We survived our first solo show! The exhibition seemed to be very well received and all that attended enjoyed the works that we displayed. Paper Toss was hugely popular and we even implemented a scoring system due to the unforeseen difficulty of throwing balled up pieces of paper into a bin. ‘360 Life Support’ was, as always, enjoyed by a diverse crowd – all genders, ages and backgrounds. The set-up for ‘The Men’s 2000m Final’ ended up being two mattresses and a number of pillows, allowing a several people at a time the opportunity to gaze up at the video above, which felt suitably appropriate. The artists’ haircuts and Wikipedia Game were both things we were slightly unsure about; we didn’t know if anyone would interact with them but again people appeared to enjoy the interactive/inclusive nature of both the activities. In general, the show epitomised what we want when it comes to our audience and how they receive our work. Photos to come soon!
Also managed to go and see the new Cory Archangel exhibition at Lisson Galley, which was fairly entertaining. The funniest part was the endless people in suits contemplating his Photoshop paintings, low-resolution images and tracksuits etc. For us, missing the entire point of these works; to debunk the idea of the ‘painting’ as this one off genius object. A benefit of seeing the rippling lake works in the flesh was realising that each of them are ‘physical’ things; there is a computer per ‘image’ that have each been individually hacked to generate this effect. Of course the whole idea that work of this nature is considered important is always to be praised – Lisson have, and continue to, enable a huge number of diverse artists the ability to make expansive and progressive work.
There was a talk on at the Zabludowicz Collection regarding ideas around private lives and networked culture. It was an excellent talk one of the most interesting contributors was David Raymond Conroy, one of the artists in the current show, Emotional Supply Chain. There was a fair amount of meandering through well-trodden paths such as private space becoming public space and being more connected than ever before yet feeling more and more alone. A slightly new way of talking about it was this notion of the stage and how the entire stage is now important; offstage as well as onstage. This links back to the idea of process (how things come into being) and how processes are taking precedent over product – give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. Another subject that we’d previously thought about, but was phrased far more poetically, was that social media is a machine that runs on traffic but that traffic only exists because of the machine itself. It has become a chicken and egg situation where we no longer know whether social media or ourselves dictate the activities one is undertaking; what came first life or Facebook? These machines could encapsulate eBay, which was also touched on by David. He proposed the funny idea that they’ve changed ‘buying’ into ‘winning’; when you ‘buy’ something on eBay you’re saying that you’re prepared to pay more money for that item than anyone in the whole world; and you’re ecstatic about it because they call it winning. A totally new topic, that we’ve now gone onto research further, is an idea put forward by Pierre Bourdieu where he talks about ‘things’ and how went one wants a ‘thing’, what they really want is the image of that thing and that image is complete (hence the desire for it). However, as soon as you and said ‘thing’ become one (purchasing or acquiring it), something that was once complete has now been mutated; you are the very thing that destroys the perfection that you believe the ‘thing’ could give you. This idea brought a whole new meaning to the Martin Creed piece, ‘Work No. 232: the whole world + the work = the whole world’; for us it changed it from this fairly optimistic view that all things are equal and the addition of something to something else doesn’t necessarily mean that it alters the final product. But now, we see the work in the light of the all consuming, never satisfied collective body of the Internet.
