P2P
Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg
If, unlike the music and cinema industries, the field of visual arts has yet to be remodelled by the development of peer-to-peer exchange networks, most of the questions foregrounded by this phenomenon – amongst them notions of copyright and authorship – have paradoxically been at the core of debates within contemporary art for decades. Curated by Le Bureau/, a Paris-based curatorial collective, ‘P2P’ confronts the medium of the exhibition with peer-to-peer strategies. The result is an exploration of how practices of sharing could cast new light onto such questions as the circulation of artworks, their accessibility and their appropriation today.
Echoing the system of free exchange (the basis of file-sharing networks), ‘P2P’ evolves through the addition and withdrawal of works over the course of the exhibition’s duration. A storage space, located in one of the galleries, is a central component, functioning as the proverbial hard-drive of the project. The notion of multiplication also plays an important role: several copies of Peter Downsbrough’s engraving There (2007) are displayed at different points in the space, proliferating the work’s content – the word ‘there’ embossed on white paper – to highlight the work’s ubiquity.
The outcomes of peer-to-peer practices, such as copyright infringement and the exponential accumulation of files, also appear in several works. The exhibition opens with Keith Sanborn’s video The Artwork in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin as told to Keith Sanborn (1996), which consists of a four-minute long montage of copyright warnings recorded from commercial videotapes. In a similar vein, Jacques André’s Achats à repetition, n°23 (2008), a wall installation comprising 100 copies of the same LP, and his Neu! Neu! Neu! (2008), a collection of the last 100 disks, books and videos he purchased, evoke the compulsive hoarding of some peer-to-peer adepts.
The most relevant proposals in ‘P2P’ do not approach the file-sharing phenomenon as a topic but engage a more critical understanding of the notions of production, repetition and circulation. Raphaël Zarka’s photograph Les Formes du repos #1 (2001), which depicts concrete breakwaters abandoned in a wasteland in the south of France, and his sculpture Rhombicuboctaèdres (Réplique n°1) (2004), a geometrical construction inspired by the same objects (made with raw wooden rafters), raise questions regarding the circulation and appropriation of forms. Valentin Carron’s series of eight sculptures takes the form of painted beams, each extending from the wall at ceiling level; while these objects are identical, they bear different titles as evocative as After the Sepulture, Bestial Devotion and Until the Chaos. Jonathan Monk’s series, ‘The Endless Search for Perfection’ (2006), consists of wire coat-hangers which the artist has unsuccessfully tried to shape into a perfect circles. The idiosyncrasies of the different pieces function as intriguing counterpoints to the copy-paste logic of the peer-to-peer system.
Christophe Gallois
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