MATTS LEIDERSTAM "GRAND TOUR"
19 FEBRUARY–5 JUNE 2005

Matts Leiderstam Born 1956, lives and works in Stockholm.

In "Grand Tour", Matts Leiderstam stages a confrontation between the present and the past. The Grand Tour to Italy was de rigueur for artists and upper-class Europeans from the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. Leiderstam playfully mirrors this phenomenon in art history within a contemporary homoerotic context and thus offers an alternative understanding of it. The work was exhibited in its earliest version at the 1997 Venice Biennial and has since been continually augmented into an extensive archive. For this exhibit, Magasin 3 and Leiderstam have jointly produced an exhibition design that can be adapted to different spaces and contexts.

Matts Leiderstam plays both the artist and viewer in his art. In "Grand Tour", his point of departure is art historical insofar as he copies, or paraphrases, paintings as a way of both further investigating and fantasizing about historical works. Leiderstam describes this process in the following way:

"When I make copies today, it is not so much about likeness as it is about difference. To paint a copy after Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain is an attempt to come closer to my thoughts about these landscapes - it is like strolling back into the forest again." (From "An E-mail Conversation Between Peggy Phelan and Matts Leiderstam," Matts Leiderstam: Works 1996-2001, Antenna, Stockholm, 2002

By pointing out the differences between the original and the copy, he scrutinizes his own thoughts about these paintings and offers the viewer an alternative way of seeing art history. He illuminates something in the original that is perhaps only intimated or even disregarded and he reveals the hidden erotics of the older landscape painting. At the same time, Leiderstam's work challenges us to reflect on the very process of seeing and on the viewer's role in this process - our own fantasy is decisive in the encounter between an artwork and the production of meaning.

Leiderstam's work on "Grand Tour" began with an exhibition catalogue (Grand Tour - The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, Tate Gallery, 1996) and a guide for gay men (Spartacus International Gay Guide, 1996) that provides tips for cruising sites all over the world. Other site-specific projects and copies produced for various institutions around the world have since been added to the archive. Today, the work consists of paintings and related books that are complemented in the exhibition with different visual instruments, such as binoculars, magnifying glasses, and lightboxes. These layers of information and tools invite the viewer to participate in a game with the gazes that Leiderstam presents. When the painting are presented together with all their references, it results in a temporal and spatial field of tension, as well as creating tension between the viewer, the work, and what is represented in the work.

In conjunction with the exhibition, we are also inaugurating the website www.grandtourexhibition.com, which will serve as a catalogue for the work and for the exhibition. Jan Avgikos (art historian and writer who contributes regularly to Artforum, Parkett, and Flash Art, among others) and Jan Verwoert (Guest Professor at the College of Art at Umeå University and a writer for Frieze, Springerin, Afterall, and Camera Austria) have contributed essays to the website. The website is designed and programmed by Bureau-K in Hamburg, Germany.

Grand Tour will be exhibited at DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts), Scotland, from July 30 - September 25, 2005

Website: Grand Tour >

In conjunction with the exhibition, we are also inaugurating the website Grand Tour, which will serve as a catalogue for the work and for the exhibition "Grand Tour".

CONTENTS:
Souvenir by David Neuman, director Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.
Looking, Without Knowing Anything by Jan Avgikos, art historian and writer who contributes regularly to Artforum, Parkett, and Flash Art, among others. Documents of a Sensuous Education by Jan Verwoert, Guest Professor at the College of Art at Umeå University and a writer for Frieze, Springerin, Afterall, and Camera Austria.

Souvenir.
by David Neuman

In French it means a memory or remembrance. In English it has gone one step further, beyond the metaphysical to the physical. It becomes an actual object obtained at a place, from an individual, or during a time, which then later on, will evoke the memory of such. To combine these two meanings gives a sense of the purpose and activities that the Grand Tour generated during its important indoctrination into the finer societies of Northern Europe. Its young men, headed towards greater things in their future endeavors would surely benefit from the experiences from their travels. But more importantly, it was what they would eventually "take home" with them that these excursions were designed for.

The fact that they were men can be interpreted in various ways. The societal social norms were obviously not the same as today in the Western world. Men traveled, escorted and unescorted, women did not, or at least very few did. This made the atmosphere prime for the accumulation of "knowledge" without the distraction of women. But as we see, it also made an atmosphere of possibilities, distant from the social norms that these young fine men would eventually return to.

Today the notion of the Grand Tour may still exist, but its geographical and ideological boundaries have been moved. (...)

Excerpt from the catalogue text by David Neuman, director Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.

To read the full text, please click here to visit the website >

"Grand Tour", 1996–2005
Installation with paintings, books, slide shows, computer screens, light panels, binocular and magnifying glasses presented on tables.

Subtitles:
"After anonymous artist, View of Niagara", ca. 1807-1850

"After John George Brown (1831-1913), The Music Lesson", 1870

"After Canaletto (1697-1768), The Grand Canal from the Piazzetta, Looking West", 1746

"After John Constable (1776-1837), Landscape with Goatherd and Goats", 1823

"After Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), The Meeting, or, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet", 1854

"After Richard Evans (1784-1871), Ganymede Feeding the Eagle", ca. 1816-1836

"After Galvin Hamilton (1723-1798), The 8th Duke of Hamilton with Dr. John Moore and Ensign Moore", 1775-77

"After Claude Lorrain, (1600-1682), Landscape with a Goatherd", 1637

"After Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), Landscape with Rebekah Taking Leave of her Father", 1640-41

"After Claude Monet (1840-1926), Morning on the Seine, near Giverny", 1897

"After Jacob More (1740-1793), Self-Portrait", 1783

"After Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Piazza della Rotonda with the Pantheon", before 1751

"After Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake", 1648-51

"After Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Landscape with a Man Scooping Water from a Stream", 1637

"After Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Landscape with Travellers Resting", 1638-39

"After Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Spring, or, The Earthly Paradise", 1660-64

"After Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), Pair of Portrait Groups of Members of the Society of Dilettanti", 1777-79

"After Hubert Robert (1733-1808), The Painter's Studio", 1763-65

"After Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729-1792), The Eruption of Vesuvius", 1771

"After Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729-1792), Eruption of Vesuvius by Moonlight", 1774

"After Franz von Lenbach (1836-1904), Selbstbildnis", 1856

"GRAND TOUR" - on tour

The exhibition has since the presentation at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
been exhibited at the following institutions:

DCA Dundee Contemporary Arts July 30 - September 25, Dundee

Göteborgs Konsthall November 26 - January 15, 2006, Göteborg

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein March 10 - May 21, 2006, Vaduz

Lunds konsthall, "Konsthögskolan / Malmö" September 9-17, 2006.
An exhibition of the visual parts of the first doctorate dissertations in Fine Art in Sweden.

Full information on the website http://www.magasin3.com/exhibitions/grandtour/