For the exhibition from Salonul de Proiecte, Daniel Knorr conceived an installation, designed according to the parameters of the exhibition space, within which is inserted the intervention of the young artist Coate-Goale; thus, a dialogue is established between the works of these two artists. Preserving the line adopted by Salonul de Proiecte, to encourage the production of contemporary art and the inter-generational dialogue, this exhibition occasions the exchange of ideas between Daniel Knorr and an artist at the beginning of his career.
Challenging the conventions regulating the modus operandi of the art system, as well as those delimiting the conflict-ridden field of the public space, Daniel Knorr has often adopted a critical perspective, without producing – however – mere conceptual “gestures”, liable of unequivocal interpretations. He transforms and resizes the object found/the urban detritus by recycling and re-contextualizing it, an act meant to indicate the imminence of the entropic processes, but which, at the same time, signals – at least at a utopian level – a possible shift from its destructive finality. Art is endowed with a representational function: its role is to raise awareness of social and historical processes, to ask questions regarding the cultural and political conditionings, as well as the tacit presuppositions on which the construction of national identity, for instance, is relying.
Daniel Knorr is proposing a kind of art produced to a large extent by the spectator, by the public. His works often materialize through the reactions and debates generated in the public sphere, in mass-media, by various decisions with polemical content adopted by the artist. This is what happened
at Manifesta 7 (2008), when the exhibition space assigned to his own participation became – by the artist’s will – a public space; something similar took place in 2005, at the Venice Biennale, when Romania’s Pavilion was left completely empty, bearing the traces of previous exhibitions and leaving the space open for questions related to Romania’s identity-construction, which was – at that time – on the verge of its accession to the European Union. To a certain extent, the exhibition at Salonul de Proiecte works according to a similar logic: the exhibition space is converted into a space for reflection, for what matters foremost is the multitude of possible interpretations, the juggle with theoretical concepts and cultural references (from the “exhibition value” of the art to thoughts on the current capitalist system) constructed by each and every viewer for him/herself.
Coate-Goale is interested in “the establishment of an urban dialogue with the beholder”; his interventions in the public space change the meanings of advertising messages, they are drawing the attention to the degradation of old buildings or are displacing the symbolic configuration of certain places. In other cases, Coate-Goale’s experimental approach is reflected in the interrogation of the photographic dispositive: a recent project is that of turning the pipes & tubes found anywhere in the outdoors (in the mountains, inside the city – such as the bars used for beating carpets) into photographic objectives; in this way, “the framing is already made”, and the image is the result of an act which fully suspends the artist’s subjective involvement. In the exhibition
Piggy-Bank, Coate-Goale brings his expertise in the field of laboratory analyses, contributing to an extended analysis on the connections between art, money and various methods of symbolic and real evaluation.
