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  • David Tomas, Untitled (Study for Live Rightly, Die, Die...) (2012). Bonsecours Market

    David Tomas, Untitled (Study for Live Rightly, Die, Die…) (2012). Bonsecours Market

  • Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

    Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

  • Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

    Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

  • Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

    Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

  • Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

    Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

  • Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view

    Live rightly, die, die… (2012). Exhibition view


Live rightly, die, die...


PART 1 : TOURISM

An exhibition by David Tomas including works, artefacts and documents by Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, Lothar Baumgarten, Pavel Braila, Marcel Broodthaers, Stanley Brouwn, Chris Burden, André Cadere, Tim Clark, Willem de Rooij, Guy Debord, Documenta 11, Jan Dibbets, e-flux, Leon Golub, Richard Hamilton, Jamelie Hassan, Allan Kaprow, Bouchra Khalili, John Latham, George Maciunas, Vincent Meessen, NASA, Irving Penn and Robert Smithson.

Two monumental works by David Tomas located on the lateral façade of the Café Cherrier, corner of Saint-Denis, as well as on the façade of the Marché Bonsecours are part of this project.

Part 1 March 1 st to 25, 2012 | Part 2 March 29 to April 29, 2012
Opening of Part 1 on March 1 st at 6 pm

Opening of Part 2 on March 29 at 6 pm
Book launch on April 26 at 6 pm

Norman-McLaren Hall of the Cinémathèque québécoise
Tuesday: noon to 6 pm
Wednesday to Saturday: noon to 8 pm
Sunday: 4 to 8 pm

Over the past 20 years there has been a notable increase in the transnational circulation of cultural information through multiple forms of artistic activity. This activity has emerged in tandem with neoliberal models of global trade and the creation of interlocked systems of economic and cultural exchange. This circulation and its possible relationships with economic and culture patterns of globalization raise fundamental questions about the models upon which these activities are founded and status of the information once it has been presented in new cultural locations. Are artists now engaged in a new professionalized form of artistic tourism and amateur ethnography? And what is the relationship between tourism, information gathering and reception, and the exotic in contemporary art?

Live rightly, die, die… explores the contemporary phenomenon of artistic tourism and the exotic through the presentation of a select number of visual works. However, instead of simply illustrating or documenting the recent trends that might be associated with tourism and the exotic in contemporary art, Live rightly, die, die… attempts to address the phenomena of tourism and the exotic within an eccentric frame of historical reference and in a way that exposes their spatio-temporal ambiguities, tensions and possibilities. It is through these ambiguities and tensions that the exhibition also raises the question of the possible existences of unknown places, opaque languages, singular encounters, treacherous, unstable spaces and idiosyncratic exchanges.

The works that have been selected for Live rightly, die, die… were initially identified on the basis of their resonance with preliminary, intuitive conceptions of tourism and the exotic. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and two photographic documents—an anonymous nineteenth century reproduction of an eighteenth century handbill promoting stagecoach travel between London and York and the earliest known photographic documentation of a Chinese Lingchi execution—served as filters and channels to focus these conceptions and to raise specific questions about the relationships that can exist between media, subject matter, travel and the exotic.

Over the past few years, one information portal has demarcated itself in relation to the art world’s information economy. This portal is e-flux. This hub of information transfer and dissemination serves as a primary source of news about what is happening in the art world in terms of exhibitions and publications. Selected e-flux news bulletins have been used in place of traditional captions in Live rightly, die, die… in order to introduce and to explore current forms of information tourism, where the concepts of tourist and the exotic take on a more dematerialized form and where an unknown place, language, singular encounter, unstable space and idiosyncratic exchange can take on a different, if no less treacherous form.

David Tomas

Consult the map of Documenta XI participants


David Tomas is a Montreal-based artist, anthropologist and theorist whose interdisciplinary works explore the cultures and transcultures of science, technology and their imaging systems. His publications include: Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Vision Technologies (Continuum, 2004), A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography Between Disciplines and Media (Éditions Dazibao, 2004), DUCTION, co-authored with Michèle Thériault (Éditions Carapace, 2001) and Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Westview Press, 1996). His latest publication was Escape Velocity: Alternative Instruction Prototype for Playing the Knowledge Game (Wedge Publication, 2012). He teaches at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQÀM.

Dazibao and David Tomas thank the artists, Éli and Abel Breton-Choinière, Cassandre, Marc-Antoine and Gabriel Coulombe, Sophie Bélair Clément, Brian Bentley, Jacques Boisseau (Café Cherrier), the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Claude Pronovost (Marché Bonsecours), Corina Steiner, Joanne Véronneau, the Cinémathèque québécoise and all those who have generously worked on the project as well as its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the RCAAQ.




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