artists’ considerations and has constantly evolved over the last few centuries. If one puts the history of art to one side, along with the classification of appearances that form has taken in the work of artists, instead paying close attention to the functioning itself of that which creates form and its evolution, one can quickly see that some of its essential characteristics—instability, potentiality, relativity—are at the heart of the preoccupations of contemporary society. The recent notion of resilience can be seen to have a close kinship with the reasoning and procedures that are at the heart of the work of artists. If we look to the notion of form not only as a major evolution of modern art and therefore our-days the essential tool in higher art education, we can see that its main qualities — to perceive instability in the purpose to open up to potentiality through discussion and relativity — is not only a problem for isolated authors, but in first place, the essential energy of disrupted societies.
It is through a new look to the form, that artistic activity can be seen as resilient. Not in the sense of an individual health, as it was the case in postromantic approaches of the end of the nineteen century, but as a form of collective resilience in post-modern societies. This relation seems evident today even if we never really pay attention to the
functioning of the form itself. It is in the same time quite impossible to analyse this problematic in an academic context, where the relation to subjectivity as an I-experience develops theories in absence of paradigms able to describe the shift from a radical personal context of perception and experience to the social destiny of communities. This passage from a personal to a collective point of view seems essential but is more or less not really explained. To be able to deal with the radical subjective point of view of the artist and the viewer in a contemporary social and cultural context, we need to think about form as a dialectical approach to the subjective and the collective, as the tool that make the shift from instability to potentiality possible.
Does art teaching and art learning develop new dialectical paradigms, or do they simply react, as some contemporary art does to a new social context where the
exercise of critics has become the content to be illustrated and is no more the tool?
Bernhard Rüdiger was born in Italy (Rome, 1964) and lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan with Luciano Fabro and, after stints as a teacher in Tours and Valenciennes, he currently teaches in Lyon. He is editor of the magazine Tiracorrendo and was co-founder of the artists’ gallery Lo Spazio di Via Lazzaro Palazzi, a busy venue in the Milan art scene from 1989 to 1993. His works confront visitors with a physical experience involving object, body and space. At once sculptures, monumental models and architectural pieces, through their meticulous spatial and acoustic arrangement his works seek to investigate history, particularly the history of places. One example is in the semi-private garden of the Antonin Perrin residence in Lyon, in which Rüdiger installed a scaled-down model of the two old low-rise buildings destroyed in 2004 during the zone’s renovation, which recalled the history of the site and its industrial culture. Rüdiger’s works also propose direct physical experiences and the possibility that the work can react to the visitor’s presence or to natural elements. All of Rüdiger’s projects are systematically accompanied by studies and models in cardboard, wood, iron, etc., as well as drawings, but they are far more than mere stages in a creative process. They constitute part of the fully-fledged work, and are involved in specific presentations in an arrangement encompassing some 30 display stands. (Excerpts from Nadine Labedade, FRAC Centre Orléans).
