How do artists work today? Has the pluralism of art given way to a pluralism of roles that artists may occupy? What are the contemporary conditions of labour producing this new state of affairs, and what re-skilling does it ask of artists? These are some of the questions addressed in The Artist As.
We Are Living on a Star takes its title from a tapestry by Hannah Ryggen that hung in a government building known in Oslo until July 22, 2011. The events of July 22 transformed normality as we knew it and, consequently, the predictable as well. The artists and writers participating in We Are Living on a Star (the book and the exhibition it accompanies) contend with a range of issues relating to history, contemporaneity, normality, and expression.
Could it be that the Moscow Conceptualists were so elusive or saturated with the particularities of life in a specific economic and intellectual culture that they precluded integration into a broader art historical narrative? If so, then their simultaneously modest and radical approach to form may present a key to understanding the resilience and flexibility of a more general sphere of global conceptualisms.