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What about secrets in the age of Wikileaks? Don’t absolute transparency and information explosion offer the best possibility for camouflage? Secrets are so obvious today that we are no longer aware of them. Man has always been fascinated with secret societies and their clandestine rites, their covert knowledge, and exclusive circle of members. The character of secret societies ranges from harmless brotherhoods to powerful associations with anything but altruistic financial and political objectives. Particularly in times of crises, secret societies provide surrogate values for the prevailing political, social and technological systems of order. |
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Within its own world of mysterious signs, the exhibition pursues the nature of secrecy along a labyrinthine course and discloses a range of bizarre and wondrous discoveries.
Secret Societies, (Exhibtion View), 2011. Courtesy of Schirn Kunstalle Frankfurt Gallery.
Secret Societies. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence
Schirn Kunstalle Frankfurt Gallery
What about secrets in the age of Wikileaks? Don’t absolute transparency and information explosion offer the best possibility for camouflage? Secrets are so obvious today that we are no longer aware of them. Man has always been fascinated with secret societies and their clandestine rites, their covert knowledge, and exclusive circle of members. The character of secret societies ranges from harmless brotherhoods to powerful associations with anything but altruistic financial and political objectives. Particularly in times of crises, secret societies provide surrogate values for the prevailing political, social and technological systems of order. The exhibition “Secret Societies. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence” is dealing with the question how to present the invisible, in how far secret societies mirror certain facets of contemporary art, and how artists reflect the overall theme in different ways. Within its own world of mysterious signs, the exhibition pursues the nature of secrecy along a labyrinthine course and discloses a range of bizarre and wondrous discoveries.
Visitors will come upon ramifying paths, triangular wall arrangements, deceptive images, reflections, and optical delusions in an architecture of light and shadow which the Swiss artist Fabian Marti has specifically designed. With her stage installation “Karo Sieben (Seven of Diamonds)” (2007) German artist Ulla von Brandenburg freely alludes to the checked patterns of freemasonry symbolism and tarot as it is anchored in alchemy, the cabbala, and numerology, while US director Kenneth Anger explicitly relates to the British black magician Aleister Crowley in his film “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969). With his work “Acéphale” (2001) British artist Cerith Wyn Evans presents a decapitated man – symbol of the cult of the same name founded by the French writer Georges Bataille in the 1930s – as a huge neon figure. And in his film “The Hashish Club” (2009) Danish artist Joachim Koester evokes the dim salon atmosphere of the Hôtel Lauzun in Paris where Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, and Honoré de Balzac met for their cannabis séances in the 1840s. Likewise, political conspiracies are critically echoed in numerous exhibits. In his “Souvenir d’Italie (Fondamenti della Seconda Repubblica)” (2010) Italian artist Luca Vitone exposes all 959 members of the secret organization Propaganda Due, which planned a coup in Italy in the 1970s; the later Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, was one of the lodge’s members. Eva Grubinger’s monumental black courtroom installation “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2009) investigates the power-political entanglements of the former Secretary of State and Nobel Prize winner, while the American artist Sean Snyder’s “The Site” (2004/05), an analysis of photos and texts on Saddam Hussein’s arrest in 2003, unmasks the charging of per se meaningless visual evidence with meaning and thus reveals the mechanisms and tendencies of media reports in a manner of astounding relevance to the current situation.
The show comprises more than one hundred works, including paintings, photographs, sculptures, films, and installations and its presumed circle of members encompasses the following artists:
Art & Language, Dan Attoe, Abel Auer, Jean-Luc Blanc, Armin Boehm, Cris Brodahl, Steven Claydon, Aaron Curry, Enrico David, Brice Dellsperger, Kaye Donachie, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Tim Ellis, Matias Faldbakken, Gretchen Faust, Simone Gilges, Goldin+Senneby, Julian Göthe, Eva Grubinger, Uwe Henneken, Benedikt Hipp, Jenny Holzer, Karl Holmqvist, Jonathan Horowitz, Rashid Johnson, Edward Kay, Joachim Koester, Terence Koh, Donghee Koo, Bernd Krauss, Skafte Kuhn, Elad Lassry, Gabriel Lester, Goshka Macuga, Jill Magid, Duncan Marquiss, Fabian Marti, Alex Müller, David Noonan, Rupert Norfolk, Markus Schinwald, Sean Snyder, Jim Shaw, Jennifer Tee, Suzanne Treister, Luca Vitone, Ulla von Brandenburg, Michael Esposito & Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Cerith Wyn Evans, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Lisa Yuskavage and Tobias Zielony.
“Secret Societies. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence” is a co-production between the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the CAPC de Bordeaux. The show will be presented from June 23 – September 25, 2011 in the Schirn Kunsthalle and in the CAPC – musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux from November 9, 2011 until February 26, 2012.
