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LX 2.0 is a curatorial project developed by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, a commercial contemporary art gallery based in Lisbon. LX 2.0 is one of the direct consequences of the regular program presented by the Upgrade! Lisbon, a monthly gathering of new media artists, curators, and interested people, also held at Lisboa 20.
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Luis Silva coordinates the LX 2.0 online project for Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea.
LX 2.0 is a curatorial project developed by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, a commercial contemporary art gallery based in Lisbon. LX 2.0 is one of the direct consequences of the regular program presented by the Upgrade! Lisbon, a monthly gathering of new media artists, curators, and interested people, also held at Lisboa 20. Extremely interested by the possibilities of the digital medium (and by its contemporary feel) Miguel Nabinho, the gallery’s director, has shown great interest in creating the gallery’s new media branch. Having extreme physical constraints (only one room allocated for the regular exhibition program,) it was decided to create an online platform through which Lisboa 20 would commission, display, and archive online (internet art) projects. The first commissioned artists were Santiago Ortiz (with the project Neurozappingfolks), Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (with the project Manhã dos Mongolóides—Morning of the Mongoloids) and Carlos Katastrofsky (with the project Last Wishes). Besides commissioning new work created by artists who have been developing a relevant work in exploring the Internet as an artistic medium, LX 2.0 will also, gradually, create a database of links to different resources, like artists sites, exhibitions, platforms, publications, and readings, in order to contextualize and allow for a theoretical background for these works and their underlying discourse.
Despite being a traditional concept in the new media art field, a feature clearly stated in the project definition is that is meant to constitute a unique exercise in the Portuguese artistic landscape. It aims at achieving a double goal: one of bringing awareness to the online medium in the Portuguese “institutional” art scene (more than being a partnership with a gallery, LX 2.0 is as part of the gallery as its regular exhibitions,) and educating and informing the audience about new media art and its underlying discourse, and another of becoming a relevant project from a global point of view (despite being a small-scale project, based in a peripheral county with little history in new media art.)
If at a first glance LX 2.0 seems a traditional online project, featuring new art works and linking to various resources, a closer look brings awareness that it is everything but conventional. As it was already mentioned, it is a small peripheral project aiming at becoming a global reference for the international new media community, but most importantly, it is an online curating exercise done by a traditional, commercial space—a contemporary art gallery.
Common sense indicates that commercial, or simply, more traditional spaces have almost a religious belief in the impossibility of dealing with new media art, especially its more extreme version, Internet art. This situation occurs simply because traditional exhibition venues (either commercial, like galleries, or institutional, like museums and art centers) are running on the white cube ideology. This white cube model, a recent development in art history, dating to the 20th century, is nothing but a hegemonic ideology that prescribes the correct way for art to be shown within an institutional context. But being an ideology, and thus a social construct, it bears no absolute value in itself.
A commercial gallery tends mainly to show only artworks that fit into this exhibition paradigm, or into its more recent upgrade, the black box. The reason for this to happen is due partly to the fact that the gallery has to sell the works in order to function. These are the two main reasons for the lack of acknowledgement of new media art, from the institutional art world. And these are the two main features that LX 2.0 is not only ignoring, but moreover is trying to oppose and demystify. It is a project created by a space that operates within the white cube ideology—a gallery—but a space that recognizes that the white cube is nothing but an ideology and that process-driven, time-based artworks are calling for new exhibition paradigms. Each new project LX 2.0 commissions is launched at the gallery’s physical space, at the same time that a regular exhibition opens. Invitation cards state both the new opening and the online project launch. LX 2.0. is as much a part of the gallery as the shows taking place in the physical space, but it exists only online.
LX 2.0 is also a non-commercial project belonging to a commercial space, a traditional contemporary art gallery. Commercial galleries need to sell, but they have also a cultural role to take. Having that in mind, it was always agreed upon that LX 2.0 wouldn’t be a commercial project. It didn’t make sense to try to sell online artworks and it would also mean the failure of the project from the very start. Instead, it was decided that the project would be financed by the commercial side of the gallery, which was, to some extent, a conscious critical statement: it is the sale of traditional artworks, such as painting, sculpture, photography, installation, or the like, that finances LX 2.0 and allows it to commission new, un-sellable online artworks.
