A Space of Visual Reflection: Vector> Gallery, Iasi

The urban lifestyle is a staged arrangement between simulators of symbolically capitalized situations and users of investments into the strategic constructions of cultural mentality. The nervous impulses of the communication system, which should ensure the poise between these organic elements created on the basis of social genetics' manipulation, circulate chaotically, to unpredictable directions, meeting all kind of occasions to become effective without easing a conclusive record of the reactions. In their majority, the cultural mentalities can receive the diagnosis of chronic automatisms, in which case one can sue at a law of a behavior's reduction to a dominant form of judging the exercise of regularizing what we call mentality. As such, it is unacceptable, from the perspective of a jurisprudence of cultural power democratization, to submit to criticism any "mechanic" manifestation of mentality. May it be observance protocol, interpretation or prediction, the signalizing of automate rhythmic of cultural mentality's exerting is a crime, in which case, through an inversion in procedure, the verdict on critics becomes an act of disciplinary injustice.

On the marge of this ramificated reflection that should interfere with every used concept - from the "urban lifestyle" to the "simulators of symbolically capitalized situations" and the "users of investments into the cultural mentalities", and to the "jurisprudence of cultural power's democratization" - in order to configure a thematic frame for the discussion, we will shape the neo-institutional portrait of a contemporary art gallery, an entity that could be used as a case study for the clarification of each of the enounced concepts.

Vector> gallery in Iasi is the first independent and permanent space of promoting contemporary art as a contextual response to the inflation and repetition of visual reprezentations in traditional art. This gallery announces the put into practice of a new projects' agenda that would lead to the institutional re-enforcement of the Vector> Cultural Association, the organizer of the PERIFERIC International Biennial of Contemporary Art. In the initial plan of the gallery's functioning it was started from its defining as a non-profit space, in which different contemporary art events are to be organized, from the presentation of exhibitions and lectures to the initiation of workshops, the offering of documentation meetings and alternative cultural events. The components of the curatorial board will be determined soon, board that will take decisions regarding the events, financing, advertising and relations to guests. A contemporary art gallery is a space that proposes new behaviour types, as a place for meeting and conversation rather than for distance and contemplation. As an experimental space of essay, the contemporary art gallery tries tastes and speculates the relationship between the sceptical retainment and the sensitivity's adequacy. Being more than just a heterotopos, inertially limited by the administrators of the cultural macropolitics, the contemporary art gallery is, as much, a certain amount of working time, with the expectances and the inner desires of those who analyze carefully their present time. Also, in a last attempt to categorize, one could say that a contemporary art gallery should be the cause of continous reorientation and redefinition of cultural meaning. Therefore a contemporary art gallery propose not only the receiving but also the education of an atypic public that can voluntary renegociate the different comprehensions of this virtual frontier between the excessively ordinary life and the discontinous unpredictability as space, time, relation and cause. In order to close the fabrication of this (morally obsolete) model of describing a contemporary art gallery, it's still to be added the fact that it simulates the condition of visibility for the art of thinking and instigates the consequence of its producing's dynamic.

Urbanity (heterospatial), capitalization (in temporal series), mentality (cross-relational) and jurisprudential democratization (in causal series) are the theoretical conditions of activation and strategical positioning of the institution which is the contemporary art gallery. There are still to be followed the practical consequences of applying a programme of promotion and critical analysis of contemporary visual arts.

Catalin Gheorghe, theoretician and analyst of contemporary art, Ph. D. student in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, member of the vector> group, Iasi

VECTOR> Gallery str. Cuza Voda, nr. 41 Iasi, cod 700 750, RO Tel/fax: +40 232 237 486 Email: vector_cartier@iasi.astral.ro