An idiosyncratic relationship to Conceptual Art, to the Unconscious structured as language and Self, 2008/2009, selection of drawings to be arranged in showcase or on display table.
Installation view: SCHAU ORT, 20 drawings in two showcases, 2010
Simone Schardt - Selected Works
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Installation view: Helmhaus Zurich, 16 drawings on display table, 2008
"An idiosyncratic relationship to Conceptual Art, to the Unconscious structured as language and Self" takes up genealogies of conceptualist strategies and cites in this context the theoretical fundamentals of several currents of Conceptual Art from the 1960s and 1970s. Substantively influenced by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and linguistics, a feminist-oriented approach is based on ideas from the writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901−1981) that entail the promise of a subject that can no longer be thought of as unified. The nature of the performance itself – typewritten letters on yellowed paper – make the appropriation seem like a parody. There are above all questions of the naturalizing presumptions of accumulations of power and critique in art’s system of reference, whose possible answers lie in the destabilization of the position of the subject. The question "Who is speaking" demands a never-ending examination.
A Late Proposal for Manifesta 6, 7 and 8, 2009, two collages on paper, each sheet 24 x 17 cm ( 9 1/2 x 6 3/4 inch ), framed 27.5 x 20.5 cm ( 10 7/8 x 8 1/8 inch )
To that end, the two-part collage A Late Proposal for Manifesta 6, 7, and 8 (2009) subjects a newspaper photograph to a reading in which the empty spaces of one part form the constitutive framework for the corresponding, yet absent Other. The image from the National Archives and Record Administration in Washington was commented in as follows by the author of the article, Stephanie Risse: “An incredible image: a young SS man and a GI guarding together the headquarters of the Red Cross in Bolzano after the end of the war in 1945.” Published in a book by Gerald Steinacher, a historian in Bolzano, Risse’s essay sketches the development of South Tyrol from a “hub of escape” to a “hub of business.” A Late Proposal for Manifesta 6, 7, and 8 is devoted, in the mode of the future retrospective and premature belatedness, to the questions of the circulation of images in the context of exhibitions and of how to update the genealogies of site-specificity and institutional critique.
Untitled, 2008, collage, pigmented inkjet print, glass, Ed. of 30, 21 x 29.7 cm ( 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inch )
Doing the same (black), 2009, pencil, water color on paper, 30 x 24 cm ( 11 3/4 x 9 1/2 inch )