T.M.A. 2

Eight pieces of work to start an art collection. This is a daunting but thoroughly enjoyable prospect and one which I have taken quite a while over. On January 21st 2008 the first of many documents trying to understand the Chocolate Box exhibition will be published. This was a show of works from the Tate Collection that Hayley Dixon and I were unable to obtain. We selected our favourite works (whatever that means) and aspired to show these at MDX. My eight pieces of work selected here are not from the Tate and all address a theme or process which I enjoy greatly, that of the interior world.

Pieces:

Vito Acconci READ THIS WORD
John Baldessari SINGS SOL LEWITT
Jonathan Monk COVER VERSION (Signed)
Fischli and Weiss SUDDENLY THIS OVERVIEW (1981/2006)
Ron Mueck UNTITLED (MAN IN BLANKETS)
Alex Hartley PAVILION
Dan Flavin UNTITLED (TO JAN AND RON GREENBERG)
James Turrell DEER SHELTER (At YSP)



Vito Acconci READ THIS WORD
http://www.ubu.com/concept/acconci_read.html

Although this is not the most notable piece of Acconci’s I find myself drawn to it because bridges the gap between image and time based media. When one participates in the work, one cannot escape from ones own viewing of it. One becomes aware of ones own looking and therefore places this piece in a highly philosophical position, some ecstasy, an out of body experience, which is key to the overall collection.
The viewer of the collection is highly important to the work included because of the strong sense of plurality throughout the works. Not the participator’s reading of the work, but the participator of the work. The work in this collect should hopefully set a grounding for work that is outside of a perceived perspective.
Actually hanging this piece may well be a problem. I have only ever encountered the work on the internet, a place where one is able to take as much time on looking at an object as one likes. In a gallery I often feel pressured into looking, and will find myself looking back at myself seeing. I therefore think that this work should some how be readily made into a postcard, available for sale.



John Baldessari SINGS SOL LEWITT 1972
http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari.html

Although LeWitt’s work first came to my attention through an interest in sculpture, it is his writing and practice of conceptual art that provides one with the greatest insight into formalised conceptualism. Baldessari here both trivialises and exalts LeWitt’s famous statements on conceptual art and provides us with a work that says no more that LeWitt’s original statements but changes the use and context and therefore the understanding that one can gleam from them.
This falls into the ‘interior worlds’ theme because the whole piece is in reference to something that exists as a basis or initial standpoint from which to make art. Of course, LeWitt’s writing was not designed to be applied in such a manner and so Baldessari’s singing is a bit hesitant and broken (he is not a professional singing and could not really use this object as the kind of pop songs it is mimicking).
Within the collect this piece works as a starting point. It addresses function and use but in a subverted manner placing itself firmly as a post-modern object. It being a video piece posses the question of exhibition, a question which is solved almost immediately with the subject matter and execution. Baldessari obviously has a great amount of respect for this writing and makes it into an accessible and ‘lowest-common-denominator’ format. A small screen (no more than 17 inch) should be used.



Jonathan Monk COVER VERSION 2004
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbH83aE-ikLLYW_fA3mJ7OaKYeNmnlRuFg6OFxeps331uWtukacW2VOSZyvdkVMgEUsRaRDLVToX8SmK90sNRaKwypo8BkKm2mVQO_v4hDynD-pAucyJ4C_S0qwDHSmBJSgg7V2zQIMs/s1600-h/9781870699747_01.jpg

An easily purchasable book but a valuable object nonetheless. Monk, like Baldessari, treats the work of LeWitt, along with Ruscha and Weiner, with love and care. Here we have collection of front covers of books owned by Monk. All the books happen to be from the artistic careers of the aforementioned gentlemen. I have chosen two works that blatantly reference LeWitt’s work because it is often the reaction to an object or practise that is more interesting that the practise itself.
These ‘secondary objects’ are what interest me in post war art; not just that the subject of a work can be something other than any from depiction, but the subject can be existing pieces of art.
The book (here shown in somebody’s bike) was published by the brilliant BookWorks, a publishing company who work with artists to create some of the nicest objects to have and to hold. The Artist Book may well be seen as a passing vogue, but to my mind it marks an important watershed in objecthood. To have this book in my collection asks questions of long held artistic values such as; the original, ownership, the limited edition and how art is consumed outside of the white cube of the gallery space.



