The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993
Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
P R E S S O F F I C E
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THE WORLD'S FIRST GLOBAL MUSEUM
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InterNet Visitors
From the first of December 1994 The Museum of Contemporary Ideas, located on Park Avenue
New York, will be accessible around the world on InterNet. This will be a free service
available to all citizens with access to the international superhighway.The Museum of
Contemporary Ideas is the world's largest databank for research developments at
post-doctoral level. Whether you are a researcher concerned with the Philosophy of
Science, Contemporary Art, Comparative Religion, Dance, Virtual Reality, Bio-physics,
Eco-tourism or Information Technology, you can access the most recent developments in
your field through contacting Peter Hill (assistant press officer) on the InterNet at
our Research Centre located in MOCI's Tasmanian office by keying:
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info (at remove) superfictions . com
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Mission Statement
The Museum's presentation of contemporary ideas is the most comprehensive in the world
offering an unrivalled view across the visual arts, the philosophy of science, architecture,
technology, performing arts, and off-planet systems. A range of services are available to
the physically challenged. Sign language interpretors are available for hearing-impaired
visitors. A sculpture touch tour for the visually impaired departs the main information
pod at noon. The Lecture Theaters in the Manhattan Archives' Cameron Theaters 3 and 6 are
enhanced by infrared amplification facilities backed up by off-planet broadcasting
systems.
Millenium Fund
The Museum's Millenium Fund will create 2000 single-artwork museums of contemporary art
around the world by the year 2000. These will be in small towns and villages including
Lorrach (Germany), Mosley (England), Namur (Quebec), Leek (Netherlands), Davoura (Algeria),
Port Antonio (Jamaica), Inverness (Scotland), Boca Chica (Florida), Tab (Hungary), Ios
(Greece), Burnie (Australia), Chiang Mai (Thailand), Downpatrick (Ireland), Mangalore
(India) and Cebu (Philippines). As part of a bigger project called 2020 Vision these
artworks will be brought together two decades later to form the core of a Museum of
Modern Art in Hobart, Tasmania.
Note to Editors:SUPERFICTIONS the next exhibition from The Museum of Contemporary
Ideas is at The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Home of the Sydney Biennale) Sydney
Dates:10 December 1994 until 15th January 1995. Curator Tony Bond. Then Touring 1995/96.
Press packs, video, T-shirts, and transparencies are available from Peter Hill .
Peter Hill is
represented by TORCH Gallery Amsterdam.Contact: Adriaan Van Der Have VOICE:
31 20 6260284 FAX 31 20 6238892
Media Reaction
For those half-familiar with artspeak and the methods of the art establishment,
it all sounds very credible. There are the benefactors, Alice and Abner "Bucky" Cameron,
eccentric billionaires. Abner is one of the five richest people in the world. (The oil producers known as the "seven sisters" call him "Big Brother") Hill has fun with half-remembered and totally distorted pieces of general knowledge, adding layer upon layer to his hoaxes.
His many press releases gently mock the fashionable anti-art of the establishment.
Who could fail to be seduced by The Film Pilgrims, a group whose film The After
Sex Cigarette is described as "a neo-romantic fantasy that turns into a penetrating
exposÁ of gender issues", or Aloha, "three Australians from Brisbane who take tourism as
their theme, making witty pastiches of postcard scenes."
Joanna Mendelssohn The Bulletin/Newsweek January 15 1991
Art Fair Mirage - Peter Hill, assistant press officer for New York's most well-known
nonexistent Museum of Contemporary Ideas, was recently in Melbourne at the Judith Pugh
Gallery for the opening of his latest bogus project: The Third New York Contemporary
Art Fair. The press release for this event reads: This exhibition should be viewed as
a single installation which fictionalizes those stressful but exhilarating two hours
before an art fair opens, when some galleries are still panicking to get work hung in
time for the opening while others are ahead of the game and have already broken open
the champagne." Works on sale included those by Aloha entitled If Mondrian Owned a
Hairdressing Salon, The Baeslitz Coat Rail, and "I don't Know what Art Is" Jan Hoet,
documenta 1X by The Logical Extremists.
Flash Art Jan/Feb 1992
The Museum of Contemporary Ideas is, to paraphrase the Baudrillardians, the ultimate
similacrum; its exhibitions represent an unednding semantic game, the ceaseless play
of freefloating discourses across information space; and, of course, the artist's oeuvre
is a sequence of inexplicable surrogates, pretend art objects of truly Borgesian
consequences.
Christopher Heathcote Artmonthly Australia October 1990
Nitsch-Duschvorhang - Das australische Kunstlerkollektiv Aloha wurde
mit dem "Cameron
Prize for Contemporary Art 1992" ausgezeichnet, den das New Yorker "Museum of
Contemporary Ideas" auslobte.
100,000 Dollar Preisgeld und einen einjahrigen New-York-Aufenthalt handelte
sich Aloha
mit dem Beitrag
"The Hermann Nitsch Shower Curtain" ein.
Das vier mal vier Fus grosse Cibachrome-Bild mit Nitsch-Motiv ist mit einer vergoldeten
Stange versehen und wird in einer Auflage von 100 Stuck fur juweils 1000 Dollar
angeboten - als "echter" Duschvorhang. Die Kunstler verstehen diese Arbeit
als "Kommentar zur
krassen Kommerzialitat und zum gleichzeitigen Mangel an asthetischer Sensibilitat
bei den meisten Objekten, die in Museum shops verkauft werden."
