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The Fair Gallery > Frieze Art Fair

Project

REVERSIBILITY STAND B6 THE FAIR GALLERY, FRIEZE ART FAIR 2008

Curator: Pierre Bal-Blanc

Artists:

Michal Budny, Andrea Büttner, Rafal Bujnowski, Claire Hooper, David Lamelas, Benoit Maire, Deimantas Narkevicius, Dominique Petitgand, Pratchaya Phinthong, Pia Rönicke.

The Fair Gallery is a collaboration between four international galleries sharing the same "fair play" spirit and the will to introduce a new approach of communication between artists, galleries, curators and collectors into the existing fair system. Based on curatorial practice and critical reflection, the Fair Gallery's main activity is to represent participating galleries at art fairs in the form of an exhibition, each time proposed by a different curator. With its artistic choices and its specific program, the Fair Gallery will experiment the potential and the limits of a new format of galleries.

Galleries infos/ contacts :

gb agency, Paris, click here

Hollybush Gardens, London, click here

Jan Mot, Brussels, click here

Raster, Warsow, click here

The Fair Gallery

Stand B6

Frieze Ar Fair

Regent’s Park London NW1 4NR UK

info@thefairgallery.com

Thursday 16 October - Saturday 18 October 11am - 7pm

Sunday 19 October 11am - 6pm

Statement

Reversibility A tribute to Charles Baudelaire and Gustav Metzger (Working title) A Curatorial Project by Pierre Bal-Blanc The Fair Gallery Frieze Art Fair, London 2008

I wish to propose that artists connected to the four galleries affiliated with "The Fair Gallery" choose an individual work or several existing works together with me which has or have the characteristic of revealing the creative process by which it has or they have been made.

Following a discussion which I wish to undertake with each artist, and open to the four galleries, I intend to ask the authors of the selected works to choose an individual work or several works with me. The artists will agree that the particular work will be exhibited and then "de-create" (or disassembled) and left in place during the opening of the Frieze Art Fair or alternatively progressively disassembled during the fair's duration.

The artists will be free to choose the process and the time necessary for the work's return to its material state if this takes the form of an object. If the work is an idea or a concept, the artist must propose the means of effecting its return to the realm of common language.

In order to attest to the work's return to the physical or symbolic realm, the artists must agree to sign a disclaimer relinquishing their rights as author over the remains of the work or works.

Each artist remains the owner, along with the gallery, of the materials or any other remaining element and of any part that may be due to them in case of a sale. The galleries are free to sell these materials or elements as such. However, they must not alter the original stated price of the work or works in question.

The eventual buyer must accept, through a written contract, the sale of these materials or elements and can in no circumstances claim ownership of a work or works by any of the exhibiting artists. However, he or she is free to refer to their origin.

Curator's letter to invited artists

From : Pierre Bal-Blanc From : Pierre Bal-Blanc To : Michal Budny, Andrea Büttner, Rafal Bujnowski, Claire Hooper, David Lamelas, Benoit Maire, Deimantas Narkevicius, Dominique Petitgand, Pratchaya Phinthong, Pia Rönicke. 29 May 2008

The gb agency (Paris), the Jan Mot Gallery (Brussels), the Raster Gallery (Warsaw) and the Hollybush Gallery (London) have invited me to curate the upcoming edition of "The Fair Gallery," which will take place during the Frieze Art Fair in London in October 2008. I would like to invite your participation.

The principle of "The Fair Gallery" already presents itself as a statement in its own right and I would like first to outline its implications.

The Fair Gallery

"The Fair Gallery" is the creation of a "meta-gallery" formed through the association of several galleries and whose concrete existence is limited to the commercial context of international contemporary art fairs. As a consequence, this changes the nature of the space of the gallery stand. "The Fair Gallery" aims to create the conditions for a new type of space in breaking with the established relations of an art fair stand and its reference to an existing physical gallery space. In this way, "The Fair Gallery" defines its space as a physical and temporary medium which creates a novel relationship between art and the economic sector. In a certain sense, "The Fair Gallery" is the materialisation of a segment of virtual space in the economic exchange of art. This subsequently reverses the question that the relation to the dematerialization of these exchanges raises.

