Tino Deghal & Dorothea Von Hantelmann – Homage to Cedric Price
What interests us in Cedric Price’s Fun Palace is that in its core it carries the idea of a new kind of institution. An institution that attempts to construct a ritual that is specific and appropriate to a mass society brought about by advanced industrialization. Concretely, it provides a movable, transformative structure that can host a mass audience and yet addresses them as individuals, even being able to transform in response to individual users. Thus its architectural conception incorporates essential features of a current social formation: mass population, individualization, flexibilization, constant change and the increasing involvement of consumers into the processes of production. Furthermore the Fun Palace would have been an institution that does not place the modern idea of “art” at its centre. One of the most interesting attacks on this modern concept of art has been published by the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead in 1943. Approaching the idea of a new Western ritual we think it’s worth rereading the following passage today.
TINO SEHGAL studied dance and political economy. Sehgal’s works are live situations that can be encountered during the entire opening hours of galler- ies and museums. These constructed situations can develop differently depending on the comportment of the visitor, thereby integrating an element of partici- pation into the works own structure. As it is a central aim of Sehgal to not produce anything material, there are no filmic or photographic recordings of these works, however his works can be found in the collec- tions of the Centre Pompidou, the Tate, and MoMA, among others.
DOROTHEA VON HANTELMANN is documenta Professor at the Art Academy/University of Kassel where she lectures on the history and meaning of documenta. Her main fields of research are contemporary art and theory as well as the history and theory of exhibitions. She is currently working on a book that analyses historical changes in the social function of the art exhibition. Entitled The Exhibition: Transformations of a Ritual, the book explores exhibitions as ritual spaces in which fundamental values and categories of modern, liberal and market-based societies historically have been, and continue to be, practised and reflected. Before taking the position in Kassel, Dorothea von Hantelmann taught art history at the Free University Berlin and was a member of the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Centre Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits. She is the author of How to Do Things with Art, one of the seminal works on performativity within contemporary art.