Kunstverein presents Prospectus Amsterdam as part of a traveling survey of the work of Ben Kinmont

12 March – 22 May 2011
Private view: 11 March 18.00 – 20.00

Ben Kinmont (Born 1963 Burlington, Vermont, USA) is interested in interpersonal communication as a means of addressing the problems of contemporary society.
His sculptures and actions attempt to establish a direct, personal relationship between the artist and the viewer, using the work as a mediator. If art is supposed to be an agency of intellectual and emotional challenge, then the artist concludes that the audience should also be addressed beyond the institutional frame of the gallery and the museum, and that contact should be more direct. To that effect, Ben Kinmont goes on the street and engages in a dialogue with any passer-by who demonstrates interest in his proposals. His actions range from washing dishes in a museum restaurant, receiving strangers at his home, asking passers-by on the street about the possibility of considering a casual conversation a form of art. His sellable work is in the form of archive boxes each containing all the pertinent documentation of one of Kinmont’s actions. The collector becomes an archivist; as such he becomes responsible for updating the data thus continuing the work of the artist and the gallerist. Besides, the artist earns his living with an antiquarian bookselling business about food, wine and domestic economy, considering this activity as a sculpture ‘the artwork is not the business itself, but the contribution to our cost of living.’ Kinmont’s practice also includes conducting research and publishing work about other artists under the name Antinomian Press.

Prospectus is a traveling series of presentations in which a selection of works from the past twenty-two years are exhibited and (re)activated. For each location, Kinmont has worked together with a different curator to conceptually develop the premise of the show. Each exhibition is intended to be different and to reflect each curator’s interest in the projects. The source material will include project descriptions and archives, past curated projects, publications from Antinomian Press and earlier sculptural objects.

Prospectus Amsterdam
As initiator of the overall project, the exhibition at Kunstverein will concentrate on Kinmont’s complete archives – brought in their entirety to Amsterdam. A selection of five to seven works will be presented each week. Throughout the show the curators thus become archivists, handling the works/archives on view. Each of the projects on display will correspond to different aspects of Kinmont’s body of work and will operate as a starting point for a discussion. Besides functioning as a platform for exchange, the table on which the works are presented will also host Kunstverein’s office and storage for the rest of the archives.

Workshop
March 14 & 15
Location: Kunstverein
Some of the archives will be reactivated and updated through workshops with various art educational institutions such as the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Piet Zwart Institute. The archives are thus activated and will continue to grow instead of functioning merely as art historical records.
For reservation please contact office@kunstverein.nl

Exhibition in your mouth
In collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Ben Kinmont will present Exhibition in your mouth, a historical exhibition of artist-written recipes prepared as a dinner on May 19. For reservation please contact office@kunstverein.nl

Publication
An updated version of Prospectus, the collection of project descriptions Kinmont published earlier with JRP Ringier in 2002 (the original edition is out of print), will be co-produced by Kunstverein, Kadist Art Foundation, Fales Library New York University and Air de Paris, published by Antinomian Press and distributed by JRP Ringier.

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Other venues and dates
Prospectus Paris
Kadist Art Foundation, Paris
02 April – 01 May 2011

Prospectus New York
Fales Library, New York University (in collaboration with Kunstverein NY)
New York City
Sept. 15 – Nov. 15, 2011

Prospectus San Francisco
In collaboration with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco
Spring 2012

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“Prospectus Amsterdam: A survey of the work of Ben Kinmont” is generously supported by:

Ben Kinmont
An Exhibition in your mouth (2002)
May 18 and 19

An historical exhibition of artist-written recipes prepared as a dinner at Restaurant As on May 18 and an informal talk given by the artist at the Stedelijk Museum on May 19.

May 18: An Exhibition in Your Mouth
Location: Restaurant As, Prinses Irenestraat 19, Amsterdam
Starts at: 19.30
Reservations: Seeing as space is limited, please make reservations before 13 May
at info@restaurantas.nl. The 9-course menu will cost € 55

May 19: Lecture by Ben Kinmont
Location: Temporary Stedelijk 2, Auditorium
Starts at: 19.30
Reservations: Reservation is mandatory, via reservations@stedelijk.nl
Entrance: Valid museum ticket

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Kunstverein present a two-night event with artist Ben Kinmont. Kinmont’s projects are as disproportionately ambitious as they are formally discreet: supporting a family as an antiquarian bookseller specializing in books and manuscripts about domestic economy and food; comparing radically different value systems (e.g. cookery and art); wondering about the meaning of art (while doing the dishes), etc. This decentring reminds us of other artists who set out to pare down their practice down while not actually opting for an entirely different professional status. In his printed broadsides Kinmont explores activities that test the work of art’s strength in forms not strictly artistic: a dinner, a bookfair, an ephemeral action, and so on. Thus gastronomy becomes a temporary artistic structure and a powerful model for pushing art to its limits.

An Exhibition in your mouth presents an exhibition in the form of a dinner on Wednesday May 18. Restaurant As will prepare a 9-course menu full of eccentric but above all tasty recipes by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Louise Bourgeois. In the evening of the following day,19 May, the artist will give a lecture about his practice in general with a particular focus on An Exhibition in your mouth as well as his project entitled On becoming something else (with the Pompidou Center and seven different restaurants in Paris in 2009).