Morality
2009—2010 Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art Exhibition
Oct 10, 2009 to Nov 20, 2010
Morality is the leitmotiv for the entire program at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art between the Fall of 2009 and the Summer of 2010. By isolating this concept, we aim to withdraw it from any of the social, cultural, sectarian, religious or historical specificities within which it is often deployed.
Morality is a provocative theme. From the bathroom to the parliament, there is a total field of social engagement in which morality functions without boundaries, between a set of abstract, intangible and general ideas. Morality is neither a base nor a superstructure, but a smooth network of influences that supersedes the law, governing both regulated and unregulated social spaces, and affecting daily life in subtle, seductive, unexpected ways. Yet, there is not a unique or purely affirmative sense that one can give to this notion. A number of moral attitudes – often at odds with one another – inform the positions that, as political subjects, we assume in relation to the events that take place in our world.
As a whole, Morality is an assemblage of exhibitions, events, projects, and dialogues that took place at Witte de With. These have been divided into acts, partly in reference to the theatrical distinction between discrete but interconnected narratives, but also making reference to the legal and religious connotations that the term brings. There is also a more obscure but important mathematical connotation, relating to the theory of sets, in which an act is a factor of transformation that affects a number of otherwise distinct and unrelated elements. By virtue of being engaged in this singular transformation, they are therefore already in the process of forming a common but as yet undefined identity. This paradoxical operation is central to this experimental project, which aims to leave the term “morality” as undefined and abstract as possible, allowing it therefore to include, against its own disposition, a range of diverse and contradictory meanings and characters.
Rather than presenting statements that can be perceived as being right or wrong, good or evil, the project Morality aims at showing a wide range of attitudes that problematize a total conception of morality, focusing on the less tangible forces and attitudes that shape common thinking and behavior.
Throughout the year, the visitor first encountered on the second floor Marko Luliç’s Fragment of a Modernist Monument made to fit the foyer of Witte de With, a sharp and humorous response to our request to produce a work for this space that, at Witte de With, hopelessly splits the gallery space in two. Only by the title is the visitor able to identify this object as a “fragment of a monument,” whose scale, proportional to the scale of the theme, suggests a discrepancy between the institution and the concept of morality. It simultaneously indicates a skepticism on the part of the artist when confronted with commissions that are too specific about the space of a contemporary art institution. This is the first in a series of interventions commissioned for Morality. Each of these interventions functioned as an autonomous response to the institution, the project, and the exhibitions.
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