A relatively productive few days has enabled us to complete some of the work for Scaffold Gallery’s show ’14 Ways to Get Rich Quick’. Our research into ‘The Next Big Thing’ landed us on a descriptive path; we realised that text was required to ‘set the scene’, as it were, since this is where our interest stemmed from in the first place. This of course is the narrative that was built up around Geoffrey Buonardi’s personality and history to order to increase his artistic value. The work is therefore a standard art gallery plaque stating all the facts that come from the film; price, title, medium etc. included is a description of Buonardi, the same description that raises the monetary value of his work from $0 to $10,000. It accompanies a space on the wall which is marked out with masking tape as to act as a suggestion of the work which isn’t there due to the fact that it was stolen/never existed in the first place due to it being the subject of a film. The title is ‘the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty’ and it refers to 'Mens rea' which is ‘guilty mind’ in Latin and is a legal term about intention to commit a prohibited act. This relates to both the idea of stealing the painting and the film’s inaccurate depiction artists. We are also involved in unlawful activity as we are, in a sense, acting as thieves; thieving the thieves through invention of an artwork.
‘An evening with isthisit?’ opens tonight and we’ve got a work from the obstructure series in there displayed in a slightly different way to how we originally intended but it’s still conceptually in line with what it’s about. It’s on the wall on the middle of a ring binder (pictured below). It relates to the office imagery/professional tools of Google SketchUp, which is intended to be used by architects, or individuals of similar professions.
