Anodyne
Sunday, June 17, 2007
 

Barry Le Va, Continuous and Related Activities; Discontinued by the Act of Dropping (1967/90). Felt and glass, 26' x 20'




Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1928


Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books), 1997

The obligation not only to make work, but to create a context for it. Doesn't the work create its own context? Not in my experience. The work generates indifference, polite bafflement, head-scratching, total silence. And these are just my responses to the estranging and uncomfortable experience of reviewing my own "production." So, for the record: #12 (below) vis-a-vis Brancusi's Bird in Space (above), vis-a-vis pricing books donated by someone in the neighborhood and putting them up for sale. Consumer surplus. Marx's Capital beside Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis beside Mankiw's Principles of Microeconomics beside Bois and Krauss' Formless on my bookshelf. The four year part time post-graduate certificate program I just enrolled in (not art history, not an MFA, MBA, or security analysis). Smithson's Non-Sites, their implicit critique of the frame of the gallery as a container of experience. Misunderstandings. Trash stratum. Sitting on my parents' Bowen Island dock, ligia scurrying round below, watching the fifteen and a half foot tide rise and rise, seawater brown with spring run-off. Stuff bumping along the shore: bottles, styrofoam, a soggy ball cap. Out on Deep Bay, a white swan goes from boat to boat in the last light, mooching handouts. On the far side of the bay, Dinghy Guy grounds out on the narrow strip that remains of the sand beach. His kitten bails out of the boat in a blur of grey fur, disappears among the logs jackstrawed along the high tide line, chases ducks.
- posted by cjb @ 9:26 AM


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