Cuchifritos
120 Essex Street NYC
March 13 – April 10, 2010
Opening Reception March 13 from 4 to 6 PM.
CAFÉ TSCHICHOLD*
Emiliano Godoy (Mexico City)
Terence Gower (New York City)
Sonia Lartigue (Mexico City)
Edgar Orlaineta (Mexico City)
Tilman Wendland (Berlin)
Edgar Orlaineta is curating and participating in Cafe Tschichold. Terms like arts, science, technique, poetry and music were terms that for Plato and his contemporaries had meanings that don’t adjust to their present day content. Our word for art, for example, is Latin (ars) and it is a translation of its Greek equivalent: technique (tecné). With tecné, as art, they designated not only poetry and music, which were associated with inspiration, but to those activities that implied some kind of specific dexterity and knowledge within a group of particular rules: the art of cooking, of navigating, but it also applied to painting or sculpture.
Today the term art owns the higher status of the creative world, in relation to design or craft for example, this hierarchy does not only limits the spectrum of possibilities of other activities but it also limits art itself, because of this many producers refuse to make a definition of what they do, because with definition comes enclosure. On the other hand the term technique in its original version seams like a more open and democratic way to define some contemporary practices that dialogue between different systems and activities.
The exhibition proposal from this group of people deals with this dilemmas as praxis and will produce a collaborative project which integrates different techniques –design, visual art, craft–, into one cohesive ambient.
The motives that the work will address have to do with recycling (objects, ideas and traditions), micro-Modernism (as a “do-it-yourself” Modernism), the site (the Essex Street Market specifically), the history of Modernism in Art, Design and Architecture, the urban environment, and crafts, but most important the real motive is the dialogue generated by the project itself and its contingent.
*Café Tschihold is the name of a concept developed by a group of artists and designers (Emiliano Godoy, Terence Gower, Sonia Lartigue, Edgar Orlaineta and Tilman Wendland) to generate dialogues, events and situations integrating different formal languages, techniques and manifestations concerning Architecture, Design, Craft, and Art in general with the principle of not limiting these activities by their historical definition.