The international fair is a privileged setting for galleries. The art fair temporarily show-cases the identity, the role as actor, producer, and the position which characterizes the on-going work of its operators, even if the mediation of this activity remains within the confines of a list of artists and their works. "The Fair Gallery" aims to open a reflection on the subject at another level. The four galleries that make up the "Fair Gallery" shift the emphasis of their individual identities, connected with their respective locality, in order to reshape them, differently each time, at the center of the global art economy. This is not intended to question the importance of periodically bringing to light the activities galleries undertake, which is the opportunity to show-case the coherence or opportunism of the work galleries undertake in relation to the artists they exhibit. On the contrary, it underscores the responsibility they must assume concerning their role: for example, the necessity of continually renewing the debates which artists are confronted with concerning the economic realm of art. Art fair organizers have themselves appropriated the organization of these debates, i.e. in their own interests, with the intention of extending their field of action, particularly to all that is non-commmerical (non-profit organizations, artists outside the market) in order to make a profit. In response to this situation, each presentation of "The Fair Gallery" is organized on the basis of an invitation extended to a curator who remains independent of the commerical interests of the galleries involved. Each curator is invited to propose a project based on the list of artists from each gallery.

Commercial Language and Institutional Language

An art fair is by definition a place of exchange and commerce, a place of transaction that brings together producers and consumers. It is the representation of an economic system founded on offer and demand, capital, investment, speculation and surplus value. Within the context of the art market, an art fair differs from other fairs in the content of its transactions. To my knowledge, no other fair show-cases the exchange of products and services in revealing in such a subtle way so many relations and contradictions which accompany the marketing that in effect forms the basis of a commercial fair. In fact, no other fair manages to reveal so extensively the arbitrary nature of money - as nothing more than a phantasm that responds to another phantasm.

It is for this reason that the fair, with its commercial language, finds itself in competition with the biennial and its institutional language. The pertinence of the relations that the art fair establishes between art and its distribution, via commercial exchange, is often as authentic as the relations that institutions attempt to elaborate between art and the transmission of knowledge. It is no less true that the fair represents, in a surprising way, the contemporary context of international artistic exchange.

An Anarchy of Impulses

To paraphrase at length Pierre Klossovski (rather than both Freud and Marx) and despite the affirmation of the cultural industry which believes otherwise:

There is no analogy between the act of manufacturing a product and the act of producing a simulacrum (a work of art). There is no sign by which the commodity world can compensate for the reversal of the anarchic impulses that constitute us in the act of making, as this activity itself (our activity or inactivity as economic s ubjects) already presents itself as compensation, and as such cannot divert these impulses for the sole profit of the cycle of consumption.

In the production of art, the anarchic impulses that animate us find their phantom expression in the production of consumer goods that deny any form of anarchic expression. In the case of the commodity, the impulses act under the guise of utility in which anarchic impulses have no outlet. In so doing, the principle of our economy is driven to an excess of production, which in turn demands an excess of consumption: producing expendable objects and conditioning the consumer to lose all notion of a durable object, replacing the latter with a conglomeration of expanded needs in the service of economic profit alone.

This initial description might today appear overly Manichaean. However, it is much more complicated. Nevertheless, I would like to continue my argument in this direction as it will allow me to give an overview in order to determine the necessary subtleties.

Only the simulacra of art are supposed to take account of the liberation of impulsive urgency, and as simulators, the products of art cannot be equated to objects of use or commodities. But if the simulacra of art reveal the truth of impulsive urgency and if through the ingenuity of the artist alone they become the implements of affects, is it by chance alone that objects of use (mechanical devices and commodities) are also simulacra?

The machine or the commodity is by nature the farthest removed from the simulacra of art, in that it dictates a rigorously restrained use in the name of efficiency. It is, as a result of this very reduction to a specific use, a simulacrum; but a simulacrum of non-simulation, or to put it another way, a mystification.

If art as a simulacrum is an implement of passions, it is necessary that its simulation be, at the same time, an effective operation; if it wasn't a simulated simulacrum it would lack effect, which consists precisely in being both constantly reversible in its operation and as extendible and variable in its use as the passion of life itself.

To defer sensual pleasure, means counting on the future, a future guaranteed by producing objects of use. However, impulses do not have external limits, and sensual pleasure as such aspires to being as immediate as it is latent and unpredictable. Art as an implement for the deployment of passions offers an alternative use, which takes shape through a rationally established operation that follows anarchic impulses.

The Generalization of Applied Arts

Let us take into account the argument that art escapes being reduced to application, on the one hand, and that we are in the realm of applied arts, on the other. There would be an art applied to the market in the private realm and an art applied to politics in the public sphere. The money invested would have no other objective than the production of surplus value for the first sphere and gaining public approval for the second. Art's use-value would be thus aligned with those who are obsessed with order. If this argument appears oversimplified, it is however not far removed from the general tendency which looms at a global scale in our societies.

Use

This oversimplified description nevertheless has the merit of demonstrating that use cannot be limited to the preserve of industry and the political sphere, but must be subject to a constant reappropriation within the realm of art. For the application, or use, with which the market or the institution claims to put art is not the only way we can understand art's meaning. Reducing the destiny of art in this way is a means of imposing one's point of view and regressing to the stage where "the one who pays is the one who decides."

