We attended a total of 11 private views (or ‘openings’ as they’re far more appropriately called here) the other night, which was quite a stretch. Included in those was an exhibition at PACE gallery of David Hockney’s iPad drawings.
Fairly obvious to say but, the nearly 80 year old, Hockney isn't the likeliest candidate for making iPad art, but saying that doesn't mean he approaches the medium with any less enthusiasm. Like his previous works with the ‘Brushes’ app, his new digital drawings are nothing if not approachable, and so handmade they feel strangely familiar. "The Yosemite Suite" collects the works he made on site at the national park in 2010 and 2011, some designed with printing in mind, and all definitely marking a new horizon for American landscapes. This body of work only reinforces his title as the ‘mark-making king’.
We also attended several ‘openings’ yesterday evening too! Something we did notice was a definite difference between the shows we’d seen in Chelsea to the ones in the Lower East Side. Chelsea galleries seemed to have far less drinks (something we consider nothing less than essential when attending an opening. They also seem to have, in our opinion, far weaker works; this would be due to the overwhelming pressure to exhibit works that are ‘sellable’. The works we saw tonight were far more thorough in their ideas and processes than anything we’d seen in Chelsea the previous evening (plus there was always beers and no looks of horror that there were young people in the building). An example of the work we saw was an exhibition titled ‘Ephemerol’. Dora Budor titled it after the experimental drug central to the plot of David Cronenberg’s movie Scanners. In the film, a telepathic artist named Benjamin Pierce works in isolation to construct this giant head sheltering a seating area. What Budor has produced is a sculpture that acts like a fiberglass mould for the reproduction of Pierce’s head. However, the interior seating of Budor’s cranium has exchanged Pierce’s original for a corporate doppelgänger based on a work by the Danish designer Verner Panton, an immersive fantasy lounge titled VISIONA II, itself a monstrous variation of an iconic ‘60s furniture piece known as the ‘Living Tower’, which is still in production today. She’s thought about her position in, not only, the contemporary art sphere but also the world and society as a whole; referencing a variety of pop culture ideas from film to home ware.
The flag arrived today too! It looks great and we are looking forward to presenting it tomorrow.
What we experienced during one of the final 3 crits today was the epitome of Pratt as an organisation. This came in the form of plenty of focus on materials as opposed to ideas within the works, which were barely touched upon. One guy just presented a few plaster casts of his feet with no knowledge of why he had produced them, other than wanted to learn how to cast – however, his honestly on this was actually creditable considering the bullshit that comes out of most people’s mouths. But the point we’re making is that being in this room with these people has made us want to present a work, which is everything that people find ‘challenging’ about what we do. We want to attempt to make an almost completely dematerialised work, as a kind of experiment, just to see what conversation arises from it. Since the idea has arisen from experiencing a crit, the subject, we feel, should be the crit itself. We plan to position a camera in the corner of the room and when everyone comes in and sits down, we set the camera to record. The piece then becomes a conversation about the conversation about the work (which again is the conversation being had). This is a work completely devised for a critique and works, almost exclusively, in the realm of art school. It brings up ideas about mirrors without being able to see one’s reflection; the focus appears to be on this object but when the objects attention is being put onto the viewer, the viewer becomes the subject of the work, by default. This is not intended to ‘poke the bear’ but we’ve realised that in order to get the most out of a crit, we need to steer the conversation away from the work’s material attributes and into the ideas within them. Our solution, make a work which is in fact the very same people who are talking about it.
