'About' Exhibition Publication ed. bZayneArmstrong

2. Press Release 3. Olivier Castel / Katie Guggenheim / Justin Jaeckle

5. Sarah Elliott

7. Peggy Franck8. Frederick Fuller9. Lydia Gifford10. Robin Kirsten11. Ian Pedigo12. Samuel Whittaker

Exhibition Guide

The First Part ofA Publication in Two Parts

A selection of pre-existing texts chosen with the artist to stand in as an explanation of their work. I invited each of the artists to suggest excerpts from published texts and the final texts are then agreed upon by both the artist and myself.

About Contents

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Factum II Factum I Jonathan T.D. Neil

In 1957 Robert Rauschenberg made Factum I, the first member of a duo that includes Factum II, which was also painted that same year. These days, however, the two live apart: Factum I is now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Factum II lives in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art. Though the two no doubt belong together, there may be something appropriate about their geographical separation. The Factum paintings are members of the Combines, that family of works through which Rauschenberg renovated the enterprise of ‘collage’ and made it solely his own. Different from the more singular representatives of that family, however, Factum I and Factum II are like biological twins: imperfect repetitions of one another that now, in their new found distance, would seem to fold West Coast onto East (or vice versa). Their connection would seem to render the map of the US as a combine itself, one more patchwork unity produced through constant addition and alteration. Or perhaps that map is just one more element within an even larger combine, as it is in Trophy V (for Jasper Johns) (1962). In attending to the geographical history of the Factum twins, however, we would do well to consider the immediate region of Rauschenberg’s studio on Pearl Street, to which he moved in 1955, the first full year of his Combines production. Close to this new studio—just downstairs, in fact—was Jasper Johns himself. While Rauschenberg was at work on the Factum twins, Johns was applying himself to pieces such as Drawer and Newspaper (both 1957), works in which, as with the bodily fragments that reside at the top of Johns’ seminal Target with Plaster Casts (1955), the object is offered in place of its representation. But, in these later works, Johns’ encaustic seals the objects to, and sometimes as, the canvas, thereby returning the three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional image, all the while retaining a sense of its manifest heterogeneity. Perhaps this integration of surfaces attracted Rauschenberg. For, in the following year, Rauschenberg made Cage, Currency and Course (all 1958), all of which are sometimes included among the Combines family. In these pieces, however, the imagery is not so much on but of the ground. The collage aesthetic of the Combines—sometimes aggressively chasing the third dimension, as with The Tower (1957) and the more famous Monogram (1955-9)—is here replaced by a solvent transfer process that leaves the work as a singular surface un-muddied by layers of paint, papers, fabrics, newsprint, photographs and the other assorted items that build out and render what Brian O’Doherty

Olivier Castel / Katie Guggenheim / Justin Jackle

famously called the Combines’ streetwise ‘vernacular glance’. If Johns had used encaustic to efface a drawer’s ‘objecthood’ by returning it to the two-dimensional space of painting, then Rauschenberg used the solvent transfer process to pull that two-dimensional surface apart and to layer it, one might say, without really adding a thing. As an effect of that process, the transferred images—the runners, the Mona Lisas, the beach balls—appear from within the paper’s surface. Each is over—or perhaps underwritten by the burnishing strokes that effect the transfer, and in this, the paper is given the appearance of photosensitivity, and thus of a photograph, which, of course, is another way of capturing the ‘actuality’ of objects. This photographic condition was not entirely new. After all, the practice of collage in Rauschenberg’s hands serves as a strategy for displacing the given homogeneity of the modernist picture plane with a heterogeneous dispersal of whatever is ‘out there’ in the world. Even Rauschenberg’s series of White Paintings (1951) could be seen to capture, in John Cage's words, ‘the lights, shadows and particles’ of their environment, a lesson Cage took to heart in 4’33" (1952), his homage to silence and the sounds of the world. But if one condition of photography is to capture the world—its ‘lights, shadows and particles’—then its logic is to double or repeat that world through a separation. Photography carves off a piece of the world and splits it from itself: a lesson readily available via the medium of collage and taught by the Factum twins. So it is Factum I and Factum II which first introduce this logic into the geography of Rauschenberg’s painting, a logic which makes it impossible to read these two canvases as just one Factum after another.

