THE EMERGENCY ROOM FORMAT                 back to www.emergencyrooms.org   
         
Copyright format artist :  Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel


             

  Illustration from MOMA / PS1  2007  Emergency Room New York .  / Emergency Room Athens . Hanoi . Napoli      // Room  designer :  Jean de Piepape .


Emergency Room is a format for artists burning with desire to engage in the necessary debates . Emergency Room is an exhibition space where artists rank and express about emergencies today , today the present day , today before it is too late.  ( statement in sound form : MOMA /PS1 )

Artists are thermometers for dysfunctions of society. They are experts in detecting immediatly  or even , in advance of the broken arm  . Artists spot at dysfunctions and are asked to have solutions . What they feel or know has to be exhibited now . But in order to exhibit, an artist has to wait months or years in order to negotiate with art institutions, find funding and collaborators. This limits the artist urging to respond to the contemporary and leaves the art work as delayed comments on yesterday’s world. Emergency Room is a format that permit immediate intervention as well as it stimulate immediate debate with the public and distribution channels . (  exemple mass media  )

Through Emergency Room, artists can react every day and train collectively (as a group and with the public )  their awareness muscle .By being an exhibition alive commenting on burning events  , Emergency Room creates a proximity  to the public and to the distribution channels , and well exposing unreported dysfunctions and giving them attention  . Everyday there will be new angles, follow up , alarming  discoveries , and everyday there will be new reasons for audience and media to tune back in .


“Artists, audience and media have been fighting for weeks in order to get to see and participate in the new and innovating exhibition that with its "art of the news" puts the art institution itself to debate.Reuters, The New Yorker and the TV-channel ABC News are some of the leading media that have brought the story about the original exhibition, and at P.S.1 more than a thousand visitors per day have been seeing it…" (Nikolaj M. Lassen, Weekendavisen, March 30th, 2007)


     

Illustration from MOMA / PS1  2007  Emergency Room New York .  / Emergency Room Hanoi and Paris   // Room  designer :  Jean de Piepape .

Artists, Visitors & Media

The energetic force of Emergency Room pulls in artists with a burning desire to react to the contemporary. These are artists who share the questions and concerns of the public and have the pertinence to become valuable sources for the media as well ( on some of the alarming issues medias refuse total communication )   . In Emergency Room the participatif  power of the debate involves both creator and vieuwers , an all are asked to become involved in the round room .

Emergency Room deliberately chooses to mix evidently different aesthetics; for instance cross-media artists with abstract painters or sculptors. ( biodiversity ) . Artists  work in an environment where experimentation and artistic daring is  not only welcome but incourage . Artists evolve and develop new unexpected methods and art forms often resulting in significant changes in the praxis of participants and thereby in the aesthetics of the emergency art as such.

Emergency Room is an international movement and everywhere the format is actualized the community of ER Artists expands: from internationally acclaimed artists to local upcoming artists – all meeting each other under the clock , working together with a deadline and a rendez vous .The format is encouraging artists to collaborate and become part of the energized community , a vietnamese artist work with a danish , a polish with a greek , a known artist with a younger ....


  

The Emergency Room Format

When an art institution has agreed  to host the Emergency Room format it is given the license to produce and exhibit a local version of the art format. This allows Emergency Room to be actualized several places across the world at the same time, intensifying the community and its effect. Other formats by Thierry Geoffroy include Awareness Muscle, Critical Run , Protest Fashion , HQ  and Biennalist. These are all derived from Emergency Room and are available as smaller and more mobile alternatives to the core format. They converge  .

Part of the Emergency Room format is  the design , the unrolling of the exhibiting methods  and a savoir faire that has to be excecuted  by the ER staff with collaboration of a  local team . Punctuality is a keystone when the artwork of yesterday daily is removed from the Emergency Room to give space to the artwork of today. This ritual is called “The Passage” and is the central element of the constant changing Emergency Room. It is followed by a debate in the round room .


  


Emergency Room can be combined with the Delay Museum where yesterday’s artwork is exhibitied . This museum is no longer ultra contemporary in the sense of the word used by Emergency Room but will be “RETARD” in the french meaning of this. This “delay” of opinions, where past reactive interpretations are preserved, is a critical way of thinking about contemporary art ( too late )  even though it is still extremely contemporary compared to the customary use of the word. The Delay Museum is a place for studying the aesthetics of the emergency.

The ultrafast moving Emergency Room is kept under constant documentation and exposure of the documentation . Documentation is both external in the form of media stories and internal in the form of blogs, webcasting and artist interviews collected by the ER Staff.





Spirit :

Passage, Accentuation, and Awareness are three core concepts for Emergency Room. Passage describes a movement, an action, and a transition face that holds a vast potential because everything is still open. The accentuation describes the capability to focus and point out – it is a disciplined gesture that pins down a time and space for the comment as an event. The Awareness  of the accentuation harbours the necessity of presence , pertinance ,  responsability . The role of the artist is here questionned .

Today is today. And tomorrow is too late.

Facts :

Emergency Room has been successfully launched at MOMA/PS1 / New York,  2007 ; Berlin, Galerie Olaf Stueber 2006 ; Copenhagen , Nikolaj Contemporary 2006 ; Athens, Ileana Tounta Contemporary art center  2007 ;  Napoli , PAN 2009 ; Paris , Galerie Taïss (2008 ) , in Hanoi at the university of fine art ( oct-nov 2009) and again in 2011  ; in Wroclaw Polish European Presidency 2011.

Future :

Every large city should have a permanent Emergency Room , now.

What is exhibited in the Emergency Room should be accessibe to public opinion for example by reporting about the expressed dysfunctions in the news (like the weather report  or the sport are  ).

An education to train the Awareness Muscle  should be established .

The dictionary by Thierry Geoffroy 



Dictionary words by words  // all words togehter   (36 pages )

exemple of press release :  Emergency Room at the  PS1 /MOMA






other art formats by Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel

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