STRUGGLE, MISSION, TASK
On the last weekend of the August 2011 session of the European Graduate School, I mounted an exhibition of drawings executed during the course in my beautiful room at the Hotel Metropol in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. The "opening" was held in two parts - one between classes in the afternoon, and one after classes and the evening lecture. By the end of the "season," as EGS Director Wolfgang Schirmacher is fond of calling the course, most of the students are exhausted by the intensity of the programming and extracurriculars, like the brutal one-day Venice Biennale "workshop," consisting of two all-night bus rides from Saas-Fee to and from Venice, with a day of art touring sandwiched between. Still, about two dozen of my peers visited "STRUGGLE, MISSION, TASK" that Saturday. It was really fun. The installation was inspired by my recent participation in one of the art fairs in New York (The Dependent), with Silvershed, but also by a series of presentations I made to NY dealers and artsies around 2001, at the Hyatt Grand. I used to visit NYC with portable art and media, and stage little shows for contacts there. It was old school stuff, in the vein of the contemporary hotel shows that evolved into the "art fair" model. Hotel environments have a special quality. In 2004 or -5 I proposed a show/residency at a boutique hotel on South Congress (Austin, TX) during the production for "A Prayer for Clean Water," which didn't manifest, but the hotel went on to launch its own program along those lines. One artist a few years ago used a Creative Capital grant to do an extensive hotel-narrative project, very close in construct to the one I proposed for the Austin hotel, where I stayed a few times before-during-and-after the APFCW production. There's the interstitial quality. The apparition of oneself one experiences when situated in a kind of fictional domesticity, an artificial home, one with a maid and usually some pretense or aspiration to pre-designed sensations. Nowadays, there's media included, via the TV and web-connection. ... The 100 drawings I exhibited were presented in a variety of formats. Some were left in their sketchbooks. Others, made on specialty papers with degrees of opacity or translucency, were either layered flat, mounted on the television monitor, a very spiffy lamp, the mirrors by the door and in the bathroom, and one was hung on the bottle opener provided by Metropol, which was attached to the coat rack. One drawing was placed in a closet-armoire. Another set in the shaped acrylic stand that had held the tourist information. The drawings evolved in the sequence from notations on lectures - Badiou, Agamben and Ronell's were especially productive, and some shorthand innovations appear in the ones composed during these sessions, either as texts or symbols - to design sketches for 3D sculpture, with oblique compositional trajectories in other directions peppering the sequence. The wovenforms of 2004-5 were strongly represented and reconsidered, but in my imagination they no longer existed as 4d spatial volumetric wireframes, but as actual objects. The CAA Conference panel I attended earlier this year, on recent innovations in the digitally-assisted fabrication of complex algorithmic or matrixial shapes had a lot to do with my visualizations, I think. Two transparencies from the "Heartless01" series I discovered in a folder I'd brought with me to Saas-Fee added some nice texture. One (Artist Eye) was displayed on a wall using a clip on a nail, the other on the lamp (Dark-wing'd Angel). On the desktop I presented the animations and video reel from "A New Dimension," on a loop. I used a thin roll of white gaffer's tape I brought with me for installation to hang the work. It really did the trick and caused no damage to the under-surfaces or artwork. The generic prints that usually adorned the room were dismounted and stored in the closet. Early Sunday morning (@1:30AM), after the last of the guests had left, I de-installed "STRUGGLE, MISSION, TASK" and put my room back in order. It was as if the show had never happened. The Evite for the exhibition shows a design fiction, depicting an acrylic-mounted print of the Disney Matterhorn standing in a mound of Bushwick snow, after the Great Blizzard of 2010-11. What a year... The Zed in the Jewelly Rouger eye is homage to Badiou's Void/OMEGA proofs on finitude and infinity sets.
The photoset at AFH Flickr is HERE. The expo title comes from a quote of Avital Ronell, from her EGS lectures. The photos were shot with my Blackberry phone-cam. I'll add Photoshop-enhanced versions later today.
