Positioning : Intro

Where do you want to go today?

1990s global culture seems to open up innumerable possibilities accessible within the individual's own physical or social locality. Fantasy and reality meld. The sublimity of the everyday is revealed. Focus is turned inward to the personal and intimate. Social networks begin and end with the individual.

If the Microsoft advertising slogan "Where do you want to go today?" seems to offer everything to you alone, what does it say about the world we live in? Behind the ad line lies the implications of a web of interconnectivity. You, the individual, can tap the collective. The slogan implies both us and you, as well as choice limited only by the edges of your imagination. An obvious trend in recent advertising, this freedom of individual choice is mirrored in a recent ad for a vacation resort, "When you return from your next vacation, who do you want to be?" Now, not only objects and ideas are up for grabs but the very you of you is an option, to be discarded and remade, or adopted or purchased.

An exhibition featuring art of the 90s, Positioning reflects these circumstances and the typically 90s phenomena of ambiguity, disjunction, and variety. Although we have found that 90s art work is typified by several overarching characteristics, those characteristics are not neatly categorized or packaged. They include disruptive and provocative combinations of humor, banality, and simple beauty; a reemphasis on the personal, intimate and close to home; a focus on the social network around the individual; and explorations of alternative notions of time and space resulting from advances in communication processes.

We've entitled these four characteristics or themes, the Subversive Sublime, the Personal/Intimate, Relational Negotiation, and The Transient and the Permanent. While formulated distinctly, these categories are manifest in art works in less absolute ways. In the 90s when plurality reigns and art movements are hardly discernible, art works cross and blend aspects of each of these four characteristics. Within our exhibition we have installed works so that they exemplify their multiple characteristics, not setting any one art work within any one characteristic. In the galleries the thematic titles are variously outlined to reflect within each gallery the different relationships between art works and the characteristics. Here, in this webpage, we've outlined the characteristics as we theorized them, separately.