|
|
Performance with two actors for the Storage Piece
I have to say that it is quite strange to add my own voice to the work which I am showing here today.
For some reason I think that it is somewhat legitimate to do so. Maybe because I think that this work is about a specific occasion. In a way this work would never have been realised without tonight's occasion.
Is the show an occasion? I think in this case, yes.
This piece consists of pieces of work which have been shown before. Without an occasion such as today, they might still have been shut up in a dark spooky storage unit.
So - we have here works, charged with prehistory, escaped from a place called 'storage' where they have hardly been able to cultivate their own context.
But actually the work has a context! Maybe it is not so obviously visible. Maybe it does not have a familiar or expected visibility. The hidden state of beings, 'a being in storage' is the case and matter we have today.
As an artist I am interested in a space which is often not 'visible' or 'visual' but nevertheless has a strong presence amongst us.
Here, we have one piece of art work. This consists of many different art pieces coming from Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Berlin, as well as from other places that couldn't accommodate the work any more.
The art pieces have been transported in the same way as normal goods and commodities are shipped and traded around the world. Sometimes, like a military troop transport, they have been airlifted in - they are just dropped off in a specific place at a pre-arranged time. All this circulation is about the system of value, actual profit and true victory.
Some of the works in this show you can still recognize even though they are hidden behind protective 'outfits' called 'packaging'.
We have here some pieces of furniture that are recognizable. I have worked many times with furniture in the past.
These interior household pieces have often been a handy tool for me to talk about a form of life because they represent a personal taste, a life style and social status.
I have worked with furniture ranging from high quality design objects to bulk rubbish. Also in here are DIY furniture pieces - like shelves.
Let's take one metal rack here, a product from a company called Otto Kind. They have developed an industrial module rack system. Quite nice I think.
You can assemble them together without any additional tools.
Still visually they look nice, and I believe they do not look pretentious at all. Super nice material, reasonable priced.
I used this metal rack system for the first time in a piece called 'What I'd love to have at home'. As the title suggests they were one of two items which I really need and wished I had at home - the thing was that the shelves I had at home just collapsed one day from having too much weight on them and they brought part of the wall down with them. I didn't know what to do.
So - by getting industrially manufactured shelves for this exhibition I just fulfilled my personal wish to have new shelves - but I got them through sponsorship - I didn't have to pay for them - as they were for this big exhibition I was in, in Frankfurt.
I would love to have had them at home but I didn't have them where I really needed them, but in a space where something else was required, an art space - an exhibition - where they were realized as so-called 'artistic expression'.
Ever since that show I have used these shelves for many other works because they became something pre-defined that was ready to be used. So I felt free to take these shelves as an 'ultimate art piece'.
One time they represented the idea of an 'art object', other times they represented a rationally thought through functional device and another time they were nothing but an extremely aesthetic object that just looked nice.
These shelves on display are the exact amount to rebuild two previous works of mine, one called 'air and water' and the other one called '..., where everything was painstakingly ordered at its place'.
Both these exhibitions where first shown in Frankfurt and then went on to travel to Cologne, then to Manhheim and final to Paris. They where eventually stored in a gallery in Berlin and now they have come here to London.
We also have plenty of objects here from Korea. They were all imported to create a piece called 'adopting proportion' which was shown in Amsterdam.
This work had to be made of things from Korea because the whole occasion was about introducing contemporary Korean art in the framework of a cultural exchange between two nations. But as I was now living in Europe, I did not have any piece to import from Korea. So the organizers of the exhibition allowed me to hire a personal shopper who took my list and bought everything for me in Korea.
There are even some early works of mine in here - so early that I have never included them in any catalogues, publications or previous exhibitions. I have some collages, some paintings and some photographs as well as some objects.
All of them are here now making up one piece and I feel that virtually all the previous pieces I have made make up this one piece. There are many missing works - works I just threw away and destroyed simply because I could not store them anywhere.
I felt embarrassed when I had to throw them away certainly not because of self-pride in having made them. The opposite really - because I had this feeling of how ridiculous it was to insist on and focus so much on the simple 'physical' realisation of each work. Still we stick so much to the fetish of the object and hope we feel something when we stand in front of it - we haven't got to stage to just trust the idea itself.
I guess you can compare it with something I once read about history. I read that history can only be history once it has been written down. Writing is history.
Whatever has not been written down has never had a place to exist as a part of history. This emphasis on the materialization of thoughts can be compared with the transfer of an artistic idea into something more concrete, graspable, a work of art.
The fetishised art object has been much criticized in the recent past - but still we all try hard to hold onto the physical art object as much as we can -as a thing of beauty or an investment - a commodity - and I guess I try to hold on to these objects no more or no less than others.
It's just that if there is any change in this attitude of object fetish then it is usually precipitated by the urgency of ones circumstances.
This work to-day stems from a situation where my lack of space and the offer of se occurred at the same time. I was certainly in a crisis as I was in a situation where I had no space what so ever for any of my belongings.
But crisis often initiates a situation where ones limits are challenged. This time was no different. The lack of space to store my work urged me to invent a storage space.
Now all my works have arrived from storage or from exhibitions that have just ended and are here now - where at least a solution has been found for my predicament.
The space where we arrive now is charged with potential where things can be contextualized while also transforming the gallery space literally into a storage space but in so doing the work is reintroduced as a commercial commodity shown in a gallery setting.
Ironically enough, for 'art' you can usually get everything sponsored, for 'art' you can bring things from far away and for 'art' you can have spaces for which you do not have any space at all.
Of course there are plenty of opposite cases - that you don't get anything for your art what so ever but I guess today I got a place to store my work and I have certainly got your attendance and attention because it has been something 'arty'.
Thank you.
|
|
