Going into Manhattan today allowed us to go to a few galleries while we were there. Simon Preston gallery had a group show titled ‘Signal to Noise’. Zarouhie Abdalian’s piece, ‘Buoy’, was a favorite; it was a small galss of water filled to the brim with a whistle at the bottom and a cork ball resting on top. It brought up ideas of invisibility, time, and space; the whistle has been deconstructed and had its components placed in a glass of water, silencing it into sculptural form. All these topics are equally nebulous and confusing but at the same time can be very suffocating and it appears to be reflected in the imagery created. Hester was showing ‘Be a funny mom’ by Lisa Holzer where she exhibited a variety of photographs of pig ears, or treats depending on whether you’re a dog or a human. The most thought-provoking aspect of these works is the sweat-like material on the inside of the frames; a translucent material that looks as if it’s oozing down the interior of the glass. CANADA was another gallery on today’s list with ‘Unhappy Users’. Luke Murphy’s exhibition includes these diagrammatic paintings in the front room and then digital animations further back. Viewers shift between these two worlds, one analog and the other technological, through a tunnel lined with keyboard e-waste. The keyboard tunnel was a bizarre aspect to it; it was a suggestion more than an instruction, although probably due to what was probably required for people using wheelchairs. However, it was still interesting to consider when telling someone to walk through a tunnel made of keyboards is different to giving them the option to. It adds to the classic ‘can I touch the art’ discussion. Our top gallery of the day had be Essex Street and Bea Schlingelhoff’s work that accompanied it. Schlingelhoff paid the art dealer to read ‘Misogyny Re-loaded’ by Abigail Bray. The gallery is completely empty. The sound is the only thing being presented and your body is the only thing on display in the starkness of this space as you listen to a woman’s fatalistic words, read by two men. It seems that what’s broken down is not feminism but a kind of humanism, the remains of which we experience in Schlingelhoff’s barren box. “Now repeat after me, I am free.”
We rented a camera today too and tried out some experiments for the piece were we sweep up the debris from the studio. We collected our ‘findings’ and recorded ourselves sweeping. Embarking on these tests made us think about what the work was really about; we had a crit yesterday and all the work is still up and therefore is present in the films we had made. This makes it very clear that the detritus is that of the work in the video. The dust is what makes the work whole; it’s the excess marble that changes Michelangelo’s ‘David’ into just another slab of material. This is when we had the idea to contact famous, or at least well known, artists and inquire as to whether or not we could come in and sweep their studio and keep the dust. This would then become a body of work involving pieces such as ‘Damien Hirst’s Dust’ or something to that effect. The work would obviously also be the email correspondence; including those who reject us. The prompts for the speech are completed but we’ve had some issues with fiverr so we might have to employ an alternative website to recruit someone to write and read the speech.
Looking into the work from the previous year at Compass made us feel more hopefully of coming up with something both entertaining for the audience and for us. ‘You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive me’ by Brian Lobel sounds absolutely hilarious; one-to-one viewings of Sex & The City with audience members. First they complete a 92-question survey (adapted from each question typed by Carrie Bradshaw) and are then diagnosed with an episode which will change their lives. In addition to the obvious hilarity there is also a true relational feeling behind this; we all know the effect of bingeing on T.V. ‘Of This Room’ by Oliver Bray also sounded like something we could get into; somewhere in between winging it and trusting in fate, his performance was/is entirely dictated by the room and the people in the room. So, assumedly, he would respond to everything that happened, which was very much to do with his audience. Our proposal might now look like more of a funny lecture/participatory-learning environment; we’ll keep researching/thinking.
We’re thinking back to yesterday’s crit and how there was much talk about categorisation, how things within the art world are labeled and how certain things are grouped together for reasons other than logic. These thoughts led us to Aristotle and his opinions on categorisation with reference to classes and objects. He divides all of being into ten categories and of the ten Aristotle considers ‘substance’ to be primary. This is because we can conceive of a substance without any given qualities but we cannot conceive of a quality except as it pertains to a particular substance. One important conclusion from this division into categories is that we can make no general statements about being as a whole because there are ten very different ways in which something can have being. An example would be that there is no common ground between the kind of being that a rock has and the kind of being that the colour blue has. This sounds fairly obvious and yeah sure, it is hard to imagine any of the other categories (quantity, quality location, time etc.) in a universe without substance, but it is equally difficult to imagine a substance that has no qualities, or no location, or that sits outside of time. There is something strange that happens with the language here and pushes us into a position where we’re trying to label and categorise our categories. For example, what’s the difference between classes, types and kinds? We can talk about the class of human beings, just as we can talk about the type, human being. One might well think they are not actually different categories of being, but typically, while both are treated as abstract objects, classes are not usually treated as universals, whereas types usually are. This use of language and how we differentiate between what people might be talking about vs. what they’re actually talking about is hugely applicable when considering story telling and fiction. Something that feels quite amusing with relation to categorisation is the words taxonomy or typology; there are many categories of a word that’s used to describe categorisation. Telling a story is an important and difficult skill, one that is within our lives everyday.
