Cataloguing Contemporaries: Ovid Ex Ponto 4.16 in Context

Abstract

At the 2005 Biennale in Venice, visitors entering the German Pavilion were confronted with the sculptures and paintings of Thomas Scheibitz. With their colossal proportions and loud colours, these attracted the gaze of the visitors and commanded their attention. Yet, in their extreme abstraction, Scheibitz' works remained curiously inaccessible. As a critic in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote at the time, they were "completely introverted artifacts, far removed from current relevance or any referential framework". 1 Only a few visitors will immediately have noticed the large number of museum attendants present, casually wandering through the rooms, with an encouraging smile for those contemplating Scheibitz' works or a mild rebuke if someone came too close to the exhibits. All of a sudden, however, they started dancing and broke into awkward sing-song, repeating, time and again, the phrase: "This is so contemporary! Oh, so very contemporary!"The uniform-wearing men and women were not attending to the artworks: they were participating in a work of art themselves: 2 the second exhibit of the German Pavilion was a performance orchestrated by concept-artist Tino Sehgal. But what was the meaning of the attendants' chant? What was 'contemporary'? Was the litany of contemporariness an ironic comment on Scheibitz' abstract art? Or did the guards draw attention to the fleeting presence of their own performance? 3 And more fundamentally: what is 'contemporary art'? Is an artwork mediated by art historians, curators, critics and dealers, and indeed: watched over by museum attendants, still 'contemporary'?  1 Richter 2005 ("in sich selbst zurückgezogene, jeder Aktualität und Bezüglichkeit enthobene Artefakte").