THE EMERGENCY ROOM FORMAT                 back   
         
Copyright Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel

         
illustration from PS1/MOMA New York . Room  designer : Jean de Piepape

Emergency Room is a format but also a existing launch pad for artists burning with desire to engage in the current debate. It is an exhibition space where artists comment on the emergencies today , today  the present day , today before it is too late.

Artists are thermometers for dysfunctions of society. They are the visual experts. 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.

Through Emergency Room, artists can react every day. They scan the emergencies of today and respond to their discoveries of conflicts and discrepancies. By being a constantly changing exhibition space commenting on current events Emergency Room creates a hotline to the public and to the mass media. Everyday there will be new reactions, 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)

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 . In Emergency Room the educative power of the debate involves both creator and consumer and reaches out to all levels of society – old and young, educated or not.

Emergency Room deliberately chooses to mix evidently different aesthetics; for instance cross-media artists with abstract painters or sculptors. Emergency Room trains the awareness muscle of the artists and allows them to work in an environment where experimentation and artistic daring is welcomed. 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 on location, working together to meet their deadline. Many ER participants follow the  other ER ; encouraging artists to collaborate and become part of the energized community and tear down the limitations and boundaries of the traditional customs of the art world.

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, Protest Fashion and Biennalist. These are all derived from Emergency Room and are available as smaller and more mobile alternatives to the core format.

Part of the Emergency Room format is a certain perfected system and savoir faire executed and taught to the collaborating artists by the ER staff. Punctuality is a keystone when the artwork of yesterday daily at 12.30 p.m. 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. Some days 20 artist will turn up for the Passage, other days only 10. On rare occasions the alerting apathy of people is proven by nobody showing up.  Other days the news of the day will start a storm of reactions from outraged or thrilled artists, creating a creative explosion of awareness to be witnessed by all the lucky visitors and media present at the time of the Passage. Here the true energetic symbiosis of the artist as representative of the public opinion is revealed and fed back into the media channels.

Emergency Room can be combined with the Delay Museum where yesterday’s artwork is archived. This museum is no longer 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 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 fast moving Emergency Room is kept under constant observation in order to document events and changes in artistic aesthetics. 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 for use in future ER Publications. The documentation ensures a constant high level of activity, people engagement and inclusion. Emergency Room is a carefully prepared environment for hectic bursts of creation.

Spirit :

Passage, Accentuation, and Actuality 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 actuality of the accentuation harbours the necessity of presence and contemporality.

Today is today. And tomorrow is too late.

Facts :

Emergency Room has been successfully launched in New York, PS1 / MOMA 2007 ; Berlin, Galerie Olaf Stueber 2006 ; Denmark, Nikolaj Contemporary2006 ; Athens, Ileana Tounta Gallery 2007 ;  Napoli , PAN 2009 ; Paris , Galerie Taïss (2008 ) , in Hanoi at the university of fines art ( oct-nov 2009)  .

Future :

Every large city should have a permanent Emergency Room , now.
What happen is exhibit in the Emergency Room should be rapported in the news , like the weather report is .
An educational program to train the Awareness Muscle  should be established .

The dictionary :

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



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