Event: Andreas Zybach speaks at Western Bridge Saturday, April 26, 1 pm (free)


"You Complete Me” mixes conversations around interactive art and relational aesthetics in a series of works that are less viewed than experienced. Works include Martin Creed's "Work No. 360: Half the Air in a Given Space," a room half-filled with silver-gray balloons, Mungo Thomson's skyspace in the form of a bounce house, Andreas Zybach’s “0 — 6.5 PS”, a long tunnel which uses visitors’ weight to generate hydraulic pressure. The exhibition also includes a commissioned poster by Jordan Wolfson and a commissioned sculpture by Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon, and makes local introductions of the work of Mungo Thomson and Mark Soo.

Let’s think about what has resulted from one hundred years of artists working to activate the passive viewer. We are familiar with art asking something of us; we have allowed it to make these requests, though we may at times regret giving up our separation from the work. Our position of passivity was also perhaps a position of autonomy. Was there some coercion involved as we relinquished voyeurism for a more engaged role? Does interactivity make art more democratic, or can it also be a kind of tyranny? Can open forms result, as per Nicolas Bourriaud, in the creation of “micro-utopias,” or should the work retain the potential to express or generate antagonisms and conflict?