Kunstforum Bd.117
The core of the exhibition is Peter
Hill's ensemble from The Museum of Contemporary Ideas.
To better understand what his many-faceted display is about, make certain you
view the accompanying video. It is probably the most thought-provoking work
of art I have ever come across. Description in this article is futile so please
press that "play" button and
enjoy what is to follow.
Joerg Andersch The Saturday Mercury May 22 1993
The Museum of Contemporary Ideas also reflects the latest trends in art merchandising
- there are beer mats advertising the museum's new bar, 'Plato's Cave', with
the memorable motto Linking Drinking with Thinking.
There were reports of people walking the length of Park Avenue looking for the
museum. A leading German art magazine Wolkenkratzer became quite excited. They
wrote an article saying it was the world's biggest art museum and as a result
the editor was asked to chair a debate to see if Germany could build a similar
museum in Frankfurt.
Rebecca Lancashire The Age 12 October 1992
Scottish artist Peter
Hill adopts two personae - first is the flip cynic reminiscent of
West German bad boys - Oehlen or Dahn for example. We see this in Nouvelle
Kunst Faction's
installation of a red card table collaged onto a hot pink field of colour -
No More Neo-Geo, 1990. Hill's second role is the cool, analytic reporter -
like Hans Haacke.
Peter
Hill a is, I think, a media-smart shopper whose works are an extraordinary
sophisticated rehearsal of art-for-art's sake. In his paintings he cultivates
an ephemeral thinness indistinguishable from more faux-naif neo-expressionist
models, like Bruce McLean. But Film Pilgrims Stillfrom
the Film "The After-Sex Cigarette - A Ballet
Exploring Gender Issues", 1990, shows the slickness allowed by photography's
seamless surface in keeping with the cannibalistic requirements of Hill's
deception. The artist's work is another form of second order art. Like that
of Robert Gober or Franz West, it is a very literal meditation on the place
of art. At a time when the lecturing of an audience is taken for criticality,
Hill's target - art galleries and his fellow artists - is more unusual and
commands respect for its real risk.
Charles Green Australian Critic for Artforum
It is a very clever idea to invent an institution with a New York address yet
to be working from somewhere else in the world. I see that very much as the
art of the 90s.
Leon Paroissien Director The Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney Channel
Ten
Tasmania Report: At the Edge of the World - 'I like the idea of being
at a centre of excellence at the edge of the world and manipulating things in
the centre,' says
Peter
Hill, speaking of his gargantuan satirical fantasy, The Museum of Contemporary
Ideas.
Staged to look like a fragment of an authentic art fair, and scheduled in competition
with the Australian Contemporary Art Fair around the corner, its booths were
hung with works of real artists including Joseph Beuys and A.R.Penck, as well
as Hill's own manifold fictional figures.
One such pseudonym is a Brisbane collective called Aloha whose
submission to the Fair, a ready-made called The Hermann Nitsch Shower Curtain ,
was a sly spoof (invoking the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho) of the great
curtains of 'blood' in Nitsch's installation in the 1988 Sydney Biennale.
Edward Colless Art and Australia Winter 1993
Museum of Contemporary Ideas - In der Austellung "New Complexities, New
Dance Steps",
von Eric van Vliet organisiert, wird der Trend weg von der einzelnen Kunstlerpersonlichkeit
hin zur Kunstlergruppe, wie er in den letzten Jahren mit den Namen etwa von Gilbert
and George, Group Material, Information Fiction PublicitÁ, BP, General Idea und Fischli/Weiss
belegt werden kann, weiter verfolgt, und es werden eine Reihe von neuen Gruppierungen
(u.a. Made in Palestine, Nouvelle Kunst Faction, Aloha, Cereal Killers,
Sex and Death)
prasentiert. Das Museum of Contemporary Ideas sieht in diesen neuen
kunstlerischen Strategien einen weltweiten Trend fur die Kunst der 90er Jahre: Weg
vom Individuum, hin zur Gruppe!
Gabriele Knapstein Wolkenkratzer Art Journal Nr 5 1989
Aloha doesn't exist. They are
supposedly a group based in Brisbane, but they are a fiction. Peter
Hill, the person behind this, is a rather elusive character and you will
have to go to Hobart to find him. It's not by chance he lives in Tasmania -
the most unlikely place for this fiction to emerge from, and yet perhaps the
only place it could emerge from.
Nick Waterlow 3-time Sydney Biennale Director Inside Edition Channel
Ten 12/5/93
Peter
Hill's Museum of Contemporary Ideas is one of many emerging artworks
around the world which are based on fictional organisations, individuals, or
philosophies. Most are marked by organizational complexity or money-no-object
fantasy. Many are oxymorons. Other superfictions include Res
Ingold (Switzerland)
and his fictional airline, Servaas
(Amsterdam) and his fictional world of fish, Juan
Foncuberta and Pere Formiguera (Spain)
and their historical recreation through taxidermy of extinct and mythical
animals and plants,Patrick Corillion (France)
and his many personae,
Seymour Likely (Netherlands),
Rodney Glick
(Australia) and David Wilson's (USA)
Museum of Jurassic Technology. These and many others are catalogued within The
Encyclopaedia of Superfictions , an InterNet artwork created by Peter
Hill.
