STILL <in> MOTION - 38 Artists 14 Authors

Introduction by Marco Puntin
Essays (Italian / English/ German) by Marino Busdachin, Adele Cappelli, Nicholas Carter, Alessandro Colbertaldo, Elisabetta d'Erme, Alberto Farassino, Massimo Forza, Veit Heinichen, Pierpaolo Marrone, Lorenzo Michelli, Marco Morgan Castoldi, Marzio Porro, Francesca Speciani, Jader Tolja
Hardcover
Cover Design: Stefan Sagmeister
Size: cm 29 x 22,5
pp. 168
66 colour-illustrations
Edizioni Pendragon (January 2000)
ISBN -21-7
List Price: € 45,96 $ 44
Our Price: € 25,82 $ 25

It is that anxiety to achieve fresh success and miraculous changes which constantly obliges us to avoid living in the present in order to project ourselves towards the expectation of the immediate future to come. Or rather, he who lives wounds himself. Almost a duty, certified and codified by advertising, by that which makes and is the fashion. With zapper or mouse in hand we are the masters of our future and the guarantors of reality, punchdrunk with millions of more or less reassuring images which promise us great novelties and unexpected developments. As it seems taken for granted by now, marketing counts for more than meditation, know-how beats imagination by two lengths: the objectives pursued through strategies blast every reflection upon what has been or now is in life. LipanjePuntin Artecontemporanea has celebrated its fifth anniversary, and has done so also at the moment when " particularly in art " the general password is spectacle, showing oneself off in order to reach the great-est number of interlocutors. So here we are ready to plan our future, serving up more or less original ideas, unusual objectives and relevant strategies. The result? Still <in> Motion is born, an exhibition, a book, at bottom an opportunity not to be missed to reflect upon our, albeit brief, gallery excursus. If the idea of asking a group of artists and writers to debate upon the relation between stasis and movement, motionlessness and dynamism, mobility and immobility has on the one hand produced works and results that are, to say the least, surprising, on the other hand it has led us, curators and gallery-owners, to quite opposite conclusions. Instead of planning objectives and strategies we have found ourselves discussing present and past, all agreeing in maintaining that, if the present is movement and becomes past the very moment it is named, the future, dark and unforeseeable, is static and motionless until it becomes present, at which point, however, it will already be past. Does a work of art, whether it be a painting, a sculpture, or a video-installation (just like a building or a table) always remain the same in the course of time? And its interpretation, its meaning or the critical analyses of it are they destined to change? Without pretence of even wanting to answer exhaustively Still <in> Motion intends first and foremost to be homage to the art we prefer, to that art which has won us over and which begs us to remain still to reflect, to think, beseeching of us a steadfast and ever-greater attention.

Marco Puntin, January 2000
(From the introduction to the book)