the project

Sigi Torinus (Canada) Andrea Sunder-Plassmann (Germany); first launched in Australia with Anita Kocsis ;sound by M. Wlodarkiewicz, O. Jarchov, A. Witte, I. Dubrovsky. Sound for the Canada shows by the Noiseborder Ensemble, Windsor Canada (the LP is coming out this Fall).

weather balloons, slide and video projections including collected handwritten text, sound, website

In San Francisco 1994 we came up with the ideas for the project while comparing notes on our experiences at art school. We wished for a discourse on beauty in art/culture that was missing, edited out as part of a politically correct rhetoric, disparaged as being an atemporal and apolitical ideal (beauty as the handmaiden of privilege, a distraction from the more important things in life).

Reading Leonard Koren's book "Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers"–which is inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi associated with the tea ceremony–we became very much aware of how much beauty as an event remains a major engine in our lives. The book was both encouraging and validating: the idea that certain forms of aesthetics are becoming somewhat of an endangered species made us want to support the diversity of the cultural ecology, and we decided that the best approach would be collaborative, multilayered, interactive and capable of engaging a network of people.

Our initial title was broken beauty, reflecting the current state of discourse; also, with Andrea being German and Sigi part German with a German art school background, we were looking not only at the writings of Kant, Goethe and Schiller, but also for ways of addressing the heritage of a politically defined ideal of beauty formed during National Socialism, and how we could subvert the paradigm that of course could be found in other countries as well and that still shows up in ads, etc. We soon changed the title to browsing beauty, for we likened our studio process to the process of browsing: feeding and grazing on tender vegetation, sampling, in the hope of finding something of interest...

The project was first launched in 1997 with Anita Kocsis (Australia) at the SCA Gallery in Sydney, Australia. The show extended into an interactive web component, including a MOO we set up at the virtual PALACE on the internet that allowed people we knew in San Francisco and Berlin to "show up" virtually and communicate their ideas during the opening in Sydney. Further, before and during the show we collected people's thoughts/manifestos on beauty and projected them as slides.

The same year we brought browsing beauty to San Francisco, where it was shown at Gallery 16 with new video and a performance. In 1998 we created a very different-looking show in Berlin, Germany (Galerie im Marstall), with the balloons remaining as the main carriers of images, and in Moscow (Art Media Centre, TV Gallery Moscow), with Russian text and images we found in and around Moscow. In 1999 the idea of browsing beauty became the basis for "Slushaj! Sasha und der Kosmos"; in English “Listen – Sasha and the Cosmos” (Galerie im Marstall).

Since then, a whole lot has changed, not just in terms of what can be done technically, but also in terms of conceptual shifts: a proliferation of writing on beauty has sprung out of the silence. For instance, in her book On Beauty and Being (1999), Elaine Scarry argues that we can connect beauty with truth and justice. We can again say that beauty animates life and makes it worth living.

So far, each show had a different focus in relationship to beauty; Australia was intimacy (inspired by the vast distances geographically), Moscow had nostalgia (this was during the transition of Soviet Union to Russia), San Francisco was magic and pleasure (during the dotcom rise with its opulence), Berlin tackled the question of identity of a new Berlin after the wall came down. For Canada, we are thinking of longing - it's a country of immigrants, many dreaming of going 'home' one day, while in Australia immigrants came to stay for good...

shows:

Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, Canada l Oct 30 - Nov 29, 2009

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada l July 10 - Sep 5, 2010

WKP Kennedy Gallery North Bay, Ontario l Oct 2 - Nov 4, 2010