We managed to get into the city today and see a number of shows; unfortunately they were not as successful as we might have hoped. Our research on the exhibitions was thin and we paid the price in the form of rooms filled with paintings. We even returned to Bea Schlingelhoff’s exhibition as Essex Street in order to remind ourselves that there are people undertaking thought provoking activities. That being said, we found Maryam Jafri’s ‘Economy Corner’ a brilliant mix of funny and intelligent. Inside was a bizarre number of objects and photographs of similar objects. On display were consumer goods, from beer to peanut butter, which all had similarly blank packaging, devoid of colour and imagery. They are supposedly ‘generic goods’ from late 70s America. It reminded us of our ‘art packaging’ idea and the ideas about labeling we’ve recently looked into. There are links to Warhole’s ‘Brillo Boxes’ and potentially even Schrödinger's famous cat; the outside of a box can’t always predict what’s within. (‘Schrödinger's Art’ is definitely a name we need to appropriate to a work when it’s applicable)
Piero Manzoni and his 1961 piece ‘Artist’s Shit’ is a reference to be made here – packaging is everything in this work. This flows smoothly into the work we’ve been doing/potentially will be doing about dust (unfortunately the gallery trip meant no sourcing artists to email but hopefully this will take place tomorrow). The dust piece will only be presented through some sort of documentation and so this is crucial when considering how the work is received. We’ve done some thinking and decided not to show the film since we didn’t think it was applicable to the subject matter. Instead we’ve thought about using a vacuum cleaner and presenting that as the work itself; the vacuum cleaner full of the excess on the work of others. This would be presented along side a piece of paper/document stating the time and date that the area was cleaned, like the Manzoni and Schlingelhoff.
We did enjoy the layout of the sweeping video and so we’ll keep it in mind for another piece that’s more about the idea of parts/segments. A film of making a cup of tea or setting up some Ikea furniture would fit into this. We reflected on how we thought the layout appeared CCTV-esque and we ended up watching video made by the ‘Surveillance Camera Players’. They’re a protest group who perform exclusively to public surveillance cameras, with disapproving undertones. They act out and range of routines directly in front of these cameras in an attempt to de-dunk the classic myth, that only those who are guilty of something are opposed to being observed by unknown eyes. There’s a whole series of Ted Talks on the topic of surveillance (here). It reminds us of our favorite line from Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’, ‘The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.’ Speak of surveillance can only be polished off by Sophie Calle’s attempts to prove her own existence by asking her mother to hire a private to document her movements on a certain day. Our fondness of lying is definitely tickled by Calle’s practice of deliberately constructing ‘evidence', creating a question of the nature of all truths. There’s definitely something in this collection of ideas – perhaps photographs of us standing in view on every New York City webcam (?). We’ll continue thinking.
Compass festival was discussed again today and we perhaps landed on a winner; a lecture/talk about our trip to New York. It would be filled with anecdotes that didn’t necessarily take place and facts that aren’t exactly true. We even considered hiring people to ‘play’ us (lies being told by someone who they aren't even about) but were unsure how this would go down in the field of live art as technically it’s live but the ‘artist’ isn’t present. We’ve still got some time to think about it.