Detail of Millefeuille, digital photograph, 2011
Digital photograph, 2011
Monday, 6 June 2011
Untitled [The Ruin of Representation], 2011
Untitled [flip horizontal], 2011
The real-time experience of a work has become secondary to the documentation, and later, representation of it. Could the technical equipment that has to be put in place in order to correctly document the work become the work?- a shift in focus from the object being represented to the means of representation.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
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| untitled, hand-bound book, 1 of 9, 2010 |
A trend for the work-of-art as an illustration of a theoretical text has become increasingly more popular; if theory, or philosophy was the inspiration for the art work could the text itself be the artwork? This question raised another - what would the value of such an object be? and furthermore how could it be presented?
By simply re-contextualising the theoretical/philosophical texts i.e. placing them in the gallery, the book would take on the status of an object rather than communicating its content. A process of editing and re-combining texts from various sources divorced the text - or the idea - from the object (the identifiable tropes of 'book' being an identifiable author, a title, a cover and a structure that follows the beginning-middle-end template) creating a more flexible, or animated structure for a 'book'.
In relation to the question of value, these 'books' question the authority of the original, and ask the question -at what point do the objects that I have created from these texts become far enough removed from the original to become an original themselves?
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| documentation of untitled event, hand-bound book and wax sheet, 2010 |
The issue of how to present text in a gallery context seems, to me, to be problematic - the tactile or sculptural qualities of the 'books' are as important in their reading as the content within them. Since the 60s artists have been fighting the 'Do-Not-Touch' policy of the gallery, but despite their efforts the authority of the White Cube renders its contents as purely visual - an object.
The 'books' used low value, industrial materials, as an attempt to be read as pure content rather than form, but this position was instantly reversed when displayed in a White Cube.
This piece was staged as an event- the wax sheets concealed the content of the 'books', but the lighting - that allows the audience to appreciate the material qualities of the sculpture- over time, will reveal the content of the book underneath. The ideology of the book, and the material qualities of the wax both share the possibility of change, transformation and metamorphosis.
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