Anthony “burial at sea” Graves.
My habits and proclivities tell me to try to distinguish when or where the ‘artwork’ occurred. I would have laid the (blame? congrats?) on barely moving wall, lights, installation. Following Nathan, I’m forced to reconsider the Gallery Social, the event, ads the ‘moment of art.’ While the wall may come apart and return to this essential, original position sometime in the foreseeable future, it’s more likely to disintegrate into alternate forms. So; the work is empheral, the objects are destructible and don’t carry an immortality spell (..even if the body is renewed, the soul remains the same).
I could turn, instead, to the event. The objects in the gallery are props, a stage setting for actions to take place in or around. There certainly is precedent, as Nathan as laid out, for such moments of supposed life to mesh with the un-life of art. Anthony’s event, like many of its hereditary lineage, winds up obfuscating that imaginary line too well. When the beer informs the other beer, or the heat of the light forces you into another conversations, and on and on…
It seems, finally, that that imaginary distinction is a red herring anyways. After Adorno, of course there is a difference. After Kaprow, of course there isn’t. (Adorno wins, because really, of course there is and isn’t a difference). On one hand I want to argue that doing things artistically isn’t the point; besides, Anthony’s event was enjoyable but hardly distinct. On the other hand, a greater concern arises; if beer or pad thai or coffee or song and dance or conversation or dinner or paintings or objects do not hold the line (there is no line!) to a satisfactory level, then what does?
Anthony’s show and show seems uniquely prepared to engage the issue as if there was no line (there isn’t); challenging instead the scope of that boundary and what it may or may not be protecting. Even if the invisible forcefield were magnificently smashed, what would be released? Is this, not to drag for metaphysics into it, a cry for the soul (of art) to persist beyond the host? Beyond the glue of the institution, the conceptual illustration, the documentation?
There are theories and laws governing : gravity, electricity (voltage, resistance, amperage), friction, mass; object/properties that exist not within anything but wholly and distinctly between them. Are occurrences like Anthony’s shows willing to sever all tethers to concrete understanding and loose the ‘soul?’ Are they capable of it? Can Anthony release these things into the aether?
Or, perhaps more difficult, can he face their eternal entrapment?
Nathan’s and Allen’s final Tjaden shows
Hey everybody, I suppose I’ll go first. They are just some ideas, but they aren’t really completed.
Allen -
The issue of light and the conflation of light with sight seems oddly appropriate; two senses that are intimately attached and reliant on each other and similarly immaterial. Is there a desublimation of sight and light into linear emanations? Probably.
I think the title is perfect, and seems to encapsulate the strange dysfunctions of understanding that the pieces in the show are invested with. The title is misdirected preciseness; I’ll assume that everyone has seen Airplane! and understand the dead-serious context of the quote (I’m also assuming I got the quote correct). When “Surely…” turns into “…Shirley…” I actually think there is a name for this phonetic or displaced confusion, but in any case, the confusion becomes a sort of condemnation not only of the confused person, but also of the structure of signs and signifiers that led to the confusion. Pieces in the show, like the shadow of the chair constructed from glass or the various half melted objects (or are they sinking?) seem ellicit similar instances of this confusion. The shadow of the chair is where ‘light’ doesn’t function; this is translated into broken bulbs, non-functioning lights.
The show also somehow synthesizes some issues that Allen has been dealing with. Earlier in the semester we had talked about the divorce between some sense of Allen’s ‘personal’ space and a ‘serious’ or ‘productive’ mode of working. While the show doesn’t have the raunchy-ness of some of Allen’s drawings, it does contain a decidely non-serious curiosity underwriting it. Allen’s green doppelganger in the center of the gallery is the most blatant clue to this: the soft green man stares with ambivalent recognition at the manifestation of his shadow, while the man himself is Allen’s not-quite doppelganger. Other pieces like the black shad-map / sight-map boxes, or the green string cones make aware that these are not illustrations of a general mode of seeing, but specific to Allen (if only because of the height).
The issue that I find implicit in the title seems to capture the theme of the show. Perhaps a quest for something that, because of it’s narrow focus, winds up far of course but somehow still in the right place. Until I put a name on that confusion, I don’t know how else to apply it.
Nathan-
With Nathan’s show, I thought a lot about the magnification of self-referentiality, or the magnification and distortion of cultural referentiality. Here two mighty columns of cultural superiority; blown up somehow more than they already are; the Beach Boys and the Beatles. Their significance is captured now not on record or tape or cd, but some supersized cds (not quite vinyl, not quite laserdisc, not quite compact disc). I read it as a metahpor to their perhaps overblown fame; assuming there even were cd’s inside those paper cases, there isn’t a player in the world that support the physical media; it’s as if they’ve become too unique to function.
The copies of the the Ed Ruscha book “How to have fun with crackers” are awash with their own self-referentiality. Somehow, Ruscha stands out as the king of copying, more decisive and insidious in his implicit capitalization than warhol. This seems to be so because he; in what I hope is in accordance with JL Austen; does not simply repeat the phrase (as it would seem Warhol does), but the reiteration is more complex, subtle, and encapsulates a broad surplus of potential meanings. This is what the two supersized cd cases do, with two supersized cultural icons.
I’m not sure if the stack of copies of the Ed Ruscha book is supplementary material in some way or a piece itself (or a collection of ‘pieces,’ a la Gonzalez-Torres). I’m unfamiliar with this particular Ruscha book, but I’m assuming it is a direct copy. Also, the intermission loops does the opposite; here the ‘term’ is repeated instantly and ad nauseum, and its meaning and surrounding context (a film it’s intermissing) fades farther away with every second.
