Curated by Carly Busta and Luke Cohen

Exhibition participants: Artur Barrio, Carola Dertnig, Corporate Mentality, Keller Easterling, Thomas Eggerer, Dan Graham, Alan Licht, Christian Philipp-Müller, Michael Snow, and others…

Spectators and agents, tourists routinely vacate their habitual surroundings to occupy alternative subject positions, if not a geographical location. Yet, with pressure to ensure each vacation is well spent, the voluntary activity of tourism supports a guide industry. Barthes considered the guidebook an “objectified form of ‘immaterial labor’ [...] essentially serving as a ‘labor saving device,’”—objective fact relegating efficient, guided, disorientation.

If tourism seeks a reliably mapped alterity, the exhibit detourism can only offer an itinerary of shifting curatorial endpoints. detourism takes topology as an impetus to highlight the interstices in the urban field constitutive of subject relations. The spatial practices exhibited underscore the line of demarcation between the subject and its dematerialization within the built environment.

In his 1969 essay, “Subject Matter,” artist Dan Graham economically articulated the exodus from the static architecture of minimalism with a hyphen. For Graham, to critically understand the modernist form, was to literally understand that form is “in-formation.” Graham’s extension of terms freed analysis from the exactitude of measure. “In-formation” accented an emphasis on the co-existence and fluctuating relational and directional properties between objects. Describing the complementing shift in terminology, art historian Eric de Bruyn writes, ”... information is attached to a striated notion of space, whereas in-formation is connected with a smooth, deterritorialized space of drifting signs and bodies.” Although the logic of topology de Bruyn observes in his study of the sixties projects of Graham and Stanley Brouwn granted the subject certain freedoms-collaborative constitution of meaning; a relative positioning of power-it simultaneously presented unprecedented indeterminacies, wherein the subject would hence forth be in danger of disorientation and powerlessness by the very forces from which he or she had supposedly been emancipated. Articulating this precarious subject position, Eric de Bruyn further observes, “The topological model of post-minimal art, therefore runs at an oblique angle to the institutional frameworks of modernism.”

detourism proposes psychogeographical engagements and deviant tourisms to offer alternate routes of circulation.

Special Event Friday July 13, 7pm – 9pm Lenin for your Library? Yevgeniy Fiks in conversation with Olga Kopenkina and Nicolás Guagnini