Vista de sala de la exposición. Thomas Schütte. Retrospección, 2010

Thomas Schütte

Hindsight

viernes 21 enero 2011
4:00
Painting
Sculpture
Architecture
Postmodernity
Public Sphere
Museum

What is public space? What is the capacity of sculpture to really transform it? What is the relationship between human scale and the design of architecture?

Like a joke from the Modulor developed by Le Corbusier, some of Thomas Schütte’s works presented in Hindsight were designed to think about problems of design and architecture in early European postmodernism.

In this podcast dedicated to the exhibition that was held at the Museo Reina Sofía between February and May 2010, a constant background noise can be heard from the foot traffic in the Plaza Nouvel and the building whose architect learned nothing or very little from these discourses when it came time to draw up the plans. Over this noise is a conversation with Thomas Schütte, where he discusses the obsolescence of his battle against institutions, which he stopped fighting, because – as he puts it – they achieved their goals after the debates of the 1970s. For example, they are now open to the artistic languages in which artists like he himself and Daniel Buren were working. Now that institutions have accepted and recognised them, Schütte explains, they are only needed for retrospectives, which, paradoxically, is precisely the reason for this interview.

Public space, Schütte concludes, is now the Internet, where someone of his generation could never have worked in the 1970s. He ends by saying that the perfect public space, despite all of these reformulations, would be common sense.

Production

José Luis Espejo

License
Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0

Thomas Schütte

Hindsight

Thomas Shütte. Hindsight. February 16 to May 17, 2010

Thomas Schütte, artista: Decoration for the power.
You have to come over in one delimited position. But what they did in the late sixties and the seventies was extremely important. You can’t imagine today what it means to put just stripes on the wall.

Julien Heine, director del Kunstsammlung de Norden Westfalia: it's two ways he follows that you can see in this two roads. One more figurative and one more constructive, more architectural, and since you can pass trough the doors between these two spaces, between these two galleries you can make your own choice, you our combination you want to make.
So there is these very aggressive ceramics, and then you came back to this very sober, very conceptual. And you can make your own combination, and I think that a very interesting idea.

Thomas Schütte: in the late eighties and early nineties post-modern discussion was very interesting. The building results was no interesting years later. The discussion was very good in all magazines, to to get out of this modernist trip, and this was good for me. I think there was the reason I started building models, until today, wood models in certain scale.
I still very modest I don want it to build in big, just one or two in big.

In the eighties I did a little bit, but I decided two keep out because... in front of a bank, in front a insurance, in the back of a museum are always private places, named private places. And the unique public space is now the internet, and in that time it was not existing. The perfect public space is the common sense. I have contract for airport, train station, insurance but I never did it.

I stop fighting institutions because I say yes or now, the say make it, I a lot of stress to get a show.
But now the institutions are open to every scene, to performances. Everybody can do things and the effort in the sixties to open up these institutions actually works. And suddenly we don't need them any more.
Except for retrospectives.