Art Language Location (ALL) is an art festival that takes place in a variety of locations throughout Cambridge and we finally applied to be part of it come October. We decided, since the festival is about language, to create an artwork that creates, for lack of a better word, a dialogue between the art made by artists for this project and children viewing the work. Children are supposedly less adept than adults when employing the spoken word. However, this innocence gives them freedom, which enables them to be, in the words of Dylan Moran, ‘the most honest critics’. We wanted to explore that honesty, employing the art at Art Language Location, as its subject matter; we want to would be thoughts and opinions of children. They would be shown the work and be given the prompt, ‘what do you think about this?’ Each audio piece would only be as long as the child spoke about the work. We also had the idea to recruit children from primary schools in Cambridge (fulfilling the ‘location’ aspect of the title) but this might not be possible.
David Hammons was also someone who caught our attention today. He’s a character that’s popped up many times before either in the context of a seminar or at an exhibition. This being said we’ve never made that much of an attempt to look into him more deeply; specific works, life, politics etc. ‘Bliz-aard Ball Sale’ is a work that sticks out. The photos portraying Hammons with his neatly arranged rows of snowballs for sale are probably the most frequently reproduced images. The piece has become sort of iconic, the single ephemeral work – a work that is essentially about ephemerality – that has come to stand for his entire practice. As it comes down to us in documentation, it is a portrait of the artist as an anonymous and disreputable peddler, an absurdist street hustler. Hammons’ notion of an artist includes a constant flirtation with notions of the illicit and the fraudulent – the ever-present suggestion that the whole business might be a scam. What, after all, could be more of a scam than selling snowballs in winter? But this is an obvious betrayal, which certainly changes it from careless deceit to something perhaps more mysterious. He is revealing what no one else wishes to, but that everyone is hiding.
Hammons has nodded to Duchamp repeatedly throughout his career one of the being installing numerous urinals on trees in a forest in Ghent. His most direct homage is also, in its own way, a kind of protest; ‘Holy Bible: Old Testament’ is a black leather-bound, gilt-edged volume which appropriates Arturo Schwartz ’Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp’ as its text. Although it seems initially like a simple one-liner, the trajectory of the critique here is actually fairly ambiguous; does this piece merely mark that Duchamp is ‘overrated’, his work taken all too often as Godly? Or is the object of parody Schwartz’s text – a complex and multivalent history of public and private art-making reduced to an inventory. (The Old Testament, after all, is itself a kind of catalogue raisonné, an attempt to turn a messy collection of anecdotes into a coherent narrative: the Complete Works of God.)
Another activity of the day has been thinking up ways to bring previous works to life; allowing our works to only live in the virtual world isn’t necessarily a bad thing but some works have benefited from being realized physically so it can’t do any harm to try the same tactic with others. Reflecting on Jon Rafman’s show at the Zabludowicz Collection definitely plays a part in this train of thought; a show which is essentially 9 films which have been given life via the exhibition. ‘The Best 4 x 4 x Far’, is included in the works we’d like to complete. It’s a work concerned with the bizarre nature of the British Empire and how this is elitism can, very easily, be compared to that of the art world. Our thoughts were to have a union jack on the back of which had the film projected onto it. It would be interesting to attempt to somehow, artificially, keep the flag up, either with a fan or fishing wire. ‘Lose Yourself in the Music’ is another of these which we intend to put the last touches on. This would be set up in a karaoke style; a microphone, a separate (smaller) T.V with the lyrics of the song, and the film being played on the wall behind.
‘A Scanner Darkly’ was also on today’s agenda. Richard Linklater’s second rotoscope feature (a form of animation where the figures are drawn from live-action footage). Rotoscope is, as a technology, about adding a level of realistic motion to the usually fantastical nature of animated worlds. With ‘A Scanner Darkly’, Linklater has a different discourse in mind. For starters, the story is neither fantasy nor fairy tale. Based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dicks, 'A Scanner Darkly' is a story of an undercover cop, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), who attempts to combat a dangerous and ultra-popular drug to which he is fully addicted. The novel and film’s representation of drug makers as eco-terrorists living and working within Arctor’s highly-regulated society is a distinctly dystopian narrative, in some ways similar – with its emphasis on long tight spaces, drugs, and the battery of tests undertaken by men who run afoul of the law – to A Clockwork Orange. But basically, the film is grounded in realistic events and much less of its scenery alters or moves. This is Linklater’s ultimate point in using rotoscope; ‘A Scanner Darkly’ is an animation based in realism, questioning the relevance, even the safety, of fantastical illusion. So, all in all, fairly entertaining flick.
Finally, we were hugely amused to read this story about New York police discovering approximately million dollars worth of weed in a crate labeled as ‘art’. We were considering the, Duchampian, idea of just labeling things as art, but the identity of the items is always concealed via the use of packaging or other protective material. This then leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether or not ‘art’ is really present and what then becomes the art if it’s not. The emperors new art work.