Factum I, 1957 combine painting: oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions and printed paper on canvas 156 x 91 cm

Neil, Jonathan T.D., Factum II Factum I, Modern Painters, December 2005/ January 2006, pp. 76-7

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Factum II Factum I Jonathan T.D. Neil

In 1957 Robert Rauschenberg made Factum II, which took its place as the second member of a duo that included Factum I, also painted that same year. Now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Factum II is separated from its twin, which resides in the warmer climes of Los Angeles, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. To say that II was painted after I would be incorrect. The two canvases were painted simultaneously, with Rauschenberg attending to one and then to the other. We should note, however, that he did not replicate his actions and materials in order to make the same painting, or even really to make two different paintings; rather, Rauschenberg seems to have painted the works simultaneously so as to render difference itself, to render difference as an inescapable, indeed necessary, goal of creation, artistic or otherwise. Getting at this difference takes time. We might even say that time is the medium of difference. For what Rauschenberg seems to make clear with the Factum repetition is that to make it ‘new’ would simply require making it again—like stamping out another Barbie doll, or producing one more sitcom. To make it again, then, is to offer the same in the guise of the different and the new; to make it again is to deny time. Nevertheless it is time, and difference, which is everywhere registered between the Factum twins. We see it announced in the calendar of year 1958, a year that at the time of the works’ making had yet to come. We see it in the double newspaper photographs of the burning building, a two-step narrative about the facts of catastrophe and the following response. We see it in the drips of paint, as with the red blaze applied at the centre of the image, a blaze whose excesses have gathered off on different routes, in different directions, and under different marching orders from the canvas. We can even see it in the two red letter ‘T’s, which seem to announce, as with any dynamic equation, that these Factums are taken at times T1 and T2 respectively: two different works with two different beginnings, alphabetically emblematized on each canvas by two white letter ‘A’s. If difference is everywhere registered between Factum I and II, then the pair also register a moment of difference in Rauschenberg’s work from that period. The following year, Rauschenberg would embark on the series of 34 Cantos, meant as illustrations for Dante’s Inferno and composed primarily of imagery wrought by a solvent transfer process. In these works, the images are not so much on but of the ground: unlike collage items or marks in paint and gouache that are added to the paper surface, the veiled quality of the transfer imagery gives it the appearance of having been revealed, or uncovered, through the legible

striations of the burnishing stroke that is used to coax the ink from one ground to the next. Rauschenberg’s first combine painting appeared in 1954 with a stained glass window—another such integrated surface—and he would continue to make some of his most famous works, such as Canyon (1959), after experimenting with the solvent transfer process. But if we can say that the Factum twins introduce difference as a function of time and repetition, then the solvent transfer process integrates this difference into the structure of the image itself. The burnishing stroke separates the image from itself; it cleaves it in two and peels the image away from itself. Thus rendered is a mirror, an image doubled both in space (but not as model to copy) and in time. We are presented with a before and an after, a temporal structure reminiscent of the abstract expressionist strokes that Cy Twombly was then rewriting in Olympia (1957), as so much graffiti, itself constituted by equally self-separating marks: with the graffito, the author is always absent, a fugitive from his actions. This concern with time would become quite literal a few years later in Combines such as Third Time Painting (1961), in which an alarm clock takes up residence in the work. But it is Factum I and Factum II which first introduce into Rauschenberg’s work time as a calculus of difference, a difference which makes it impossible to read the two canvases as just one Factum after another.

Factum II, 1957 combine painting: oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions and painted paper on canvas, 156 x 91 cm

Neil, Jonathan T.D., Factum II Factum I, Modern Painters, December 2005/ January 2006, pp. 76-7

