
“Un Coup de Dés: Writing Turned Image. An Alphabet of Pensive Language”
Generali Foundation
Wiedner Hauptstraße 15
September 19–November 23, 2008
Curated by Sabine Folie
With concerns over the fate of the Generali’s groundbreaking Conceptualist program running high since the institution’s merger last year with the Bawag Foundation, it would seem anything but a random toss of the die that incoming director Sabine Folie’s debut exhibition looks, according to press materials, to Stéphane Mallarmé’s provocative “unmasking [of] language as a convention that serves to subject the individual to discipline and a regulated system of capitalist exploitability.” In considering such use and subversion of language in postwar and contemporary art in all media, the exhibition of more than a dozen artists (including Robert Barry, Rodney Graham, and Ewa Partum) revolves around Marcel Broodthaers’s famous good-bye to conventional poetry, Pense-Bête, 1964, for which he sealed his final volume of verse in plaster. A catalogue accompanies, with texts by Folie, Gabriele Mackert, Jacques Rancière, and others.