Dear friends,
On behalf of Eastern Alliance culture program, Divus publishing house and Umelec magazine, I am writing to invite you to submit some art works to be presented at an atypical exhibition Beauty Free Shop in Prague for the entire month of December, 2005.
The exhibition will be an exhibition of art, but the space and the presentation will be a store. Really. We have obtained access to a large, downtown Prague store with window displays onto a busy tourist street. As happens with stores, items are to be offered for sale.
So for this exhibition, we are soliciting contributions of objects that might look appropriate to such a setting. This might not be as easy as one might at first imagine. Whereas in a gallery there are walls upon which paintings, posters or objects can be displayed, this space features no open walls. On one side of the space available, there are floor-to-ceiling windows. On the other, there are teak-wood framed glass cases, possibly most appropriate to a hat-shop or a jewelery store.
If you are interested in possibly participating, we will promptly send you digital images of the space and floor plans. Then we can begin discussing appropriate contributions. At the end of this email, I am including additional information also.
Please let us know if you are interested soon, as this show will open in one month from now!
Sincerely yours,
Ivan Mecl and Janice Bae
and organization crew
David Cerny, Kristof Kintera, Jiri Ptacek and William Hollister
Imagine a storefront. A boutique in the middle of a tourist town during Christmas high season. On the outside, it looks appropriate to the occasion. Goods can be seen through the window panes and there is a sales person behind a cash register, and customer service representatives available on call. It is only on closer examination, that people recognize that none of the objects serve any practical purpose.
To be sure, they are professionally packaged, there are brochures available to explain function, but in general they are useless, more or less. These are contemporary art objects, but in their nature they arepresented as goods.
This art installation is during Prague's Christmas season and exhibition as a fiction of a luxury department store. In the front hall of an unoccupied exclusive commercial space on the ground floor of the Adria Palace will be an overview of some of the most important contemporary world artists, whose work is associated with consumer goods. These goods are to be presented to the public at the start of December, 2005.
Artists contributing to this exhibition should consider works that resemble, first and foremost, consumer goods, and of a sort that could be found in any high-end Manhattan Fifth Avenue Boutique.
In addition, objects presented should somehow echo production product style. They should look good on a store shelf. In this way, the objects should not appear as art objects as one would find in a gallery, but as commodities.
How do works of art behave in commercial space?
How do spectators behave when they realize they are unexpectedly confronted by art?
How much does it cost?
What's the point?
Many important artists in their work touched on the subject of consumer goods. They created art that somehow recollects something manufactured, or some consumer product. In 1998 Kri¹tof Kintera presented is mysterious products and Jiųí Černický showed his manufactured schizophrenia around the same time. Earlier, in 1995, David Černý created his model heros-kits based on plastic model constructions.
The Beauty Free Shop is no gallery project. It isn't even an exhibition in the true sense of the word. Beauty Free Shop is presented as a store in a bustling city center. At least that's how it would appear at first glance. Centrally located, with a sales lady behind a counter and a sign in the front, and lit up appropriately, every detail would give the impression of being in a real store. It is up to the customers to orient themselves and perhaps select some consumer good according to their own needs.