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dismissing the authority of the bishop and introducing the free market. This implies an alteration in the question of forms. The revolutionary artisan denies having theoretically recognized the form of a table or having experienced its revelation in faith. He claims that previous artisans invented it and that he, in the process of his own work, can improve it. This modern notion that forms are not fixed ideas but plastic models, that they can be modeled, that they can be progressively improved, and that therefore the works express fashions or modes is expressed in the word modern. Thus, the word theory also changes its meaning. It no longer denotes the contemplating of fixed, unchanging ideas but active modeling. It dialectically opposes observation, on the one hand, and experiment, on the other; for I have to observe the appearances before I work out a model for them and I must try out my model in order to see how good it is. So modern scientific technique enters the stage. Thus the attitude toward value also changes. Work, then, is that gesture thanks to which models are worked out and progressively improved. This is why work is the source of all values. There are no eternal values that can be recognized theoretically or reveal themselves to faith. There is no idea of a perfect table, of a perfect society, of a perfect human being. All values have to be worked out. The modern work ethic ... follows from this. We are no longer modern. We can no longer ask the question of the relation of material and form like this because we no longer share the modern analysis of work and therefore the modern work ethic. We have been led to a postmodern view of this problematic by the industrial revolution. To us, the work process looks like this: machines work. These devices are an opening input through which raw material flows in order to flow out of another opening output as products. In the middle of the machine is a tool. It bears the form of the product that is to be created and it mechanically stamps this form onto the raw material that flows by it. An example is a machine through whose input plastic flows, whose tool bears the form of an ink pen, and out of whose output plastic ink pens stream. A critique of these massproduced ink pens shows that their value results neither from the raw material nor from the machine nor from the human beings who work at this machine, but from the form in the tool- it is thanks to this form that ink pens can write. This is why the source of all work is to be found not in the worker but in the software. From this point of view, work consists of two phases: a soft phase in which human and artificial intelligence design forms, often from numeric calculations, and a hard one in which these forms are mechanically, often automatically, stamped upon raw material. The second phase, that is, the one that in modernity was regarded as true labor, is inhuman because it can be mechanized. A constantly

decreasing part of society participates in this phase. A constantly increasing part is occupied with producing forms, information taken in the widest sense, in the so-called tertiary sector.... For the question of who has power and makes decisions has thus shifted. It is not the owner of machines but the information specialist (not the capitalist but the systems analyst and programmer) who holds the power.

Flusser, Vilém. Change of Paradigms, Writings, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2002. Translated by Elizabeth Wilson and Andreas Ströhl

Frederick Fuller

Aside from a number of romantic duet albums made by singers who never met in the studio and allegedly despised eachother - Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross spring to mind - I was reminded of dead zone duets: recording of dead (or brain-dead) musicians augmented by extra instrumentation or new vocals, as mentioned earlier in referance to Minnie Riperton. For newspapers catering to a fourtysomething readership, the hot music story in 1994 was that long-awaited reformation of The Beatles, united through technology in a completion of the late John Lennon's unfinished song. Electronic exhimation has a rich history. A few years before The Beatles reunion, Natalie Cole duetted with a recording made with her dead father. More disturbing than the record was the video, an electronic seance replete with Oedipal implications, during which Nat "King" Cole was exhimed from the archives and montage in seamless drifting communion with his scantily dressed daughter. One of the pioneering works in this field was created when Elvis Presley was raised from the grave by radio DJ, Ray Quinn of Baltimore's Radio WCBM, to sing his 1956 Love Me Tender with Linda Ronstadt's 1978 version. Then Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves were wiggled and wobbled in the studio, despite both of them having departed for the afterlife after plane crashes, finally finding a mutually agreeable key on "Have You Ever Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been Blue)?” In the analogue age, duets were difficult, augmentation more common. MGM were releasing embellished Hank Williams records by 1957, four years after his death from an excess of booze and speed. Coral Records worked the same electronic voodoo on Buddy Holly recordings following his death in a plane crash, although they waited just five months to meddle with the tapes by editing them, adding vocal backgrounds, strings or a full band. "Ironically enough", wrote Holly biographer John J. Goldrosen, "with the passage of years and the ignorance of newer fans about the posthumous nature of these arrangements, the songs strengthened the impression that Holly had been turing decisively away from rock'n'roll or rockabilly and towards pop music.” A similar impression could be gathered from Alice Coltrane's addition of strings to recordings made by her late husband. "Living Space" was originally recorded in New Jersey in 1965 by John Coltrain. Then four violins, two violas and two cellos were added by Alice in 1972, Los Angeles. [...] With more justification, drummer Rashied Ali, who worked with Coltrane in the last years, told Valerie Wilmer: "Its like rewriting the bible!" In fact melodramatic Hollywood mystic soup of "Living Space" could be the Bible on wax, as starring Charlton Heston or James Earl Jones."

