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In Practice: Total Disbelief
"In Practice: Total Disbelief" considers artistic engagements with dimensions of doubt as they contribute to the formation of social life. Across media, the works in the exhibition engage formal tools that uphold belief and produce what we consider to be true 鈥� narrative and cinematic tropes, photographic technologies, empiricism, and others 鈥� and use them to make any number of other truth claims. A position of disbelief may see these aesthetic conventions as valid, but still delimited by external forces, as if they are suggesting something, but not the right thing, or not saying all they can or could say.
While characterized on one hand by the clean slate of a baseline lack of faith, an active engagement with disbelief also means taking stock of astonishment, navigating defense mechanisms, and pitting skepticism against a real desire to be convinced and to know. In Practice: Total Disbelief posits that artworks are the products and by-products of these dynamics, appearing as objects, images, and activities that sustain uncertainty, not in the least about the capacities of the art object itself.
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"In Practice: Total Disbelief" considers artistic engagements with dimensions of doubt as they contribute to the formation of social life. Across media, the works in the exhibition engage formal tools that uphold belief and produce what we consider to be true 鈥� narrative and cinematic tropes, photographic technologies, empiricism, and others 鈥� and use them to make any number of other truth claims. A position of disbelief may see these aesthetic conventions as valid, but still delimited by external forces, as if they are suggesting something, but not the right thing, or not saying all they can or could say.
While characterized on one hand by the clean slate of a baseline lack of faith, an active engagement with disbelief also means taking stock of astonishment, navigating defense mechanisms, and pitting skepticism against a real desire to be convinced and to know. In Practice: Total Disbelief posits that artworks are the products and by-products of these dynamics, appearing as objects, images, and activities that sustain uncertainty, not in the least about the capacities of the art object itself.
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In the brick-lined basement of SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens, you鈥檒l find Andrew Cannon鈥檚 Gertrude Fireplace, in simulated brick, a replica of a massive structure designed for Gertrude Vanderbilt鈥檚 studio in what is now the studio school in Greenwich Village.
In Practice: Total Disbelief considers artistic engagements with dimensions of doubt as they contribute to the formation of social life.
What is at stake when doubt is our primary stance toward the world? 鈥淚n Practice: Total Disbelief鈥� at SculptureCenter stages a position of doubting the contemporary as ideals, norms, and truth-claims continue to be productively revised and perniciously defaced.
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