We are up to our shoulders with Making Use. Life in Postartistic Times, a new project which will open at the Warsaw MoMA on the 19th of February 2016. From today until the opening (or maybe even afterwards), we will be uploading posts on the books which are related to the project. Making Use. Life in Postartistic Timesthe is engaged with the various ways of migrating from the field of art to daily life and in the reverse direction—from life to art. It addresses one of the fundamental postulates of twentieth-century avant-garde movements—the mutual penetration or even fusion of art and everyday life. The first book is quite obvious, it is Toward a Lexicon of Usership by Stephen Wright. Wight (who has accepted the position of the "shadow curator") - whose writngs was a point of departure for this exhibition - postulates a deconstruction of “conceptual edifices” that have provided the foundations of institutionalized art since the nineteenth century. As counter to this edifice, Wright proposes a model of art that implements its own potential—imagination-driven and conceptual—through the process of making use. Such postulates operate on a 1:1 scale, akin to a map that begins to overlap with the actual territory that it represents. Wright is looking for strength in the weakness of art; the theorist disputes Kantian “purposeful purposelessness,” the need to replicate existing systems, the rigours of ownership and authorship, and the haughtiness of so-called “expert” culture.