Toop, David 1995, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds - Body Snatching, Serpent’s Tail Publishers, London, pp. 92-93

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Pegler, Martin M. 2003, Stores of The Year 14, Visual Reference Publishing, New York, NY, pp. 105-107

Robin Kirsten

In our attempts to arrive at a form that addresses our client's needs we arrived simply at a linear approach and a cylinder. The line allows for gentle movement while also allowing the ambiance to mix with the displayed items. The cylinder in turn is held by the line as a prominent element that serves as an individual fitting area emphasizing attention to clientele. To provide a sense of intimacy while simultaneously accenting the depth and allowing connection to be made between the displayed garments and the fitting area, the designers partially vaulted ceiling. The partial vaulting also modified the store's scale from side to side. To achieve a "warm environment," Mojo Stumer used glass panels, limestone flooring and "a deep statement of a single wood wall punctuated by a rhythm of several cabinet displays." These cabinets mark the depth of the store. "The presence of these relatively soft natural materials keep the store both comfortable and inviting." The garments are double hung in a series of bays set at right angles to the aisle. This not only separates the merchandise categories but simplifies the customer shopping by limiting the amount of product visible at any time. Throughout, the light is warm and flattering to both the product and the shopper. The incandescent lamps are recessed into ceiling channels but they can be focused as desired. The lamps highlight the garments in the hanging bays as well as the outfits selected for special attention by being presented off steel pegs on the cabinet doors along the right side of the shop. At the far end of the shop - rear the fitting room - and barely seen from the entrance - is a secluded sitting corner designed for those who serve by waiting, or those who are waiting to be waited upon.

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Ian Pedigo

"Where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the in-order-to which is constitutive for the equipment we are implying at the time; the less we state at the hammer thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiled is it encountered as that which it is-- as equipment. [...]

“The peculiarity of what is primarily available is that, in its availableness, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be available quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings primarily dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the task--that which is to be done at the time"

~

"The equipmental nexus of things, for example, the nexus of things as they surround us here, stands view, but not for the contemplator as though we were sitting here in order to describe the things....The view in which the equipmental nexus stands at first, completely unobtrusive and unthought, is the view and sight of practical circumspection, of our practical everyday orientation. "Unthought" means that is is not thematically apprehended for deliberate thinking about things; instead, in circumspection, we find our bearings in regard to them....When we enter here through the door, we do not apprehend the seats, and the same holds for the doorknob. Nevertheless, they are there in this peculiar way: we go by them circumspectively, avoid them circumspectively.... and the like. [...]

“We do not always and continually have explicit perception of the things surrounding us in a familiar environment, certainly not in such a way that we would be aware of them expressly as available....In the indifferent imperturbability of our customary commerce with them, they become accessible precisely with regard to their unobtrusive presence. The presuppoisition for the possible equanimity of our dealing with things is, among others, the uninterrupted quality of that commerce. It must not be help up in its progress."

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Heidegger, Martin 1954, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Indiana University Press, Indiana, p. 163, 309

Heidegger, Martin 1962, Being and Time, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp. 98-99, translated from the German Sein und Zeit (seventh edition) by permissionof Max Niemeyer Verlang, Tubingen

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Samuel Whittaker

In principle all my changes of place figure in a corner of my landscape; they are recorded on the map of the visible. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at lease in reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the "I can." Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world and the world of my motor projects are each total parts of the same Being. This extraordinary overlapping, which we never think about sufficiently, forbids us to conceive of vision as an operation of thought that would set up to before the mind a picture or a representation of the world, a world of immanence and of ideality. Immersed in the visible by his body, itself visible, the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking, he opens himself to the world. And on its side, this world of which he is a part is not in itself, or matter. My movement is not a decision made by the mind, an absolute decision that would decree, from the depths of a subjective retreat, some change of place miraculously executed in extended space. It is the natural consequence and the maturation of my vision. I say of a thing that it is moved; but my body moves itself, my movement deploys itself. It is not ignorant of itself; it is not blind for itself; it radiates from a self ... The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the "other side" of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself."

