Farmlab Public SalonGoran DjordjevichFriday May 9, 2008 @ NoonFree Admission

SITES OF MODERNITY
Antiquario dell Statue and Museum of Modern Art

About the Salon
Join Goran Djordjevich for a preview of his upcoming exhibition, SITES OF MODERNITY: Antiquario dell Statue and Museum of Modern Art. The show will take place this June, at the Oberwelt Gallery in Stuttgart, Germany.

About Sites of Modernity
Some time around the year 1503, Pope Julius II placed the Apollo statue, which was in his possession, into the newly built Vatican garden named Belvedere. Soon after, the Laocoon group was excavated and brought to the garden as well. Then came other statues: Torso, Nile, Cleopatra, Venus, Comodus as Hercules, Tiber, etc. Those had been mostly broken marbles scattered around in various private palaces or buried for many centuries. Now, put on display together in the enclosed garden, they became exhibits, as if in an open-air wonder camera. Unlike the other wonder camera collections, this one was dedicated solely to the statues from ancient times. Those fragments from the past, placed among the orange trees and in specially built niches, emerged as a completely new sight for the contemporaries. This was a sight that had never been seen before. Soon it got the name Antiquario delle Statue, and that was the moment when the Antiquity was born. However, this particular display of the statues from the past became also the new vision of the past. Being the most novel invention of the time, this represents the birth of Modernity as well. Those statues were the first works of art and the first modern works of art. Thus the Belvedere Antiquarium itself was not only the first museum of art, but also the first museum of modern art. Since that moment, the Antiquario dell Statue, directly or indirectly, shaped the concept of art and art institutions throughout the entire Western World, for the next five centuries.

In 1929 The Museum of Modern Art opened in New York. After Pio-Clementino and the Louvre museums, this was the last important offspring of the Belvedere impulse. Being international in scope, the idea of Modern was to collect and exhibit the best and most advanced art of the time. At the 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, instead of the dominant 19th century paradigm based on National Schools, the museum's founding director Alfred Barr introduced the idea of International Movements. This completely changed the character of the modern art narrative, and retroactively, the History of Art in general. And this is the narrative that has been shaping the art world ever since.

Today the old Belvedre collection of statues is in the Vatican Museum, while the most important collection of modern art is in the Museum of Modern Art. And today these two museums are both museums of antiquities. The exhibition Sites of Modernity brings together to life the fading memories on these two most important museums of modern art: Belvedere Romanum and Museum of Modern Art. --Goran Djordjevich

About the Salon Presenter
Goran Djordjevich is a former artist in recent years known as the Doorman of the Salon de Fleurus in New York. He was also Technical Assistant at the exhibitions: "Salon de Fleurus" at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, "International Exhibition of Modern Art 2013" at the 2003 Venice Biennale and "Americans 64" at the 2005 Venice Biennale, "50 Ans d'Art aux Etats-Unis"
at the 2007 Biennale de Lyon, and "What is Modern Art?" at the Kunsthaus Bethanien in Berlin 2006.
More info: www.whatismodernart.de



Images of Belvedere (top) and Pope Julius II (bottom) courtesy Goran Diordjevich