We took a long weekend in Budapest and managed to squeeze seeing some art into our (totally not) busy schedule. Gábor Koós had a solo show at Chrimera-Project Gallery which was nearly interesting but felt like it was trying to hard to be ‘art’. As always with this sort of thing, not a crime by any means, just not a goal for our own art making and it’s always fun to feel aspirational when viewing art. For the exhibition he had been experimenting with an empty factory that he had then morphed into the gallery space. The morphing is executed via a huge scale rubbing which technique enables the artist to map the factory space bit by bit, he literally unfolds the space element by element and reinstalls the resulting material in the gallery space structure. Taking a look at his former body of work we became aware of this being sort of his ‘thing’; reproducing objects and creating copies with a high degree of authenticity. This familiarity is something we find slightly problematic it feels a bit too comfortable, very safe. But to say something positive it does have ties to very interesting ideas such as Walter Benjamin notion of the “aura” and how, with this particular space, it is dislocated and reproduced within the white cube setting of Chimera-Project Gallery. The press release suggested that Koós creates a reproduction, that is able to unveil and create new qualities that were not visible but were growing out of true elements in the structure of the original. It goes on to talk about the installation providing a better understanding and new conclusions regarding the inventive and questionable relation of the original, the reproduction. These are all interesting points but the work doesn’t really fill the big boots that these words have build for them. If the work is about transporting a building into a new environment, why is there no consideration as to how this might occur? The artist is just using a pre-existing formula to solve a new equation.
Today’s work we made for 30/30 came in the form of a film. As you can see below, there is a news headline banner that’s scrolling across the front of the screen with all number of things coming up on it. This is every idea that we have in our ideas list, the very first place that some insignificant thought goes before it goes into a slightly higher level of production. These can be phrases, sentences, and sometimes just single words. This work is about our focus on these things (ideas), over the physical, materialism that the ideas live in (objects). however , we do not reject the objects in the way that heavily conceptual artists might, we embrace them as powerful tools in their own right, they must be used in collaboration with each other to gain the full effect. We’ve been trying to making something out of these ideas for a while, we thought about making a book of proposals or just making the list as an on going work but this feels like an interesting way to use them. They go so fast through the screen that they become almost meaningless, almost like a stream of unconscious thought which is why they need to be embodied by a vehicle in order to communicate themselves effectively. The thinking about the news headlines is that they are very fleeting; they disappear just as quickly as they emerge and are never thought of again.