Gallery 1
21.04 - 3.06.2001
--- Exhibition prepared by Independent Curators International, New York
--- Curator on the CCA side: Milada Slizinska
--- Exhibition open 20.04, 6 p.m..
--- Wystawa czynna do 3.06
Attention:
24.04 (Tuesday), 6 p.m., Cinema/Auditorium Room, meeting with the artists.
Poland - Most Wanted: 
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With a delicious sense of humour and a tongue-in-cheek approach, Russian-born artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid have spent the last twenty-five years collaborating together to explore popular notions of what art is. In 1994 they tackled the question of popular tastes in art directly by commissioning a public-research polling firm to conduct "The People's Choice", the first poll on artistic taste in the United States. Using the data collected in the survey, they painted a pair of canvases of classic proportions ("the size of a dishwasher," the preferred choice according to the poll) and called them America's Most Wanted and America's Most Unwanted, including in each painting what the respondents said they wanted or did not want in a painting. America's Most Wanted features a historical figure (George Washington) and wildlife (two deer, a hippo, and some trees), but mostly blue water and sky, which cover 40 percent of its surface; and America's Most Unwanted consists of dozens of overlapping triangles and squares of different sizes and colours (mostly pale yellow, orange, and blue), surrounded by a soft border in black. The survey and the resulting paintings come from the artists' interests in examining people's underlying attitudes about art and what that art might look like, while also challenging the faith that our society puts in statistics. If these paintings are a joke, the joke is on us.
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(wall size) 
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(paperback size) 
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As Russian émigrés, Komar & Melamid were intrigued by the idea of the consumer-research poll as an outgrowth of American democracy; and as artists, they wanted to find out what a genuine people's art would look like. What exactly is a democratic and populist painting? By using such a poll "to penetrate the [Americans'] brains and to get in touch with the people," Komar & Melamid felt that they might be able to come up with an answer. Borrowing a technique that is used to determine how most of American society is run, they hired a market-research firm to engage in "a conversation with the American people" about their attitudes, much the way an American president would during an election campaign. They worked with the firm to develop the questions for the poll, ending up with approximately 100, beginning with the respondents' age and spending habits and then ranging over a variety of subjects from their consumer tastes and recreational activities to their knowledge of famous artists and their own preferences in art, although the term "art" was not used until the thirtieth question and was made to seem part of a series of life-style choices. The questions about what they might want in a painting were as literal as necessary, with options including abstract or representational, portrait or landscape, angles or curves, hard or soft lines, flat or textured surfaces, picture size, particular colours, kinds of brushstrokes even their preferences for wild or domestic animals. A total of 1,001 people were polled a representative sample of the American public.
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(dishwasher size) 
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(paperback size) 
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Since 1994, Komar & Melamid have expanded their research beyond the U.S. to discover what people in various countries around the world look for in art, conducting a similar poll in each one. The project now covers the aesthetic preferences of people in thirteen more countries - China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Kenya, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine and, in addition, the World Wide Web (where the poll results are still posted). For each country, and the Web, the artists have created a Most Wanted and Most Unwanted painting, based on the results of their polls. This exhibition brings together all thirty of these paintings.
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(television size) 
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(refrigerator size) 
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The results of the international polls are surprisingly consistent. Blue is the preferred colour of a majority of the world's citizens. Abstract art is overwhelmingly disliked, with the exception of the people of the Netherlands-the country that gave the world the geometric abstract artist Piet Mondrian. The Chinese answered the most questions with "undecided," but did express a preference for art that shows people at work rather than involved in a leisure activity, in contrast to the Americans, who prefer seeing recreational subjects. The apparent scientific basis of the poll not only lent credence to a host of preconceptions and prejudices but also seemed to legitimise the whole idea of creating democratically determined popular art, giving it an aura of objectivity that is antithetical to any kind of authentic art.
Noted American philosopher and scholar Arthur C. Danto raised the crucial question most bluntly in his essay "Can It Be the "Most Wanted Painting" Even If Nobody Wants It?" While undoubtedly many people like images of historical figures and equally many like those of wild animals, few would favour a picture that puts George Washington together with a hippopotamus. By loading a single canvas with absurd or banal combinations of unrelated "most wanted" items, no harmony can be achieved; and by relying solely on the median, on statistically derived artistic values and desires, no significant artwork can be created. At the heart of the matter is the question of authority: Who or what determines the value of art? And the answer, according to this project, is clearly that we all do, individually and subjectively. Artistic value is an elusive quality, a quandary that Komar & Melamid appear to have acknowledged by using the phrase "America's Most Wanted," with its allusion to the F.B.I. search for fugitives.
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(magazine size) 
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(wall size) 
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Komar (b. 1943) and Melamid (b. 1945) began their careers by tweaking conventional ideas and mocking the authorities in their native country of Russia during the early 1970s, initially taking on state-approved Social Realism as a target and establishing themselves as prominent artist-dissidents in the process. They later immigrated to Israel and, in 1980, moved to the United States and are now U.S. citizens. For one series of works in Russia during the 1970s, Komar & Melamid assumed the fictional identity of Nikolai Buchumov, a one-eyed Russian painter whose adventures served as an alternative to their own restricted lives under Soviet authoritarianism.
The importance that Komar & Melamid always assign to a work's frame, both literal and metaphorical, links their art with European and American Conceptual art of the 1960s. With an acute sense of irony, their brand of Social Realism, for example (in the series The Origin of Social Realism, 1982-83), effectively used the visual language of that movement to undermine it. And ever since, with exhibitions in the major museums of Europe and the United States, Komar & Melamid have rejected the trappings of an easily identifiable artistic style and have instead pursued a witty and wicked investigation of what art means, and to whom. The current project, The People's Choice, is their most articulate statement yet of why art cannot be produced by applying democratic standards. Despite their intensive research, America's (or any other nation's) "most wanted" painting remains as elusive as ever, a challenge to each new artist, and each new art-viewing public, to renew the quest.
The People's Choice Website:
http://www.diacenter.org/km/
Paintings: http://www.diacenter.org/km/painting.html
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Trust for Mutual Understanding, Arts International |
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Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle
Al.Ujazdowskie 6, 00-461 Warsaw, Poland
tel: (48 22) 628 12 71-3, (48 22) 628 76 83 ; fax: (48 22) 628 95 50
e-mail: csw@csw.art.pl