Opening
#collaboration #exhibition #installation #participatory #performance #public #site-specific #text / year: 2011 / collaborators: FICTILIS / with: Emerald City Improv / materials: placards, charcoal on sheetrock, white paint, snacks & refreshments

FICTILIS-Opening-main-image

[NOTE: Collaboration with FICTILIS] “Opening” was an installation/performance which featured everything that goes along with a typical art opening – gallery setting with snacks and wine, visitors, placards with titles and artist info, etc. – everything, that is, except for the actual ‘art’. The piece was staged in a new gallery the night of Seattle’s artwalk, and to achieve verisimilitude, we enlisted the help of local improv group Emerald City Improv, whose members came and enacted the roles of Artist, Dealer, Photographer, Writer, Celebrity, Scenester, etc. The installation playfully referenced the exclusivity of the art world, with the notion that there are things only some people can “see”, the endangerment of local arts funding, the avant garde’s obsession with its own destruction or disappearance, and our own anxiety about producing displayable/consumable art objects. Near the front door, on the way in and out of the gallery, visitors encountered the following quotations:

He who never realizes the difficulty of art never does anything worthwhile; he who realizes it too soon never does anything at all.  – Chardin, 1765

At a certain level, we have yet to experience the death of the avant-garde, to imagine what it might be like if the avant-garde really did cease to exist. But if that compulsive repetition by means of which the avant-garde keeps reproducing itself under different names is, as we shall see, its primary form of death, even so, one might still imagine a second death, the death of this repetition itself. To speak of the afterlife of the avant-garde will not be to imagine the next style, manifesto, movement, or postmodern pretense of superceding avant-garde repetitions. The afterlife of the avant-garde will be the first confrontation with the silence of death and will produce precisely nothing.  – Paul Mann, 1999



Opening
year: 2011
collaborators: FICTILIS
with: Emerald City Improv
materials: placards, charcoal on sheetrock, white paint, snacks & refreshments

#collaboration #exhibition #installation #participatory #performance #public #site-specific #text
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