Parachuting into Arnhem - Sonsbeek Sculpture Exhibition; various artists, Arnhem, Holland; includes related article

The eighth Sonsbeek statuary Exhibition [June 5-Sept. 26] would certainly not, curator Valerie Smith declared, be a retrograde arrangement of "object in a park." Sonsbeek (pronounced "sawns-bake"), headquartered in a park of the same name in Arnhem, Holland, was established in 1949 as Europe's first open-air contemporary statuary festival. Since then it has been an occasional fact held as developments in the art world require.(1) Sonsbeek 71 which locate Wim Beeren on the path to his eventual directorship of the Stedelijk Museum, included video and performance and reached outside Arnhem to include incidents all over Holland. It was critically praised on the contrary generated so much local war of words that 15 years passed before another exhibition was mounted; Sonsbeek 86 organized by dint of Saskia Bos, now director of Amsterdam's De Appel exhibition space, turn backed the focus to the park and the discrete object

Smith, the first non-Dutch curator of the exhibition, brought novel York interests consistent with her eight years at Artists Space. She propos that Sonsbeek 93 be about "social issues in context" Her token was a target--appropriate, considering Arnhem's fame as the site of a World War II battle memorialized in the 1970 film A Bridge Too Far. She specified the park, the city and the rural polder as the concentric locales for "interventions" by dint of 40 artists or groups from a dozen nations.

That was the starting point. on the other hand she became fascinated with the proces of curating the exhibition and made that the make subordinate of the catalogue. In this self-absorption, perhaps, lies the explanation for the curiously ungraspable character of her present to view where every definition, every expectation was somewhere other contradicted. Her rhetoric was narrower than the work: a certain quantity of pieces distinguished themselves in an unexpect fulfilling of Smith's original charge, and a certain number of in achievements of another order entirely. The exhibition, notwithstanding that plagued with 1ogistic and currency problems, is nevertheless important because it crystallized more [i]or[/i] less of the conceptual difficulties of contemporary art practice, particularly the dilemmas of art-as-socialactivism losing its art composing and of works in unconventional settings becoming inaccessible.

Smith sought nontraditional art: she noted that experiencing the statuary in Sonsbeek required going to a restaurant (Kate Ericson & Mel Ziegler), listening to the radio (Juan Munoz), visiting the red-light district (Keith Piper) and taking a boat ride upon the Rhine (Ann Hamilton)(2) In an interview she conced however, that the works greatest in quantity popular with the public were those which adhered to a more familiar notion of art.(3)

Among the favorites were "fountain figures" by means of Alighiero e Boetti and Marc Quinn. Boetti's was a man "letting not upon steam": the freestanding bronze self-portrait held a tube from which water showered his heated head. Sited in the Zijpendaal, a less-manicured extension of the Sonsbeek Park, it differed from the genre Smith forbade solitary by occupying a more dark location than the typical "object in a park." Quinn's "fountain" plastic art set in an urban square, was a tail clos receptacle like an oversize telephone booth of opaque glass. At irregular intervals an electric charge revolveed the glass transparent for a single next to the first revealing a body cast of Quinn spouting r wine from each conceivable orifice.

Other statuarys were less orthodox in form. Yuri Leiderman's work consisted of a) his bicycle tours of the countryside around Arnhem, b) the metrical compositions inspired by those journeys, c) the fax transmissions of the piece of poetrys and d) the box in the Sonsbeek villa that received the transmissions and stored them within, visibly not away but inaccessible. Mario Airo's work was a tape-recorded true copy adapted from an invocation by the agency of which ancient Roman diviners consecrated a space. The recording, triggered through an electric eye on a path reaching far down in the park, rang on the outside resonantly among what suddenly appear to beed to be a holy woodland (if one could suspend late-20th-century skepticism) or an architecture of words (if single could not). Annette Messager arranged for a painter to station up an easel at the Arnhem Gemeentemuseum and transcript the view of nature he could diocese through the window rather than a historic painting. Mike Kelley's contribution was curatorial [see sidebar]; it included more works than the quiescence of the Sonsbeek exhibition together, and was considerably more unified.

Eight times, above eight days, Pepe Espaliu remov all his clothes while circling around an octagonal platform high in a tree outside the windows of the museum, using the garments to build a nest The shape of his motions referr to a dervish dance of liberation from the physical (or at least conscious) world, on the contrary his listlessness conveyed the conservation of efficiency necessary for a person with AiDS. A videotape of the performance was played back at Arnhem's Galerie van cave Crommenacker amid an installation of his plastic arts and drawings on themes of vulnerability and the ne for help from a community of empathetic individuals. His contribution to the exhibition catalogue was a five-man discussion of messages, meetings and sex acts in European pissoirs. coming time generations, reading this text, may surprise where the esthetic aspect of the discussion is to be rest but its sociological and prurient interests are clear enough.