Fischli and Weiss SUDDENLY THIS OVERVIEW (1981/2006) 2006
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/fischliandweiss/rooms/room3.shtm

This piece may lure one into thinking it is about some sort of analysis of context, that one may be able to see a set of works summing up at least something. This is not what the piece does at all. Disparate scenes and characters are depicted in this many objected piece. The apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey sit alongside random mice and tidal waves. This object is about, if anything, the vast and unknowable nature of every.
Everything in this work is made is a basic form (one of the four elements) clay, unfired. But one gains from the work that ‘everything’ isn’t as easy as that. Some of the clay objects seem to be missing a narrative, or a point. The ‘overview’ is not of something we, as a culture, understand, we may recognise some elements of it, but it is too much wrapped up in itself for us, purely as a viewer, to understand it fully.
This puts all comes to the work on an equal footing. There is no presumed knowledge and if one finds several highbrow jokes, there will be an equal number of lowbrow ones aswell.



Ron Mueck UNTITLED (MAN IN BLANKETS) 2000
http://www.jamescohan.com/artists/ron-mueck/

Another seemingly inaccessible work, but this time through its closeness to ‘the real’. The work of Ron Mueck is usually placed within the category of ‘Hyper Realism’, which I feel is a mislabelling. The works are close to reality but differ from it greatly placing the viewer in another awkward position.
This spersific piece is a brilliant example of a work existing by and for itself. It may reference the human form, but in a way that one is not used to understanding it; a tiny man wrapped in blankets. One’s mind might leap to Moses or Christ but these two are both temporal myths prone to change and fade as most memes do. This man is man, one need only be human to empathise with the figurative nature of this work. but through presumptions we have about the human form, scale and the like, this object exists somewhere between the real and the imagined, in the uncanny.
Plurality, therefore, is important to this work and all the pieces in the collection; the viewer brings a meaning to the work, or merely brings themselves.



Alex Hartley PAVILION 2000
http://www.sculpture.org.uk/image/000000100157/1/

In a similar vein to the Mueck piece I have chosen to select Pavilion by Alex Hartley. The images on the façades of the sculpture depict an interior, but one which is wholly inaccessible. After a few moments contemplation ones realises that all the information that one may every conceive to get from the object is right there in front of you. The ‘room’ is known completely to use, but it is not what we expect. The lines are not in focus and even stepping nearer does not give us any (excuse the pun) insight.
The viewer as an outsider to the work is a greatly important idea. This stems from my own personal interest in Science Fiction. Within classic Sci-Fi a new object will come into existence, be this through man’s endeavour, an encounter with another consciousness or some new, or old, form of nature. The characters within Sci-Fi must react to these new experience and try and apply morals that they may have, or learn new ones, better adapted to the strange new world in which they find themselves.
The image of a room is nothing new, but this object is. One must reassess ones form of looking; how one looks, why one looks, to better appreciate this object.



Dan Flavin UNTITLED (TO JAN AND RON GREENBERG) 1972
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/pictures/image/0,8543,-11505379680,00.html

Placement of the viewer comes into play yet again with this Flavin piece.
Set up as a wall of light one becomes aware of their own presence in the room. Unlike Untitled (Monument to V. Tatlin) this work drifts way from being an object which one looks in at, to being an one where you must look around. Where as one might perceive Pavilion to be three sides of a cube with a right angle pointing at you, this is the opposite, with the corner pointing out and away, a space in which we may place our heads.
Hopefully the collects casts the viewer as an outsider., someone who is being told things or experiencing them from a very personal stand point. I have aspired to choose works that are enclosed within interior systems but are by no means finite. The Baldessari and the Monk pieces may hopefully inspire people to take an active interest in something that is specifically not the object. The Mueck and the Hartley contain images that are known to us but have have been altered, placing them in the field of the uncanny. The Flavin, F & W and Acconci pieces address ‘interiors’ and the viewer, the viewer in the work, the viewer trying to know the work and the viewer becoming conscious of their own viewing.



James Turrell DEER SHELTER (At YSP) 2006
http://martingoodman.com/soyouwanttobeawriter/uploaded_images/James-Tyrrell-701654.jpg

And now to religion. It is easy to perceive that the acquisition of objects is now the key goal in people lives, with the artistic object being some sort of sacred relic, a strange and mystical thing that may hold obscure wonders that are inaccessible to the common man.
This is something I believe not to the true. Art objects are not something unknowable, they are valuable, but not necessarily precious, works of nature. I enjoy the theory of evolution because of its simplicity and because it is something going on around me but something I cannot see. Evolution has produced this world in which we live. My writing this is a product (but a changing one) of evolution; cars, trains, thumbs, bushes, radiators, all these are part and parcel of a process we are involved in.
There are times in the process when the mind (another product of evolution) soars, and things as of yet unimagined come before ones eyes.
Deer Shelter at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park is one of these things. The sky brought down to picture-plane for our examination. This work is not a window, it is constructed in a way that the sky seems not to be far and unattainable, but right next to the ceiling. This is of course where the sky is anyway, we just don’t think like that, yet.


R B Grange