~

Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these correspondences in their turn give rise to some external visible shape in which anyone else would recognize those motifs which support his own inspection of the world? Thus there appears a "visible" of the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first. It is not a faded copy, a trompe-l'oeil, or another 'thing'. The animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way as the fissures and limestone formations. But they are not elsewhere. Pushed forward here, held back there, held up by the wall's mass they use so adroitly, they spread around the wall without ever breaking away from their elusive moorings in it. For I do not look at it as I do at a thing; I do not fix it in it's place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it. The word "image" is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a design was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the material image was such a design, belonging around our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the design nor the painting belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They

are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture and the actor's mimicry are not devices to be borrowed from the real world in order to signify prosaic things which are absent. For the imaginary is much nearer to, and much further away from, the actual - nearer because it is in my body as a diagram of the life of the actual, with all its pulp and carnal obverse [son envers charnel] exposed to view for the first time. In this sense, Giacometti says energetically, "What interests me in paintings is resemblance - that is, what is resemblance for me: something which makes me discover more of the world." And the imaginary is much further away from the actual because the painting is an analogue or likeness only according to the body; because it does not present the mind with an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things; because, rather, it offers to our sight [regard], so that it might join with them, the inward traces of vision, and because it offers to vision its inward tapestries, the imaginary texture of the real.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Eye and Mind in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Northwestern University Press, 1964, p 163-4, Translated by William Cobb

Exhibition Guide

The Second Part ofA Publication in Two Parts

I invited three different people to each write a critical response to this exhibition, during the exhibition - David Cook, Tommy Diamond and Richard John Jones - who write about, or in relation to art in what I understand to be three very different ways.

Contents

2. Press Release3. Richard John Jones

6. About About - David Cook

9. Notice - Zayne Armstrong

About

1

This show has made me recall a number of different events, situations, anecdotes and essays over the past couple of weeks. It has been haunting me as its proposition is so simple that it becomes transferable to endless different examples - the publication released at the beginning being a perfect example of this. The premise of doing the same thing twice touches on things like reproduction and repetition and in turn perhaps authenticity and authority. If we look at organizational or corporate examples, we are considering the 'franchise' branding or advertising - a world of semiotic appreciation. Or if we consider time the repetition becomes telescoped into something more historical, the works becoming indexical or archival. I understood from the press release that the "content of these works does not reside in their (material form) but about it" but that seems very cryptic and I'm still unsure as to what this show is really About.

The curatorial decision to choose artists who are linked by their use of 'found' material exposes these objects and strips them of any status that a normal univocal work of art would command. These objects or performances have been done twice. A magician will pull the rabbit out of a hat many many many times, but seeing it once is usually miraculous. Seeing it twice would be less miraculous but would allow for an understanding of the magicians performance. It doesn't allow for any greater insight into how the trick is pulled off yet seeing something that can't be real twice allows for a consideration of the act as being performed. And I have no doubt that I too am a performer of myself in this project. The opening and closing events punctuated by publications promotes the 'during' as a curatorial stage on which those participating are performing themselves like crazy. In short I am not sure here what to scrutinize, and I think that perhaps this is not important. As in the initial press release I have been asked just to write in my own style. What about, well, I don't want to get pulled into the language but I am writing about About.

Unfortunately this is out of my remit, I don't think this is something I can actually do. Yet, luckily for me, a situation I was in again seemed very appropriate to the situation I am in now. That is not to say that it has anything to do with it in real terms but the thing that links it is the aspect that both these situations are potentially about nothing at all.

With Kate Cooper I recently conducted an interview with the investigative journalist Gavin McFadyen on film for a project we are currently doing together. I am going to omit any particulars about what is being spoken about in order to fuel the ambiguity of these quotes to demonstrate a problem that I see behind the curatorial stage that About

Richard John Jones

creates in raising an authenticity issue of the "performing" participants. I am going to transcribe edited portions of this conversation below as it addresses issues around ambiguity, nothingness and representation that provide an alternative approach to what issues might be behind About but not present in it. To re-iterate, the transcript is not about the show that this writing is meant to be addressing but adds some concerns that I believe it would be productive to include but not specify, as in this cryptic or ambiguous "void" I do not feel that I have to produce a 'valid' text that is true to my performative self.

It starts as I think these processes should with an image.

[Static on a television set]

Gavin McFadyen: It is a television set but you can't see anything on it, thats where I'd start. Then you'd ask yourself the question "What is this screen, with all these pixelated things that you can't read? Is there a real picture there thats being obscured? Or something that they didn't turn the camera on for? Is it a scene of a public execution... That you can't see?

What is it?"

