13 Feb – 3 May 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), US, in cooperation with the Siemens Arts Program


Indiscipline, the revolutionary potential of re-thinking

In the publication which is accompanying the exhibition at the MOCAD in Detroit, Thomas Trummer (curator from the Siemens Arts Program) writes: "Well before King Crimson’s “I repeat myself when under stress,” Freudian psychology taught us that in situations of shock, aggression, and nervousness, the mind reaches for a lavish excess, so that what is spoken presents a double meaning...."

Berlin and London based 'Englishman' Tris Vonna-Michell is one of three artists who are working with and about duplicating - visual, narrative and formal. All of them have one center theme: Detroit, the city in which the assembly line, the symbol of modernity and automatization, was invented.

Read the 'repetitions' of these young artists not as means of relativizing subjectivity (such as in art of the 1950ies to the 1980ies), but as individual criticism.

The Englishman Tris Vonna-Michell, known for his “live-situation performances”, will extend an existing piece of work that arose as a reaction to his experience of social history and the revolutionary potential of the of city of Detroit.

The exhibition 'I Repeat Myself When Under Stress' offers a possible perspective on the different strategies of repetition that artists use today to meet the demands of history and the sense of impotence that many feel in the face of increasing economic instability and the continuing state of war in parts of the world.


more culture>>>


Accompanying publication
Four books are published and designed by 38th Street Publishers, New York, www.38street.com.
I: I Repeat Myself When Under Stress Reader, Trevor Smith & Thomas Trummer (curator of the exhibition)
II: In Search of the Endless Column, Hans Schabus
III: Ceal Floyer
IV: Tris Vonna-Michell

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) focuses on the fine arts, architecture, contemporary craft and design www.mocadetroit.org.

One focus of the Siemens Arts Program (established in 1987) is seeking out new cultural approaches
and themes to include these in the current discussion in the charged field between culture, business, and science. At the same time, artists are invited to the enterprise, where they collaborate with Siemens employees to work artistically on themes from the working environment www.siemensartsprogram.com.

fig.: Tris Vonna-Michell 'TRVM40', 2007-2008; installation Puzzlers Photo. Exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, April 12 – May 18, 2008. Photograph by Stefan Altenburger.

Tris Vonna-Michell's work attempts to connect different times and spaces, facts and absurdities by using devices such as stream-of-consciousness, visual stimuli, slides and props. The aim is to blur our understanding and disrupt the speed at which we process information in order to question the authority of the things we see, experience and remember.