Dance, See

I've seen a really good exhibtion at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen today. Dance, See is a project by young art students of the Siegen University. Combining art didactic and art historic elements the students worked out an exhbition on Dance as theme in fine arts.

In this revealing exhibition dance is explored from the fine arts perspective of the 1960's to present. Questions asked are: what impulses and ideas do the fine arts garner from dance? What are the specific interests that the fine-arts-artists pursue in this dialogue? At the same time, basic choreographic positions are included in the observation. The exhibition then traces the history of the seminal co-operations and mutual inspirations, but also of the parallel developments in performance and conceptual art and their mutual interest in general anthropological, cultural, and popular forces. Among the many different aspects followed up on in more or less detail are: the separation of dance movement from its traditional "cause", from music, and the resulting exploration into the motivation and coordination of movements; how the coordination in group dance can be decentralized; how the hierarchy in a stage setting is decentralized; the discovery that everyday movements contain symbolic meaning; the conquering of urban space through the movement found within it; the eradication of expression and narration with the accompanying ironic and multi-media-based reintroduction of narrative elements; the use of the camera as the immediate counterpart to a dancer and the development of experimental documentary forms of recording - next to the traditional form of dance notation; how experiments in movement produced fertile ground for minimalist sculpture and video installations. (press release)

Artists featured are Dave Allen/ Douglas Gordon/ Jonathan Monk, Eleanor Antin, Charles Atlas, Sven Augustijnen, Antonia Baehr, Samuel Beckett, Jerôme Bel, Andrea Bowers, Ulla von Brandenburg, Trisha Brown, Helen Chadwick, Merce Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra, Simone Forti, Dan Graham, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rebecca Horn, Jirí Kovanda, Mara Kurotscka, Yuri Leiderman, Auguste und Louis Lumière, Babette Mangolte, Bruce McLean, Eva Meyer / Eran Schaerf, Peter Moore, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ulrike Rosenbach, Boy & Eric Stappaerts, Stelarc, Catherine Sullivan, Beate Terfloth, Peter Welz, Erwin Wurm.

After being launched in Siegen "Dance, See" will be presented in the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla.

Credit: museumfuergegenwartskunstsiegen.de