Curator – Büro Friedrich

14 September – 13 November 2004

John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Fraser, Martin Gostner, Eva Grubinger, Erik van Lieshout, Marko Lulic, Aleksandra Mir, Adrian Piper, Tino Sehgal, Annika Ström, Barbara Visser, Franz West.

Curated by Jörg Heiser.

The exhibition is funded by the Berlin Capital Culture Fund, the Mondriaan Foundation, and the art section of Austria’s Bundeskanzleramt.

A common resentment against conceptual art is that it was too didactic. The exhibition brings together work by artists that tackle the problem head-on: they undermine the authority of educational forms yet do not simply renounce knowledge and critique. Humour and role play are the disarming weapons used in performance, video, installation, painting and sculpture. New ways open up beyond the cul-de-sac of a false choice between harmless hermeticism and patronizing gestures.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Adrian Piper’s pivotal piece “Funk Lessons” (1982-1984), a video based on a performance by the artist teaching – a mostly white – audience of students basic and advanced dance routines of funk and soul music. Another classic example is John Baldessari’s “Baldessari Sings LeWitt” of 1972: the artist sings, like a lay preacher, the famous, stern Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt, to the melody of famous songs, among them the US anthem. Or Franz West’s cross between a pedestal and a lectern “Laocoon’s sprimgy head (Lessingmstudy)” of 2002, with a paperback copy of Lessing’s ‘Laokoon, or on the divisions between painting and poetry’ casually placed inside of it. In the book, Lessing plays off sculpture, which according to him was static, against poetry, which was in motion. West counters the assumption with an amorphous, reddish lump mounted with a rusty steel spring onto the top of the lectern.

Works by 13 artists from 6 countries will be on display throughout the whole space of BüroFriedrich from September through November 2004. BüroFriedrich is a non-profit international venue for contemporary art that has already put on several exhibitions dealing with the history and present of conceptualism. Complementing a group of classical pieces (Piper, Baldessari), there are some recent works (Fraser, Grubinger, van Lieshout, West) and some commissioned exclusively for the exhibition (Bonvicini, Gostner, Lulic, Mir, Sehgal, Ström, Visser).

A series of lectures at Münzclub (Münzstr. 23, Berlin Mitte), taking place on Mondays from 13 September, will address the question of didactics in direct exchange with the audience: some of them will take the form of ‘interview’ (Adrian Piper on 8 November, Aleksandra Mir on 13 September), while others will cross over into performance (Barbara Visser, on the opening night, 11 September). A catalogue which will encompass some of the material from these lectures will be published after the exhibition.

Funky Lessons at Münzsalon
Münzstraße 23, 10178 Berlin
admission €4, Members free

Every Monday 8p.m. Jörg Heiser talks to:

13 September Aleksandra Mir (English)
20 September Martin Gostner and Marko Lulic (German)
27 September Kerstin Grether and Klaus Walter “The Funky Lessons of Pop Music” (German)
04 October Thomas Bayrle “The Funky Lessons of Teaching” (German)
11 October Tino Sehgal (German)
18 October ‘No Talk’ – Funky Lessons Surprise Film
25 October Monica Bonvicini (German)
01 November Eva Grubinger and Annika Ström (English)
08 November Adrian Piper (English)

John Baldessari 'Baldessari sings LeWitt', 1971 — John Baldessari ‘Baldessari sings LeWitt’, 1971, 15 min b&w

John Baldessari 'Baldessari sings LeWitt', — John Baldessari ‘Baldessari sings LeWitt’, 1971, 15 min b&w

CAMOUFLAGE – LOOK like them – TALK like them

20 April 2004 – 29 May 2004

Curated by Manray Hsu

Jun Yang analyses in his works the construction of cultural identity and control. He juxtaposes power structure, social order and pop cultural forms.
By using his autobiography as an axis around which meanings of rituals and codes are spelled out, he constructs sarcastic and pungent narratives that verge on fact and fiction.

His video, produced in 2002, Soldier Woods, or Soldat Holzer, is an elaborate play on his name “Jun Yang,” and thus exists in two separate versions, English and German. He tries to trace back all different possible meanings of Jun Yang in the Chinese language as well as various misunderstandings incurred during the last twenty years of living in Europe.
What’s lost in translation is not only things to deal with, but the person himself whose persona cannot but engage in the most simple fact of his life: his name.

Yang’s work touches on the gray area between legal power and illegal fall-outs, personal memories and collective representations. In his latest video CAMOUFLAGE – LOOK like them – TALK like them (2002/2003), he interrogates the situation of illegal immigrants and legal foreigners from the perspective of a fictive person, called X. The video is based on a fictional interview the artist conducted with X, whose generic identity as an illegal immigrant smuggled into the land of wealth, hope, consumption, and, above all, behavioural control, has to be disappeared in order for him to exist again. Using news clips, found footages, ads, and images of public display of power, Yang creates a video of everyday social control laid bare in a documentary form.

In addition to the two videos, the exhibition also includes wall drawings based on CAMOUFLAGE, which intervene into the architectural space to create multifaceted conceptual folds.

Jun Yang was born in China 1975, he lives and works since 1979 in Vienna.
Among his recent exhibitions: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig; Museum für angewandte Kunst Galerie, Vienna; 2001: Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Frankfurter Kunstverein; 2002: Manifesta 4, Frankfurt; PS1, New York.

Manray Hsu is an independent critic and curator based in Taipei and Berlin. His major exhibitions include: 2000 Taipei Biennial: “The Sky Is the Limit” and “How Big Is the World?” (OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, 2002).
Manray Hsu served as a jury member for the 49th Venice Biennale and for UNESCO Prize at the 7th Istanbul Biennial in 2001.

For further information, please contact Waling Boers or Alexandra Saheb