Offspace

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As Offspace or project room non-commercial, independent are showrooms for young unetablierte contemporary art called, often performed in artists' studios, between used rooms or in private homes. Compared to galleries and institutions, the program in offspaces is more flexible, cheaper and more subjective. The operators are mostly artists themselves, often art students too. Although this is an English term, Offspace is mainly used in the German-speaking area; the actual English equivalent is the "Artist-Run Space" or "Alternative Space".

precursor

The forerunners of offspace lie in the 19th century, especially in France: With the self-conception of modern art as the avant-garde, there is not only the need and necessity to produce beyond existing structures (anti-academism, Nazarenes ), but also outside of the established institutions ( e . B. salons, large art exhibitions) ( Secession ). Important examples of this are: Gustave Courbet's temporary exhibition building "Du Réalisme", which was built at great expense in 1855, in which, after his pictures were rejected by the jury of the official salon, he demonstrated his new conception of art on his own for a short time. In 1867, Édouard Manet showed fifty of his pictures in a specially built pavilion, including his scandalous picture “ Olympia ”. This was followed by the “ Salon des Refusés ” in 1863 , the “ Salons des Independants ” in 1884 , then other secessionists across Europe, then the secessions of the secessions. In today's off-space, the manifesto-like mode of assertion established at the time and the pioneering idea have at least partially been preserved.

Alternative to the established art scene

The rejection by the established art scene is part of the conception of modernism as an avant-garde, as is their demand for art to merge with life. This resulted in the sensational exhibitions of the Suprematists , Futurists and Dadaists , which often took place outside the established art world. The museum, on the other hand, was vehemently rejected - especially by the Futurists - as the death chamber of art. The neo-avant-garde of the 1960s later represented the claim derived from this, also outside of the established institutions and beyond the bourgeois artistic taste, with provocative positions to question artistic and social conventions (in Munich e.g. Action Room 1 in Waltherstrasse, 1969 ). The concept of the offspace as a counter-model to the white cube is already indicated here . While the white cube represents the clean museum space and stages art as an autonomous entity, the off-space is often “dirty” and overlaid with other levels of meaning. The art exhibited there experiences a stronger contextualization.

Familiar exhibition contexts are also broken up through the conscious approach to local subcultures (Kippenberger, SO 36 , 1978/79). The unconventionally chosen exhibition location was updated again in the early 1990s with Hans Ulrich Obrist's kitchen and hotel exhibitions , when the art / life concept of the historical avant-garde in the new guise of “site-specificity” experienced a renewed bloom.

Despite their bottom-up structure, project rooms are sometimes characterized by a certain hermeticism. Demarcation and distinction, for example, played a decisive role in the occupation of “Raum 19” at the Düsseldorf Academy by Imi Knoebel , Imi Giese and Blinky Palermo from 1966 to 1969. Here, the alternative exhibition space served the self-staging and positioning of the artists. Offspaces also have an important identifying function in terms of participation in current developments.

Since 2000, institutions and galleries have also oriented themselves towards the role model “Offspace”, in that they appear to be increasingly youthful, unestablished and unconventional. The economic efficiency of the project room could also be exemplary in times of the financial crisis. Despite the more difficult demarcation between offspace, gallery and institution, the project space remains a place of relative independence and self-determined artistic activity due to its self-defined field of action within the art business.

See also

literature

  • Eva Madelung , action room 1 or 57 guide dogs: 1 year action space costs 150,000 DM - 1 guide dog costs 2,600 DM , Verlag A 1 Informations Verlagsgesellschaft, 1971
  • Martin Damus, Functions of the Fine Arts in Late Capitalism: investigated using the avant-garde art of the sixties , Fischer Taschenbuch, 1973, ISBN 978-3-436-01664-7
  • Jürgen Schilling, Action Art: Identity of Art and Life? A documentation , CJ Bucher, 1978, ISBN 3-7658-0266-2
  • We're Elsewhere, Reader, ed. Nora Sdun and Jörn Müller, Paperback, 182 pages, Textem-Verlag 2007, ISBN 978-3-938801-32-1
  • Spaces: Free Art Space in Germany, Ed. Marina Gärtner, 396 pages, Deutscher Kunstverlag 2015, ISBN 978-3-422-07310-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Interview with Stefan Beck in : Borderline: Strategies and Tactics for Art and Social Practice , Verlag BoD - Books on Demand, 2002, ISBN 3-8311-3775-7 , p. 205 ff. (Available at Google Books)
  2. ↑ Karin Pernegger: Art theft in the sharks' pool of the art world , in: hot spots , Klosterneuburg, 2005
  3. ^ Stefan Hartung, Parnasse und Moderne , Edition 25, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-515-07129-6 , p. 163
  4. ↑ Jane Turner, The Grove dictionary of art , Oxford University Press US, 2000, ISBN 0-312-22971-2 . P. 286
  5. ↑ Cornelia Klinger, in: Cornelia Klinger, Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarden, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-7705-3821-8 , pp. 211 ff.
  6. ↑ Angelika Taschen, Roberto Ohrt, Burkhard Riemschneider, Kippenberger , Taschen, Cologne, 1997, ISBN 3-8228-7867-7 , p. 224 ff.
  7. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Obrist in a conversation with Marius Babias , in: Kunstforum International Volume 132, November 1995, p. 408
  8. ↑ Imi Knoebel, Karola Grässlin , Hugh Rorrison, Imi Knoebel: Against coarse dirt , König, Cologne, 2003, ISBN 3-88375-694-6 , p. 37