Disposizioni Spaziali
Aldo Giannotti

In 2015 ar/ge kunst celebrates thirty years since its foundation in 1985. To mark this anniversary the entire annual programme will serve as a critical reflection on the history of ar/ge kunst and on the Kunstverein as the institutional model that has characterized it since the beginning.

Through the various practices of the participating artists, this process of self-examination will centre on the exhibition as a mode of research, production, collaboration and restitution; a space and time conceived to facilitate reciprocity and mutual influence between the exhibitions and the accompanying program of public discussions, workshops and performances.

The first exhibition project of 2015 is entitled Spatial Dispositions and has been devised by Italian artist Aldo Giannotti (b. 1977, lives and works in Vienna). As a progressive examination of ar/ge kunst itself, Spatial Dispositions will operate as the introduction to the anniversary program. Beginning with a series of spatial observations on the planimetry and architecture of ar/ge kunst, Giannotti’s research expands into the broad field of relations that have defined and continue to shape it as an institutional space. The history and economics of ar/ge kunst, its mission statement and ambitions, its responsibilities towards members and visitors, its relationship to its cultural and political context are here translated into projects for potential installations and performances.

Presented as a ‘programmatic’ series of ideas or concept drawings, the outcome of Giannotti’s intervention is a kind of cartography that evolves in line with the research and dialogue of all the visitors, members, staff and artists who are and have been involved in making ar/ge kunst what it is today. Drawing, as a planning tool, has always been integral to Giannotti’s artistic practice. He uses it as an occasion or medium for liberating an imaginative, anticipatory practice that gathers up countless interventions and possible ‘exhibitions’ in one and the same space. His ideas function as a commentary, critique and contribution, perpetually reconfiguring the representation of the space. As such, Spatial Dispositions provides an approach to the institution as a system that can be read and altered according to both senses of the word disposition: as a pre-existing quality, tendency or behavioural pattern on the part of the subject, and as the possible organisation, distribution and arrangement of things in space.

In these terms, Giannotti shifts what might be called the ‘affordances’ of the institution (properties inherent in the form or design of an environment and capable of conveying the possibility of its use) beyond immediate perception; ar/ge kunst becomes an object/subject that strives to perform a multiplicity of roles and functions in response to the actual or potential contexts it chooses to engage.