News From Nowhere

Opening 25.11.2014, 6pm
Welcome City councilwoman Lisa Rücker
with Jokomo und Jeindl
Finissage 09.12.2014 6pm

For this year’s series of exhibitions planned by the Styrian art groups Künstlerbund Graz, the Steiermärkischen Kunstverein Werkbund, and the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Steiermarks, a book will once again serve as the starting point for the conception and contents of the artistic explorations: the utopian novel “News From Nowhere”, written in 1890 by William Morris, an unusually multitalented artist. Morris was a British painter, architect, poet, craftsman, engineer, printer, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, and an early co-founder of the socialist movement in Great Britain.

The utopia described in his book represents an alternative to the social conditions of the period in which it was written. Still, it can be understood even without the historical political references or the background biography, and its vivid language remains effective to this day. Morris begins his analysis of society with human needs, not production. In presenting an altered valuation of commodities, work, and productivity, as well as the theory of artistic activity linked to all of that, Morris’s book is surprisingly relevant and worth contemplating today; it also provides far-reaching connections to an even more profound study of art. In his “News From Nowhere” Morris surrenders neither his political nor artistic point of view, and hence he creates a utopian concept of an environment of particular sensuality and sensitivity, as well as an aesthetically experiential one—something that makes the book especially suited to this series of exhibitions. Hardly anyone else has understood as well as he did how to link art, as well as social and political ideas, with life. He not only identified the boundaries between art, craftsmanship, and life, but also wanted to blow them apart. Particularly because of this, Morris remains one of the most relevant utopianists of the past: he believed that it was essential to connect ecology with the dismantling of authorities in order to improve human life; he also focused on the individual’s right to freedom, adding this to the other changes needed in society.

“News From Nowhere” is a cycle that has been developed in a process. Comprising mostly new works developed and supported by the individual participants, its independent exhibitions will show the specifics of the art groups in an arc that the audience can visualize.