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On the Subject of the Ready-Made

or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board
Works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection selected by Bethan Huws on the occasion of 100 years of the ready-made

November 25th 2016 — May 14th 2017
Mercedes-Benz Contemporary
Duchamp as Curator
Video in context of the exhibition
Heimo Zobernig, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol
André Cadere, Hayley Tompkins, Guy Tillim, Siegfried Cremer, Peter Roehr, Liu Zheng, Franz West
Olivier Mosset, Leonhard Schmidt, Daniel Buren, Hermann Glöckner, Andreas Brandt, Elaine Sturtevant, Donald Judd et.al.
Günter Fruhtrunk, Lothar Quinte, Jean Arp, Isabell Heimerdinger, Willi Baumeister, Dieter Blum, Tadaaki Kuwayma, Franz West, Andy Warhol, Andreas Schmid, Guy Tillim et.al.
Jürgen Schadeberg, Andreas Schmid, Guy Tillim, Dieter Blum, Jean Arp, Isabell Heimerdinger, Willi Baumeister, Donald Judd, Tadaaki Kuwayama
Sergio Fermariello, Adolf Hoelzel, Patrick Fabian Panetta, John Nixon, Max Ackermann, John M Armleder, Lothar Quinte
Hartmut Böhm, Gia Edzgveradze, Julius Bissier, Max Bill, Richard Artschwager, Esteban Pastorino, Ian Anüll, Tom Sachs, Jean Arp, Viviane Sassen, Greg Bogin et.al.
Dieter Blum, Anton Stankowski, Adolf Fleischmann, Adolf Hoelzel, Liu Zheng, Christa Winter, Hartmut Böhm, Gia Edzgveradze, Max Bill
Ulrike Rosenbach, Bill Beckley, Josef Albers, Donald Judd, Roland Fischer
David Goldblatt, Donald Judd, Pietro Sanguineti, Zheng Guogu, Josef Albers, Ulrike Rosenbach
© Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

For the exhibition ‘On the Subject of the Ready-Made’ Bethan Huws has devised a location specific project, selecting examples of artwork from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection. Bethan Huws’ curatorial concept starts with Duchamp’s praxis of a combinatorial thinking, the inherent logic and the analytical wealth of allusions found in Duchamp’s conceptual approach. She represents these aspects through the visual neighborhood of artworks from one hundred years of art history, surprisingly juxtaposed so that they provide a commentary on one another. The exhibition’s title is a play-on-words on the famous dictum of Lautréamont: ‘As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’ (1874), which became a defining slogan of the Surrealists, and also anticipated the ready-made in linguistic form.

Symposium “Duchamp as Curator”

 

Downloads

Exhibition brochure
General short texts on the works in the exhibition
Renate Wiehager on Bethan Huws and the exhibition concept

