The artists’ Plan B. Case studies from MoRE, Museum of refused and unrealised art projects

Abstract

In the pile of stones “rejected by the builders” lie a huge amount of high-quality artistic projects that were not realized. Pieces of a history of art that has not been written yet in its complexity, these projects are kept in the private archives of artists. More (Museum of refused and unrealized art projects) is a digital museum originated from an idea of Elisabetta Modena and Marco Scotti that collects, preserves and displays online unrealized art projects of the XX and XXI century (www.moremuseum.org). MoRE is produced by Others cultural association and it is part of: CAPAS - Centro per le Attività e le Professioni delle Arti e dello Spettacolo, Università degli Studi di Parma. Among the numerous projects collected stand out a series of (non) works that have found development in other and different artworks for various kinds of reasons. This article proposes an analysis of some case studies stored in the digital museum that are examples of how the role of the commissioner of an artwork and its production context are still often and wrongly underestimated. Analyzing first the documentation of the project that are kept online and, where possible, verifying the project itself directly with the artists, these cases will highlight as in numerous occasions artists have switched to a "plan b", proposing and carrying out artworks often as significant, but in some cases substantially different from those first proposed, or how the initial obstacles have been a stimulus for further and different reflections. The selected projects (plan a) and then realized in a different way (plan B) are works of Jeremy Deller, Regina Josè Galindo; Eva Marisaldi, Liliana Moro, Giovanni Ozzola and Cesare Pietroiusti.