RECORDS PLAYED BACKWARDS
Curated by Daniel Baumann
Seth Price's texts on music and production technologies are scientific
and imitate scientific language, they are parodies and reproduce the language
of parody, they are journalistic and use its rhetoric, and maybe, they
are poetry. Michael S. Riedel uses the space that inescapably opens through
transcription and re-staging (when filmed films are projected, recorded
lectures are repeated, "clubbed clubs" are opened, exhibited
exhibitions are installed, performed performances are presented). Céline
Duval orders private photographs according to arbitrary formal decisions
and publishes them as an ongoing one-page magazine. Anne Collier's clinical,
deadpan photographs draw on the legacy of West Coast Conceptual and Minimalist
art, which she inflects with her own particular neuroses (according to
the Whitney Biennial homepage). Matias Faldbakken turns a small empty
space on a page of a journal into a big wallpaper, a gesture that is as
loaded as ridiculous, but the wallpaper looks perfectly good. John Armleder
has produced Furniture Sculptures since 1980 (and filmed his friend walking
backwards into movie theaters as if the film runs the wrong way). Imperio
is the Mexican remake of Andy Warhol's film Empire by Reena Spaulings,
Bernadette Corporation, and Claire Fontaine, a collective work of the
three fictitious women artist’s collectives. Film Montages (for
Peter Roehr) by William E. Jones takes simple repetition as its first
principle and arranges fragments of gay porn films into a musical composition.
The re-use of existing material is, naturally, as old as everything, although
that's not what this show is about; it's about dissolution, stuttering
and the space that opens up when a language, a gesture, a picture, a film
is duplicated to produce a terrain where sense becomes a wet soap, when
transcriptions and repetitions create gaps and ruins that become places
for thwarted expectations, elegant encounters and new forms of display,
distribution and misunderstanding.
Including a letter by Adolf Wölfli, public art works by Wade Guyton
and Justin Beal and new publications by Seth Price and Michael Riedel.
John Armleder / Justin Beal / Anne Collier / Céline Duval / Matias
Faldbakken / Wade Guyton / William E. Jones / Seth Price / Reena Spaulings/Bernadette
Corporation/Claire Fontaine / Michael Riedel /
Adolf Wölfli
