Pelt (after Living Skin)
Sunday in the Park with Ed
Display Gallery, London
6 – 28 March 2015
Sunday in the Park with Ed takes Edouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe as a starting point and questions what is transgressive in an artists practice and whether radicalism as seen in Manet’s work has been truly take forward. Does the avant-garde have any cut today? We recently withdrew Living Skin from a touring exhibition after questioning political actions of the sponsor.
The essay The artist, the scientist and the industrialist (1825) by Olinde Rodriguez, is the first published use of the term ‘avant-garde’ and calls on artists to “serve as [the people’s] avant-garde”, insisting that the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way to social, political and economic reform.
We ask whether at the beginning of the 21st century. the avant-garde is indeed the ‘immediate and fastest way’ to sustained social and environmental reform? In a so-called ‘age of austerity’, funding to the arts has been cut, and artists and exhibition-makers face complex funding decisions. The role of corporate sponsorship and individual philanthropy is placed under a spotlight, and as our recent experience shows, throws into shadow often uncomfortable, uncertain, and unexpected issues confronted by the artist. For us it brings into question, how are the values of the artist retained and the desire to communicate to a wide public maintained?
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