Are we interested in what it really obscures, or are we interested in the fact that its just pixelating? Thats a real question.In terms of representing a fascinating ambiguity I just thought of the pixelating thing because it shows you something thats real thats not real, you don't know what it means.

RJJ: And it could be totally vacuous.

GM: Totally vacuous. It could be nothing at all. But what's the moral preoccupation then? Well there isn't one in this example, its the fascination. I mean I just keep thinking there is an element here which I find fascinating that questionable notion that if it gives you pleasure that is all that matters.

I mean in this situation it is a problem that the pursuit is not for the truth. I am professionally at a disadvantage because everything I do is nominally for that purpose and structured to do that and guarding against problems of not achieving that. So its very hard for me to get my head around what is I'm here to do. I'm here to discover what the reality is, if I can, behind something. That is more than a provocation

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but what if, in this case, its only an amusement?

RJJ: But it surely can't just be an amusement. Because the things that this project incorporates are potentially very serious.

GM: Sure. But that means that you need to take one of those things and really take it apart, find out everything you can about it which we should be able to do by any diligent search.

But anyway, all this is intractable unless there is a hard steel bolt there of something that allows you to see what any information might be attached to. Otherwise all this is a game. An interesting one, but a game. I'm just trying to explain the difficulties that Is see in pursuing this kind of course rather than pursuing a hard and serious investigation. That, of course, would also mean investigating the artists behind this. A serious investigation. But this might be a problem, because if you're investigating to find out the truth and there is a lot to be said for Art as truth-saying, then you don't want to be engaged in serious misconceptions and deceptions in the pursuit of it otherwise then you are a hypocrite.

Do you lie to people on the whole? No you don't because very little is gained form deception. Are you hiding Jews in your attic in Amsterdam in 1943? - of course you'd lie but there are very few situations of that gravity. Is there a lot of art thats all about lying?

KC: What do you mean by lying?

GM: misrepresenting yourself...

I can see an adventure into the imagination which might be difficult, I can see that much. And thats fascinating, I'm all for it. I mean Andre Breton was all for it. A lot of good people were all for it. But the one thing about Breton was that he didn't lie about anything, which is what got him in all the trouble. I think it would be inconceivable for Breton or Aragon or any of the others in the Surrealist movement to cohabit and truck with serious criminals for other than some imaginative purpose... and even then I find it hard to believe. I find that hard because there has to be an integrity at the core.

RJJ: ...and you don't think there is here?

GM: I don't know. And it is impossible to know under the circumstances. I mean if Andre Breton spent a really long time trying

to figure out what the art of the insane was that is because he was interested in the truth of that art, what it meant and how it described the imaginary world that these people were in. This would be a truthful door to that world. Its not made up in a Hollywood studio, its not paid for by somebody else its because the work itself was of sufficient weight to justify the enormous degree of severity to get it.

I'm not making a judgement here I'm just saying that these are the complex issues that underpin this enquiry. If I'm going after something I want to know as much about that as I can possibly can and it may be uncomfortable because for example the person making the accusation, I may also need to know a lot about them as well. When somebody comes to me with a story, I'm as curious about them as I am about what they're telling me because that is where the truth is. It doesn't mean you disbelieve them if they are lying but you have to appreciate the complexity then. That is one of the problems in our situation because I don't know what the truth is or where one is going with it - for what purpose? And what is the moral ground here that I'm standing on... if there is any? There may not be and then we are dealing with an ambiguity. And thats interesting too as long as its not vacuous.

I've got an example which is slightly provocative.

Lets say that we were looking at electric chair instalations all across the USA and we were much more interested in the colour of the room, what the guards ate for dinner, how people imagined it somewhere else. Never the electric chair. We are not examining the electric chair, wh made it, who's using it. Are we seeing it in use.

KC: But surely thats too didactic now in terms of what it is possible to say to an audience as an artist?

GM: I have to say that I don't agree with you at all. Part of the ideology that we live in in this world is to detune you out of politics to detune you out of the social value of what we do. I mean its like saying that all the painters in the renaissance were not talking about god and religion as they understood it. Of course they were, that was the primary motivation of everything they did. It wasn't to be engaged with the wonderful colours they used.

