When, as an artist, success at the beginning of your artistic career is lacking, continuing for a lot of artists is hard and the step from a practicing to non-practicing artist is easily made. So easy, that it takes a while before realizing that the step has already been made. But what if your position in the artistic field is accomplished and you’re a successful artist and you decide to stop producing work? Is this to be seen as an ending of a career or is it a statement towards the art world? Isn’t it possible to blur from one profession to another? Why can’t you be an artist for a period of time and move on to another profession?
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When we talk about successful artists making the decision to stop producing work, we can also refer to them “stepping out” of art. In this reference of “stepping out” there are different kinds of categories:
/ Artists that make themselves less and less visible through their work to finally decide to stop producing.
Artists like, Lee Lozano (1930-1999) who got more and more radical with her pieces (general strike piece, in which she had decided she would no longer attend public “up town“ functions or gatherings related to the art world, boycott piece, in which she stopped talking to women) that she broke off all contacts with the official art world and went into an isolation in Dallas which people refer to as her drop out piece.
/ Artists who feel that producing art isn’t the instrument anymore for them to function in society. Anna Winteler decided to change her career and became physiotherapist. To the question why she stopped producing work, she replied: “It’s the same reason why I start making art, you meet new people and you become somebody else”
/ Artists who can’t keep up with the development of technology and their work starts to become old-fashioned like in the case of Ferdinand Kriwet who refused to keep up with this and also felt that he already had said what he wanted to say in the art world. He now lives his live as a real estate agent.
Is it possible to change? Can an artist be seen as a profession after it’s been abstracting itself for the last 100 years? Isn’t it impossible to see decisions in life as private and not as a statement? Is it a radical fusion of art and life? What are the consequences of this, when one really lives the artistic concepts when this implicates total invisibility or disappearance?
In the project Archiving Disappearance, this phenomenon will be investigated. The project will contain out of an archive, two symposia and a publication.
The archive presents different categories of withdrawal by former artists that each represents a category. It will grow while giving public lectures to show its development during the whole project. In the two symposia, artists, curators and theorists, that have been working on this topic from several different ankles, will be brought together to introduce what they’re working on and to meet each other for possible collaborations. The first one is planned to be at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul where also the introduction of the archive’s first development will be presented. Istanbul functions as a perfect place for introduction because of it’s isolated character within the art community, which will lead to a bigger concentration within the group as well as the audience. The second one is planned to be in New York because its dominant market, which is important in relation to the topic and an enormous contrast between Istanbul.
There will be a half a year pause between the two symposia so that after the first one, the participants can continue to do more research on what they want to present next.
Finally, after this whole research through lecturing, the results will be presented in The Netherlands where the archive and all it’s complexicities will be presented with a publication where all the participants of the symposia are asked to give their contribution to.