Artists

Events

  • -
    Guided Tour - The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection as Ready-Made
    Ready-mades were a simple gesture with major ramifications for their originator Marcel Duchamp – and for the visual arts in general. 100 years after the concept's first mention in writing (in a letter that Duchamp wrote to his sister), Bethan Huws is placing the ready-made at the center of her artistic researches. The Welsh artist has rearranged works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection according to her own criteria, as it were transforming the works into ready-mades, into components of a new work, and inserting them in a web of references. This tour attempts to lay bare the various statements in the Duchampian concept.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Guided Tour - "... Like Food of the Gods." The Artist as (Co-)Curator
    Since the early 1990s, Welsh artist Bethan Huws has repeatedly engaged conceptually with the practice of curation. This is also the context of the current exhibition at Mercedes-Benz Contemporary: 'On the Subject of the Ready-Made or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board'. Huws is not showing her own work, but rather using 'curatorial gestures' to present works that she has selected from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection – and to thereby question the boundaries of the artwork and of the 'show room' or 'museum' as institution. The tour aims to trace this intertwining of artistic/conceptual and curatorial practices.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Guided Tour - The Curatorial Concept
    The exhibition's title – which quotes Duchamp – is a play on words on the famous line from Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (1874): "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella", which became a defining slogan of the Surrealists. Employing combinatorial practice, Bethan Huws' has taken 130 works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection and surprisingly juxtaposed them so that they provide a commentary on one another. The guided tour seeks to outline the themes, motifs, and logic of Duchamp's thinking to which Bethan Huws' refers.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Guided Tour - Juxtaposing Artworks
    Bethan Huws’ groupings of 130 works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection visualize various aspects of Marcel Duchamp's oeuvre. Themes include the function of the 'hand', which is essential to Duchamp's conception of the ready-made, as well as the significance of multiplication, serialization, and historic book printing. The color symbolism that runs through Duchamp's work is also explored. This tour follows these and other visual references that Huws' has discovered in works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Guided Tour - Post-Ready-Made is Pre-Ready-Made. Observations on Bethan Huws' Notion of the Ready-Made
    'Ready-made', as Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) understood it, involved removing a prefabricated everyday object from its functional context and transferring it into an art context. Bethan Huws' notion of the ready-made, however, is broader in scope: It involves the historic, cultural and/or textual decontextualization of objects, texts, and images – with the aim of generating new contexts of meaning or 'readings'. By reflecting on the current exhibition, the tour invites participants to engage more closely with Bethan Huws' concept of the ready-made.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Mercedes-Benz Contemporary Berlin
    Artist Talk: Bethan Huws in Discussion with Renate Wiehager
    On the occasion of our current show “On the Subject of the Ready-Made or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board” both curators Renate Wiehager, head of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, and Bethan Huws, Welsh conceptual artist, will be discussing the conceptual idea of the exhibition as well as Bethan Huws's artistic scope of work.
  • -
    Guided Tour - Linguistic Constructions
    For Welsh artist Bethan Huws, the differentiated use of speech is the starting point for a dynamic quality of thought, for the interpretation and the questioning of art as a means of generating meaning. This tour focuses on Huws’ etymological and linguistic researches, which allow the analytical wealth of references in Duchamp's thinking to be comprehended. For Huws, it is never solely about an introverted artistic discourse with Duchamp, but rather sensory and intellectual stimuli that can also include memories, emotion, and wit.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Guided Tour - "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella." Bethan Huws in Dialog with Marcel Duchamp
    Discourse with Marcel Duchamp, the originator of the ready-made, is a central theme in the work of conceptual artist Bethan Huws. Take, for example, her 'translation' of Duchamp's painting Nu descendant un escalier (1912), which she converted into a 'language image' in 2004, or her Research Notes (2007–14), in which she analyzed the artistic and theoretical commentaries of Duchamp and connected them with her own thoughts. This tour tracks the creative references to Marcel Duchamp's oeuvre, how Bethan Huws of the YBA (Young British Artist) generation follows up on it, and examines the importance of Duchamp's concept of art for her curatorial concept.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Guided Tour - Translations – Transcriptions – Transfiguration
    Bethan Huws' restructuring of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection reveals new interpretations, which break with the usual art-historical classifications. Here, the concept of the ready-made becomes curatorial practice. Huws understands the ready-made not, as in the original understanding, as the removal of a prefabricated everyday object from its original environment into the context of art, but rather as concerning dislocation from cultural and historical contexts. The guided tour focuses on the various translations, transcriptions, and transfiguration.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Mercedes-Benz Contemporary Berlin
    Children's workshop
    The two-hour workshop is for primary school children between 8 and 12 years. In the context of the exhibition "On the Subject of the Ready-Made or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board" the children will discuss different works of the show. Within an asscociation game, the children will encounter different aspects of the ready-made and will make little ready-made objects themselves. For the registration of your child, please send an email to nathalie.stelmach@daimler.com. The workshop is free of charge and in German language.

  • -
    Guided Tour - Re-Readings. Language, (Visual) Idiom and the Question of the Ready-Made
    Starting with Bethan Huws' perception of the ready-made, this tour examines key conceptualizations in the artist's oeuvre, as well as in the latest exhibition at Mercedes-Benz Contemporary, which she co-curated. Key thematic areas are language and (visual) idiom, materiality and mediality, (artistic) form and (aesthetic) differentiation, as well as processuality and the (in)stability of identity. This allows the concept of the ready-made to be subjected to a 're-reading' in the context of contemporary art praxis.
    The tour will be held in German language.
  • -
    Mercedes-Benz Contemporary Berlin
    Children's workshop
    The two-hour workshop is for primary school children between 8 and 12 years. In the context of the exhibition "On the Subject of the Ready-Made or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board" the children will discuss different works of the show. Within an asscociation game, the children will encounter different aspects of the ready-made and will make little ready-made objects themselves. For the registration of your child, please send an email to nathalie.stelmach@daimler.com. The workshop is free of charge and in German language.

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