I mean the investigations you have undertaken so far have been fascinating in terms of colouring in a landscape around a central ambiguity which you haven't been able to colour. So if the pursuit here is a landscape, thats fascinating but I don't think thats what we're on

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about here. Is truth the thing that is being pursued here? And an ambiguity is not necessarily profound, it could just be a game. In this case perhaps it denies any social relevance, it just reproduces this facile notion that if it gives you pleasure that is all that matters.

- Richard John Jones, 2008

5

About About - David Cook

Doubling, reciting, re-doing, making the same thing twice, moving between two or more points, or, repetitions of these repetitions; these are some of the strategies employed by the artists in About; an exhibition that is itself a double, shown as two simultaneous exhibitions, side by side, loosely thematically informed by an interest in "found materials," materials that are themselves repetitions, split between their actual instantiation as art and their virtual instantiations as familiar everyday objects. I want to devote my space here, in the second instantiation of the About publication, to look closely at a couple of these splits or doublings, the ways that things are happening or are made 'again.'

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Through

Looking over the photo documentation of Robin Kirsten's Suspension Bridge, I have a distinct feeling that I am not looking at 'the real thing,' that what I am seeing is not simply of this time and this place, somehow that what I am looking at is too open to be a concrete object. In order to understand why this is so, and since Kristen's work is indeed a concrete object, I might begin by looking carefully at what is in Suspension Bridge that seems to be leading me outside it. First, the title, this title automatically makes the work into a diagram; Of course a 'real' suspension bridge, the ones that we are most familiar with, perhaps as tourist attractions such as Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco or Denmark's Great Belt Bridge, would not fit inside the exhibition space of Auto Italia. In this way Suspension Bridge is already a representation of something outside, in other words, it is already about. Here, the title opens the sculptural work to a 'through' flowing motion, at the same time a joining and a splitting – a joining with the virtual image of the 'real' bridge that we might know, and a splitting from the actual image of the diagram that we see. This sort of motion is important throughout the work and has general significance to the organizing concepts of About. Another reason Suspension Bridge seems to withhold itself from a concrete appearance concerns the exhibitions theme of 'found' material. The pedestal, which is also the 'bridge' in Suspension Bridge, looks as though it could be a mass-produced consumer product yet it takes on

------------------------------- Here I'm interested in the overlapping associations that the word 'about' conjures. On one hand it means "on the subject of..." and on the other it is associated with "movement within a particular area," a synonym of "around." In both senses, there is a trace of the idea of an outside, a being-displaced-from-within that correlates to the English root word, onbutan, which means "outside of." [all definitions taken from the OED]

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equal visual importance when measured with the object it is carrying. Both parts of the sculpture seem not only to communicate the abstract functional qualities of the bridge [i.e. what's on top that has weight and what is below that supports weight] but also the abstract qualities of the exhibition of modern sculpture, in particular, the relationship of the pedestal, something rectangular and flat, to the sculptural object, something that might have no formal relation to its support whatsoever. Many of the works in About – I am thinking for now of works by Ian Pedigo, Samuel Whittaker and Lydia Gifford – employ a more direct method of abstraction via the technique of 'draping.' In at least one instantiation of each of these artists’ works, a flexible material is made to drape over some other object that was ostensibly 'just in the room.' Because Auto Italia is not a traditionally white, cubed gallery, it provides many fixed objects to work with, as in the case of Whittaker's untitled "unsupported acrylic" works, which are draped over [what looks like] functioning air conditioning equipment. These works are made to reflect and double their environment. The act of draping is perhaps the most literal mode of doubling as it ostensibly uses the form it wishes to diagram as it's own mold. This effect is particularly exiting in Whittaker's pieces, where the objects themselves could be seen to blend in with the rest of the landscape of Auto Italia in such a way that they risk disappearing into its frame, their only distinguishing attribute being the exhibition guide. What this work does — and this is not necessarily limited to Whittaker — is it becomes a mode of seeing, something parallel to what Merleau-Ponty writes in regard to the paintings at Lascàux that... "It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it." The opening of Whittaker's "unsupported acrylic" to the landscape of Auto Italia, in a sense, creates new ground in the politics of vision, it allows us to see more; It's own 'becoming-diagram' has, at the same time, the effect of materializing what-is-being-diagramed, making that “what” available to thought, and disjoining it, to borrow Hiedegger’s term, from the "equipmental nexus of things." In Heidegger's phenomenology, we encounter things as “equipment” wherever something is "put to use," and here "our concern subordinates itself to the "in-order-to"." Thus, the equipmental thing “stands view,” but remains "unthought." In both Whittaker and Gifford’s work, not only the drape but also the techniques of mimetic size and color allow

