Modernisms

“I am extremely ill, I am behind with 800 letters,” Marcel Proust complains in a letter to critic Louis-Martin Chauffier in January 1920, shortly after receiving the Prix Goncourt. This observation, which could very well indicate the current state of overload of the subject, exhausted by mail, social media, and the compulsion to constantly perform, leads back to the early twentieth century and the indirect history of the epochal and convoluted À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) that was embedded in a no less complex network of missives. It is assumed that Proust could have written up to 48,000 letters, of which at most a quarter have been researched and catalogued to date. In letters to his parents, publisher, and friends, the posthumous publication of which Proust wanted to prevent at all costs, he often addresses the conditions of his illness, and in his last two years of life, it occurs in every letter. He was severely affected by asthma from childhood, but he also used it for all kinds of escapist and manipulative purposes in the service of life and work. Toujours au lit, or “always in bed,” is the title of an important essay by Reiner Speck, in which the place and “sleep” (or lack thereof) are not only at the beginning (and end) of Recherche. full text (E/D) > download pdf

Modernisms, a new exhibition format in the rooms of piece*unique in Cologne, aims to place singular proponents of international contemporary art in dialogue with culturally and historically relevant artifacts and works whose origins lie outside the narrow framework of what is generally understood as “fine art.” This includes architecture, design, literature, and music, as well as more distant areas of culture and knowledge of modernism – an era whose foundations and categories are increasingly up for debate in a world despairing of itself.

By suggesting such lines of resonance between present and past, Modernisms once again appeals to the virtues of universal thinking. Given this, it should be considered that contemporary art’s inherent dynamics of sensing and asserting its own contexts can yield immense poetic power while also revealing limitations, dissolutions, and dead ends that lend new legitimacy to the somewhat anachronistic buzzword “interdisciplinary.”

The first issue of Modernisms brings together letters by Marcel Proust with three groups of works by Croatian artist Dora Budor. Both artists share a preoccupation with the forms and layers of memory up to the dissolution of the ego – insomnia, daydream, sudden clarity, euphoria, repetition, placebo, depression . . . one’s own life, remembered in the subjunctive as foreign, becomes art – and concurrently a subject of art.

2015 – 2019

01 MICHAIL PIRGELIS 02 HEIMO ZOBERNIG 03 ALEXANDRA BIRCKEN
04 YVES SCHERER 05 TOM BURR 06 GEORG HEROLD 07 WU TSANG
08 KATE COOPER 09 GREGOR HILDEBRANDT 10 ANNETTE KELM
11 KLARA LIDÉN 12 ROSEMARIE TROCKEL 13 DAVID OSTROWSKI

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