COLLECTIVE (IM)POSSIBILITIES: THE DYSFUNCTION OF DILETTANTISM*

As part of the LCCA Summer School the internationally renowned situationist Monthy Cantsin will present to the gathered critics and to all other viewers his project Collective (Im)Possibilities: The Dysfunction of Dilettantism*

The exhibition consists of photos, installations, mixed media and conceptual artworks. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, it uses references and ideas that are so integrated into the process of the composition of the work that they may escape those who do not take the time to explore how and why these images haunt you, like a good film, long after you’ve seen them.

The collected, altered and found photos are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, it often creates several practically identical works, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested: notes are made and then crossed out again, ‘mistakes’ are repeated.

The works are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, the artists leave us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. Through a radically singular approach that is nevertheless inscribed in the contemporary debate, they absorb the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.

The works are a drawn reflection upon the art of photography itself: thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism – made present most palpably in the artist’s exploration of some of the most hallowed of modernist paradigms.