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Elisa Platteau Galerie is sponsored by

VARIOUS PLATONISMS

Marco Bruzzone, Rachel Carey, Mariana Castillo Deball, Daniel Knorr

2 OCT - 9 NOV 2009

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

When discussing the possibility of a curated show at Galerie Elisa Platteau some months ago, my mind inadvertently wandered off to consider a slew of pun-like exhibition titles (some way too tongue-in-cheek) alluding to the fortuitous homophony of the gallerist’s family name with that of the forefather of the Western philosophical tradition; I finally settled for a group show titled “Various Platonisms” – a suggestion of the inherent multiplicity of the Platonic tradition, to which Elisa Platteau is now adding her own variant.
Various Platonisms and Platonic ideas are at work in this exhibition; the different works in the show speak to the persistence of some very deep-rooted cultural, political and social concerns, many of which were first articulated, as properly philosophical problems or challenges, by Plato – his originality in this regard eventually led the great British logician Alfred North Whitehead to state that the whole development of Western thought is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato.
Marco Bruzzone and Rachel Carey share a notable interest in crowd behaviour and crowd control; Carey’s work in particular is concerned with (to use a rather grandiose term) master-slave dialectics and the tragi-comical quality of many experiments in the formation of aristocracies and oligarchies – the originary Platonic form of government. Bruzzone has made a series of works using pigeons, building a resting device for them hung up high in the air; from this improvised vantage point, their droppings went on to form a perfect, if smudgy circle – producing an image that is clearly not without philosophical resonance (both the allegory of the cave and the idolatry of geometry in the original Platonic academy come to mind).
Berlin-based Romanian artist Daniel Knorr is well-known for his work in public space, alternately subjecting architectural icons (in Berlin), statues (in Copenhagen) and trams (in Bucharest) to his irreverent, irony-prone treatment. In this show, Knorr will exhibit a vitrine filled with what appear to be craggy rocks or fossilized materials; they are in fact clumps of paper retrieved from the Stasi archives in Leipzig – the result of the feared Secret Police’s frantic attempt to erase all traces (save for the odd letter) of their institutionalized political paranoia, thus recalling Plato’s deep-seated suspicion of the written word, and his preference for the spoken word instead. The political uses of myth (especially when expressed through the naturalizing medium of geology), finally, have often appeared at the center of Mariana Castillo Deball’s artistic preoccupations, most notably in her long-standing commitment to thinking archeology which culminated in the multi-faceted project These Ruins You See. Deball’s research-heavy practice locates itself at the intersection of science, museology, historiography (most notably of science itself), and anthropology – some of the fruits of a long period spent in Brazil looking at its anthropological tradition in particular will be presented at the gallery, once again taking up the artist’s continuing interest in mimesis.
If all art, as one particular brand of Platonism (that we are not entirely unsympathetic to) has it, is imitation, then what exactly does it imitate?

Dieter Roelstraete (°1972) was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent and currently works as a curator at the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA. He is an editor of Afterall and FR David as well as a contributing editor to A Prior Magazine, and has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues. Roelstraete is also a tutor at De Appel Curatorial Program in Amsterdam and at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. He lives and works in Berlin and Antwerp.