Unlike libraries, schools, churches and many other social structures, museums are one of the few institutions, which encourage and depend on movement and in particular, on walking. As Rebecca Solnit has suggested, walking is an original form of narrative; of telling a story by retracing steps and, thus, forming metaphors for life... "the journey, slips, stumbles and falls... the road to ruin, the steady pace, the obstacle, the high road, the primrose path, the downward spiral, the uphill struggle, the long day's journey into night." The structured walk from work of art to work of art, from station to station of artists· imaginations, is the central narrative of a museum - a walk which reiterates the story of art and of the time of its creation. Nowhere is this more true than at the Louisiana Museum in HumlebcBk where Knud W. Jensen, its founder, created a series of architectural spaces for walking and considering the role of modern art within a natural environment. A wanderland for the spectator.
Walking is, paradoxically, the mode of "seeing" works of art, and not surprisingly, it is an art motif in and of itself, which is rich and engaging, having various meanings through artists· investigations of it. Walking had a complex iconography within traditional art history - romanticism in particular - and its semantic richness has continued to be explored in contemporary artworks which emphasize either the museum itself, the subject of walking or through objects which affect the walks of the spectator by various physical interventions. Awareness of the body's habitual rhytms is the central sign of this exhibition section.
The exhibition section is comprised of three distinct kinds of art works which comment on, reflect or refract the theme of walking in specific areas of the museum. Ferguson' s installation of the artworks will use a wide array of the spaces of the museum - the principal and the marginal, the habitual and the occasional: entrance, ticket booth, gift shop, coatroom, corridor, gallery space, cafe, auditorium, conference room, terrace, pathway to emphasize (through installation, exhibition and performance) an engaged and enriched experience of walking and thinking through this institution and its relation to art works and bodies.
Jensen' s bold assertions - which make of the Louisiana a unique museum in the world - provide by the opportunity for a reinvestigation of the public space of contemporary art. Using a micro-architectural approach together with a narrative thread of artworks - themselves concerned with the movements of bodies in gestic and gendered spaces - as well as newly commisioned art works made for this occasion, Ferguson hopes to re-engage and reconstruct, in contemporary terms, Jensen's fundamental approach to the space of the museum through the semantic surplus in the tematic of walking as seen by contemporary artists. The exhibition section proposes a new way of interpreting the museum itself in conjunction with the exhibiting of existing contemporary works in a new context and new works of art in a context which will allow them a critical position.
Participating artists:
Marina Abramovic (Yugoslavia)
Vito Acconci (USA)
Francis Alys (Belgium)
Dominique Blain (Canada)
Barbara Bloom (USA)
Ronald Brener (Canada)
Marcel Broodthaers (Belgium)
Sophie Calle (France)
Janet Cardiff (Canada)
Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska (Great Britain)
Lewis deSoto (USA)
Braco Dimitrijevic (Yugoslavia)
Eric Fischl (USA)
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Cuba/USA)
Mona Hatoum (Libanon/Great Britain)
Gary Hill (USA)
Jenny Holzer (USA)
Mission Invisible (Japan)
Ana Claudia Munera (Columbia)
Bruce Nauman (USA)
Marta María Pérez-Bravo (Cuba)
Adrian Piper (USA)
Linda Post (USA)
Mark Rakatansky (USA)
Charles Ray (USA)
Jana Sterbak & Ana Torfs (Czech Republic/Belgium)
Talking Heads (USA)
Joelle Tuerlinckx (Belgium)
Andy Warhol (USA)
Krzysztof Wodiczko (Poland/USA)