16 febbraio - 20 maggio 2007, Amsterdam (NL)
“Mapping the City” focuses on the relationship between artists and the city from around 1960 to the present day. The group show revolves around the way in which artists perceive urban space. The emphasis is on the city as social community, on behaviour, poses, and urban rituals. Participating artists_ Doug Aitken, Francis Alÿs, Stanley Brouwn, Matthew Buckingham, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Guy Debord/Asger Jorn, Ed van der Elsken, Valie Export, Lee Friedlander, Dan Graham, Frank Hesse, Douglas Huebler, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Sol LeWitt, Sarah Morris, Bill Owens, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Willem de Ridder en Wim T. Schippers, Beat Streuli, Jeff Wall | How do we experience the street? How do we behave? How do we navigate through the city? With a combination of works from the Stedelijk Museum collection and works loaned from international collections, the exhibition highlights photography, video art and installation. Two ideas are at the heart of the exhibition: the flâneur, a type first described by Charles Baudelaire around 1850, and the activity of dérive, a practice coined by French philosopher and Situationist Guy Debord. The flâneur, a detached observer of city life, has been defined as the product of modernity par excellence. Debord describes dérive as drifting through the city without a specific destination, to re-experience the stimuli of the metropolis and the encounters to be found there. “Mapping the City” begins in the late nineteen-fifties when Debord published his Theorie de la dérive (1958). Another jumping-off point is Stanley Brouwn’s famous series This way Brouwn. Starting in 1962, Brouwn started asking random passers-by for directions in getting from point A to point B. He gave each route that people drew for him the title This way Brouwn. […] Info: tel +31 020 5732911 fax +31 020 6752716 e-mail: info@stedelijk.nl; www.stedelijk.nl - CS