PLus ultra
Curators: Thomas Feuerstein, Stefan Bidner, Medien.Kunst.Tirol
An exhibition of medien.kunst.tirol in cooperation with Kunstraum Innsbruck
ARTISTS
Cosima von Bonin, Christoph Hinterhuber, Richard Höck/Karin Pernegger, Richard Jackson, Andreja Kuluncic, Paul McCarthy, Dorit Margreiter/Anette Baldauf, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, Hans Weigand
PLUS ULTRA (...) We dream of endless pleasure and limitless ecstasy. We want to expand, demand eternal growth and strive for multiple orgasms. We are obsessed with the obsession to go “ever further” and we envision a life without mental or material frontiers, without a deadly finale, a life of eternal youth. We detest stagnation and desire nothing so much as the new. And we celebrate the state of PLUS ULTRA in the culture of NONPLUSULTRA. (…)
The impulse to go ever further in order to satisfy the greed for the ultimate historically has characterized our culture of disorientation since the beginning of the modern era or since the setting out of the sea-faring conquistadors. The motto PLUS ULTRA, in pursuit of which Charles V’s fleet once put to sea to conquer the foreign lands of the occident and to carry home their exotic treasures, up to the present day determines our longing for the inexhaustible Eldorado of a novus mundus. (…)
PLUS ULTRA, as the imperative to go beyond limits, to explore unknown worlds and to realize imaginary visions, has become the universal impetus of Western culture and the synonym of its modernity. This unquenchable desire recurs in the artistic avant-garde movement, in sports and the entertainment industry, in economic expansion, in scientific and technical progress, in individual egomania and social megalomania. Metaphorically speaking this latter-day PLUS ULTRA – echoing the ’trail west’ and the ’frontier spirit’ of the American Wild West – has been expanded and translated into contemporary forms of pioneer and techno culture, into an all-powerful financial system, into cyber worlds as duplicates of physical space, as well as – via Sci-Fi scenarios – into the colonization of cosmic dimensions. Just as once the project of the modern era was initiated, by way of PLUS ULTRA, as a westernisation, so nowadays it is being revised through globalisation, the shifting of natural and technical frontiers, as well as the tensions between orient and occident, as NONPLUSULTRA. Against the background of accelerated transformations of a political, economic, technological and social kind a naïve belief in progress, one-sided accumulations of capital or a wasteful consumerism clash with questions of social equality, a fair redistribution of wealth, and ecological responsibility. (…) The exhibition presents artists as navigators negotiating cultural codes, images, values and processes, dealing with social drifting, drawing up maps of the changes and the metrics of our social condition, our dreams and obsessions. (…)
