FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- 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 is now available from Revolver (Archiv für aktuelle Kunst), and which was initially conceived and put together for an exhibition in October 2003 at the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul.
Reprinting a selection of the popular press’s responses to abstract public sculpture -- "plop art*," as it has been disparagingly termed in the 80’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.
Anton Vidokle was born in Moscow and is currently based in New York. His work has been recently featured at Utopia Station at the 2003 Venice Biennale; in Form Specific, Moderna Galerija/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; and at the Prague Biennale. Born in Mexico City, Julieta Aranda lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the 7th Havana Biennale; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut; and La Panaderia, Mexico D.F.
Popular Geometry was produced with help from Regine Basha and Vasif Kortun, and published by Revolver (Archiv für aktuelle Kunst), Frankfurt.
