Halle Otrans

Getting art out of the box!

The incoming warehouse as an exhibition space

Art shipping logistics are an essential part of modern art business. It facilitates multiple presence at different places.
Labels with the destination addresses on the transport crates are an important indication of the significance of what is inside. Exhibitions are the way in which art exists today. What is not exhibited is not perceived.
To get the idea of an utterly contemporary artwork across, a new generation of artists no longer needs the old massive truck as a transportation vehicle. One acme of our culture is moving away from anything that is defined by physical existence.
To do so, the quotation has become a common contrivance that is used to transform the past into a perfectly present presence. The slick and perfect delusiveness of the display has no regard for the materiality of the original.
What remains is a reference to the history of our material culture. It is in an interesting phenomenon in this context that transport boxes and pallets are frequently shown in exhibitions (becoming exhibits in their own right). Remains of real-life objects still scattered with traces of their own making and use. (Robert Morris, “The Box with the Sound of Its Own Making”)

I am interested to present artists in the Halle Otrans who do not see themselves as mere living quotations in the information stream of contemporary public discourse.
No artist’s life is utterly rooted in the present. Compelling art always has some special past in its center (Mark Dion). The artist’s own past and a visible development history of his/her art.

Herbert Oppeneiger