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------------------------------- See Merleau-Ponty's text, Page 12 of the exhibition guide part 1 See Hiedgers text, Page 11 of the exhibition guide part 1 [presented immediately adjacent to the Merleau-Ponty's text, Page 12] Heidegger gives this example: "When we enter here through the door, we do not apprehend the seats, and the same holds for the doorknob. Nevertheless they are there in this particular way: we go by them circumpcectively, avoid them circumspectively....and the like." [see Hiedegger, Page 11 of the exhibition guide part 1.]

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them to push the boundaries of the equiptmental nexus of Auto Italia via a doubling, a ‘through’ flowing motion that creates proximity at the same time that it distances; According to Merleau-Ponty, the "animals painted on the walls [of Lascàux] ... are not there in the same way as the fissures and limestone formations. But they are not elsewhere." We could say the same of Gifford’s standing plywood in how it resembles and materializes – as if in a feedback loop – the unthought [or now-thinkable] patterns of the Blue Room wall. In this way, as much as About is an exhibition of repetition and doubling, it is also a meditation on blindness and vision because so much of the work engages in this kind of politics of vision.

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Outside

Another double that we might consider occurs when the politics of vision leaves the nexus of things in Auto Italia and projects itself outward to the places of everyday encounter, the place where the viewer of the work goes after the exhibition is over, or to the places where the ‘found’ materials were indeed found. The overall impression of About — as I can only piece it together, via it’s documentation – is so clearly unmonumental that perusing this direction seems almost unavoidable; What happens after leaving the gallery may very easily take on just as much interest as what came before. As with Kirsten’s piece, this problem of the outside can be addressed from within – Olivier Castel, Katie Guggenheim and Justin Jackle's collaborative re-do's of gallery closures [set in place after the official hours of the show] are perhaps the most clear examples of works in About that address the space outside the gallery as a sort of double of the exhibition space. One of the basic functions of the admonition, “For the exhibition the gallery will be closed,” is that it puts attention back on the space one is standing in. Although it perhaps also frames the viewer in the position of being ‘outside-looking-in,’ the idea of a continuation of the exhibition despite the gallery’s closure seems, I would hope, to encourage an experience of the exhibition as being indeed outside of the gallery. Here again we bump up against some of the nuance of the exhibition title. On one hand the word ‘about’ means "on the subject of..." and on the other it is associated with "movement within a particular area," a synonym of the word "around." In both cases, there is a trace of the idea of an outside,

------------------------------- This is a kind of resemblance that, as Giacometti understood, allows for discovering “more of the world.” [see Meleau-Ponty, Page 12 of the Exhibition Guide]

a being-displaced-from-within that correlates to the English root word, onbutan, which means "outside of." Keeping these meanings in mind we might say that the gesture of the gallery closure is just as much about the gallery as it is about the gallery. What we would mean by this is that the redone pieces concern themselves as much with the function of the gallery as with how that function can be played out beyond its own physical bounds. Another piece that draws attention to the instantiation of About as ‘outside of’ the gallery space is Frederick Fullers videos by their relation to the image of the Coca-Cola bottle. By channeling Jon Cage’s wisdom on inevitable difference, Fuller’s work begins to have conversations with the exhibition as a whole, an exhibition that, to remind ourselves, was organized to some degree around the concept of the ‘found’ material, but which also embodies, to a large extent, the ‘everyday’ and the ‘mass-produced.’ The question here is to what degree can a displacement of the “equipmental” have in relation to the outside instantiation of About, in what way can the aesthetisization of the mass-produced effect our seeing of the mass-produced in our everyday encounters with it, how does it engage with the mechanisms of global capitalism, and how might the gallery space open to the world and allow us to discover more of it even in the face of global capitalisms massively expanding virtualizations.

-David Cook, 2008

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Michael Borremans, The Replacement, 2003

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Notice:

Please note that the text contribution from Tommy Diamond that was going to be included in this publication, for various reasons, has not been and will not be written as far as I know.

-Zayne Armstrong

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