Daily exercises. Curated by Luca Vitone

Luca Vitone
The charm of the unrealised

Writing about unrealised artworks has its own charm. First of all, we talk about these projects only virtually, we don't have a finished object and we know that an artist while in the process of making has got the time to think and follow day by day the formation of the artwork, with the possibility of changing some details when he believes it is better to modify something. Then we will never be able to see a finished object, which remains present only in the mind of the artist, but only sketches prepared for the presentation of the project. Sometimes these changes are not just the result of artistic desires, but are also related to the needs of the client and to the feasibility of the project, which is verified in progress and depends on economic or logistical reasons.
In our case the artists invited for this exhibition have given us different reasons to justify the non-realisation of their projects and these reasons help us to understand the different ways and why an artwork is – or is not – realized.

But let's look at these cases one by one and try to offer a reflection on making art.
Mark Dion presents a pharaonic project, which reminds us of Giovanni Segantini's unrealized one for the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris. A pavilion designed for the centenary of a park, that should have contained various cultural institutions that represent its activities. In this case the project had not accepted by the judging commission and its memory remains thanks to a series of drawings and an articulated text, which tells us the reasons and merits of this idea, unfortunately still only on paper. 
Maria Eichhorn does not tell us if her project started from the request of a client or if it is simply the result of her work in the studio. She simply proposes us an architectural project of some degree of consistency that has not been realized for unknown reasons. Probably the panoramic tower has never found the right occasion to be proposed, or maybe the artist, considering that the financial commitment for its realization would have been conspicuous, has decided to postpone it, while distracted by the necessity to finish other already confirmed artworks.
For Till Krause the situation is slightly different. He declares that he designed his project independently and then submitted it to a jury that did not accept it. It is of particular interest that Till then adds in his report that the project has not been realized also because "I didn’t try hard enough". This is an interesting statement because it shows us the sincere awareness of his own responsibility, an attitude that is not so common in general among humans and most of all in the spirit of the artist.
Daniel Maier-Reimer, following his methodology, proposes a journey across the sea, but the MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) rejected his proposal. In this case the artist, following the iconoclastic modalities he adopts for the presentation of his artworks, does not present us with drawings, itineraries, maps and images, so that everything remains in the mind of the creator and we just have less than half a dozen written lines that allow us to imagine it. Here the artist keeps everything for himself and leaves us alone with the possibility of fantasizing about what he would have seen and what he would have brought us as a result of his work.
Veit Stratmann proposes a work that he says has been "designed not to be realized". Here is an unusual statement; but this abnormality makes us think about the themes put forward by the author: safety, control, ecology and good conscience. All these arguments concern us and according to the ideology we follow can produce very different and sometimes opposite reactions. Here is the impossibilty of putting the work into practice, which with its absence reveals this idiosyncrasy of the terms, which according to an ideological interpretation manifests the vulnerability of the thought.
Cesare Viel presents a project that has evaporated during its own development for economic reasons and above all because when it was initially designed no specific client had been identified. Two airplanes that, while flying, show us two sentences (a usual practice for the artist) that make us reflect on our state and on what surrounds us. A reflection that makes us understand how in the moment of the elaboration of an idea everything is volatile and its realization depends on our will, but also on the opportunities that are offered us.

These materials are witness of a very important way of doing for an artist: designing the artwork beyond its realization. It is not entirely important that the artwork has been realized, the important thing is to imagine it and to sediment it with a project, because this is the daily exercise that an artist has to carry out so that he can set in motion his own practice, useful for the realization of finished artworks.
MoRE has the merit of collecting materials that would have remained inside a drawer and that would have never been known, excluding a personal attendance at the artist studio, but mainly it has the important function of making the artist’s working procedures well-known to a wider public, presenting objects that would never have been known, beyond the notoriety that an artist could achieve.
Here is the fascination that we started with: the possibility of accessing the most unknown design places inside the mind of an artist who, with notes, sketches and drawings testifies to his artistic progress.

Berlin, March 23rd 2019