By Accident Booklet Cover page
Curated by Komplot : http://www.kmplt.be/
14th March - 4th April 2009
Opening 14th of March 7pm with performances
Exhibition from 3 to 8pm, from Wednesday to Saturday and by appointment
le commissariat, 13 rue Ternaux. Paris.
"We cannot produce accidents to order" (William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, 'The Third Mind', 1978).
‘By Accident', historical survey, “Concept, text &
performance” by Douglas Park (with other input from Matthew Burbidge,
Jean-Philippe Convert, David Evrard & David Garchey), presented by Komplot,
Le Commissariat, Paris, 2009
Performance of Jean-Philippe
Convert and Douglas Park after a text of Douglas Park
The following attempts to
introduce, describe and explain every exponent and example coming to mind and
recommended of a seemingly overlooked but nonetheless worthy idiom or genre
identified. This cultural area being fate striking work at any stage of
production, exposure or whenever, only for drastically affected outcome to be
kept by the authors, deliberately addressed and appearing as part of their
output –as well as actually generating other work. Existing, original,
intentional and self-conscious meaning, expectations and plans can change
beyond recognition, actually become further added to –or even lead to entirely
new possibilities opening up.
Questions asked encourage and provoke playing
with and defiance of proscribed constructs as to whether any process, product,
experience or situation is ever predictable, fixed, definitive or controlled in
ongoing and inconclusive reality –and also the feasibility of choice and
freedom within any conditions.
Such circumstances include
(both foreseeable and unexpected): accidents, complications and mistakes;
personal setbacks; interpersonal, political, legal, media and public etc
adversity and backlash; grievances and disputes; resource and facility
shortages; technical hitches; conservation, storage and transit issues; side
effects, spinoffs, unfinished business and afterlife; changes of mind;
hindsight, improvements, updates, amendments and retraced steps later
etc. Still more factors are flexibility, opportunism and
capitalisation.
Without detracting from anything, consideration,
definition and selection policy struggled with overlap and similarity with
other (equally relevant) tendencies and instances not brought about or operating
in the same way. These include: useage of other’s work; “challenges”
(attempting to influence other’s decisions); works engaged with important and
serious episodes, phases and circumstances in the artist’s own life; the
reappearance of imagery from and of other works; retrospectives, surveys and
monographs as work; archival and preparatory / working material as work;
involvement of other’s input in production; solicited and curated contributions
submitted to works and projects akin to collections, archives, publications,
programs and exhibitions.
Further addressed is explosion of clichés and constructs expecting
specialness and supremacy to cultural practice, lifestyle and products –against
the inescapable reality of external determining factors occupied; nothing is
immune or exempt to social, political, cultural and economic forces or
scientific and natural laws. Much that’s included becomes real-life
satire on the irrationality and superstition of anecdote, biography, legend,
mythology and romanticism (most notably: Wassily Kandinsky’s famous
“revelation” about the light filtering through tree leaves and branches,
passing on further through his window onto some blank canvas or unfinished
work-in-progress –supposedly the “inspiration” behind Kandinsky and other’s
early abstraction). Between the critical and creative approach, crossover
arises with idea that great scientific and technological discovery and
invention come out of mistakes or carelessness.
While belonging
more to the (ho, ho, ho) homage (of visual and lingual puns on attributes of
major figures and works etc), certain artists and work falling outside this
category deserve a mention for addressing issues at stake.
During the
rise of the conceptual-era, the Belgian autodidact satirist and social
commentator, Jacques Charlier identified ideological and ethical contradictory
flaws and downright hypocrisy behind-the-scenes of these supposed radicals and
manqué revolutionaries. As well as other works parodying his
contemporaries, Charlier photographed workmen struggling with the strain of
carrying Daniel Buren’s rolls of striped wallpaper and textiles, Andre Cadere’s
clashes and arguments with ordinary gallery and museum personnel about if or
where he could place his “barre de bois-ronde”, also capturing the visitors and
behaviour at vernissages and other occasions. Additionally, Charlier drew
deadpan cartoons and comic strips, including visual and written impressions of
what each major male artist’s penis might look like, specific attacks on Buren
and Cadere in particular –and even observing the procedures and speakers at a
conference. Around the same time, the U.K artist Tony Rickaby, as part of
his concerns with class values, wrote and published his bookwork, An Unknown
Art History (Art Net, London 1975) and Six Unknown Yet Influential Artists of
the 1960’s in General Schmuck periodical (edited by Felipe Ehrenberg and David
Mayor, Cullompton, 1975). Both of which are series of short fictional
stories about well-known 20th century modern “master” artists crossing paths
with some ordinary member of the public during everyday life –with coincidental
similarity to their work. More recently, the U.K contemporary artist,
musician and educator, Bob & Roberta Smith produces his signboards telling
stories which mix and match the people and events of art and cultural
history.
© Douglas Park, 2009
FRAGMENTS from an INTRO by Douglas Park (© 2009)
“... Nothing is immune or exempt to social, political, cultural and
economic forces or scientific and natural laws. Much that’s included
becomes real-life satire on the irrationality and superstition of anecdote,
biography, legend, mythology and romanticism...”
“Between the critical and creative approach, crossover arises with idea
that great scientific and technological discovery and invention come out of
mistakes or carelessness. “
“... Fate striking work at any stage of production, exposure or whenever,
only for drastically affected outcome to be kept by the authors, deliberately
addressed and appearing as part of their output –as well as actually generating
other work... such circumstances include (both foreseeable and unexpected):
accidents, complications and mistakes; personal setbacks; interpersonal,
political, legal, media and public etc adversity and backlash; grievances and
disputes; resource and facility shortages; technical hitches; conservation,
storage and transit issues; side effects, spinoffs, unfinished business and
afterlife; changes of mind; hindsight, improvements, updates, amendments and
retraced steps later...”
LE COMMISSARIAT, Paris
For this exhibition, Le Commissariat, a Parisian curatorial group, invited Komplot, a Belgian curatorial group, to produce a show; Komplot invited London-based writer Douglas Park, who compiled an archive of relatively recent art-historical accidents, complications, and mistakes. The show’s theoretical key is a quote from Burroughs and Gysin’s now very fashionable The Third Mind (1978): “We cannot produce accidents to order.” In the exhibition’s press materials, Park cites Mel Bochner’s 1966 exhibition at the School of Visual Arts, “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art,” as a specific, even archetypal example of such an accident.
That exhibition had originally been designed in a conventional fashion (prints framed and hung on the walls), but it was only because the school found it too expensive that Bochner was “forced” to adopt his famous exhibition strategy, in which sketches, invoices, calculations, and sundry ephemera and preparatory materials by many contributors were collated in four-ring binders, placed on pedestals, and made available for perusal. Park adopts a related casual approach. The core of the exhibition is the archive, which is compiled in a fifty-page booklet, with each entry discussed by Park in English and French, accompanied by David Evrard’s (seemingly unrelated) visuals. Copies are available, and there are chairs for sitting and perusing. On one wall, there is an orderly, legible slide show of many of the archived images and events, and on the other, there is a video of a drunken discussion—about the archive—with Park in a bar. The footage is grainy and dark, so that mostly what one sees are the French subtitles (which are not always accurate). There is a blustering and slightly helpless quality in Park’s voice and in the exhibition, but this lends the show a grimy authenticity and is indicative of something legitimately underground.
David Lewis
via http://www.myspace.com/douglas_park/blog
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