Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art
Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-HillDecember 6, 2006 - February 18, 2007
Since the 1960s contemporary artists have engaged critically with the ways in which knowledge is constructed. Authorized histories, stereotypes, memory, the human condition, gender issues, established forms of representation, technology, the everyday, language, the cultural institution—these are some of the important issues that contemporary artists have been engaging critically and are still engaging today.
The artists in Forms of Classification deal with many of these issues in diverse ways, defying scientific logic and methodology and offering unorthodox, unpredictable ways of thinking about the world and of the idea of “knowledge.” The artworks selected offer possibilities for suspending, expanding, and challenging our perception of given knowledge, as they propose alternative ways of thinking about ourselves, the world, culture, and history.
The term classification has become intrinsically associated with memory and the archive when discussing contemporary art. Terms such as artist-as-archivist, archival art, archival discursivity, and archival work have become common ground. The artists in this exhibition are primarily discussing, addressing, and deconstructing the present. When a classificatory strategy related to the archive or to the ethnographic practice has been employed, as in the case of Mark Dion, Mathilde ter Heijne, Susan Hiller, and Monika Weiss, this involves the subversion and deconstruction of itself—i.e., of classification as a tool of control, exclusion, definition, and authority—to become a tool of inclusion, of expansion, and of disruption.