If, to follow Pierre Klossowski (and many others after him), one accepts that the usable object is a simulacrum and that the commodity is a mystification, we can thus see that the industrial system has created a cycle that leads us to confuse our desires with the latter's continual misappropriation. Its goal is to limit us to an incessant movement of excessive production and consumption, which the financial system and the political realm phantasmatically imposes on us, in that it is founded on an economy of simulacra, as a hegemonic vision of reality.

We can thus rightfully expect art to shed light on all the forms that this phenomena can currently take, in a time when products give way to services and capitalism generates the most advanced forms of dematerialisation. We can also expect from artists a form of action that offers a use-value at the heart of the creative act itself, there where others see nothing more than a step in the process of s ubservience to surplus value and the profit of visitor attendance. Just as we can expect an exhibition value from curators which is not limited to a mere exchangevalue that obfuscates the works exhibited in the name of a spectacle of the institution.

Perverse Reason

For the exhibition project "La monnaie vivante" (Living Currency), I gave a number of examples of artists' responses to the questions raised in the previous paragraph. With reference to texts by Klossowski, I also described the strategies these artists employ. It appears to me that they respond to the constraints of the industrial sphere through a strategy of perversion - in transgressing the logically structured language of norms and institutions. Artists react in this way, to my mind, not in order to criticize (private or public) institutions, but in order to demonstrate that institutions assure the triumph of perversion by imposing a hierarchy on creative impulses. Two forms of perversion can thus be distinguished: a perversion within institutions, which deny its existence and pass it off as a virtue, and one that is appropriate to art, which recognizes its origins and assumes all the risks and consequences.

Contingency

Before concluding, I think it is interesting to quote the argument of a young French philosopher, Quentin Meillassoux, who gives an interesting perspective on what I have been developing here: It is a question of making contingency the absolute property of being, both as a law and a thing, and which a redefined reason, a reason emancipated from the principle of reason, would have the responsibility to conceive and describe. This gives rise to the idea of an inverted - as opposed to an overthrown - Platonism; a Platonism that does not maintain that thinking must liberate itself from the fascination with an ever changing phenomena in order to accede to the immutability of the idea, but maintains that thinking must liberate itself from the fascination with the phenomenal creationism of laws in order to accede to a purely intelligible chaos capable of destroying and producing, without reason, things as much as laws.

The Price to Pay

Finally, to return to the reason for my reference to Pierre Klossowski, rather than Marx and Freud, I have chosen Klossowski in order to avoid reducing my argument to an obsolete ideological debate. But this choice is above all motivated by the fact that having staked his description of "the economy of impulses" by following Sade and Fourrier rather than Marx and Freud, Klossowski reveals to all that beyond the political nothing in the flux of impulsive life appears truly gratuitous, that voluptuous emotion in its very becoming is in no way gratuitous, but implies appreciation, value and excess - in other words, there is a price to pay. In conclusion, nothing is more opposed to pleasure than gratuity.

The length of this introduction in effect indicates that the project that I wish to invite you to participate in has already begun. My intentions are numerous but the first consists of engaging in a dialogue with you on the basis of the points that I have outlined in the attached proposal, the content of which should not be considered definitive.

To be clear, it is obvious that I wish those who accept the general ideas to remain as close to the outline as possible. However, I have deliberately limited the details in order for the project to remain open so that it can be transformed according to the responses it receives. The title of the project remains a working title which can be changed if necessary.

My proposal is based on a process the results of which cannot be ascertained in advance and this is what I wish to share with you, along with the other artists and the galleries, and, of course, with the public of the Frieze Art Fair.

I have discussed a number of points that are in the proposal in my introduction. I would be very pleased to continue to discuss them with you and, on the basis of your response, in particular the questions that I have not broached here, such as the origin of the project, the artistic references that they elicit, my role as curator and obviously the reasons for choosing to invite you to participate.

I hope that each artist will take the time to respond in writing or to raise questions, but will avoid the informality of a chat which is often too elusive. If, on the other hand, you would prefer to discuss the project directly with me, I would be happy to arrange a meeting.

Kind regards,

Pierre Bal-Blanc

Iconography / Sources for the project

View of the destruction of David Lamelas piece " projection (L'effet écran)" 1967-2004.

Courtesy CAC Brétigny, Photo Credit: Clitous Bramble

After 3 years of use by the CAC Brétigny, the authorities have asked for the de assembled of the work without the agreement of the artist and the curator.

DAVID LAMELAS

Projection - L'effet écran - (Projection - The Screen Effect)

Projection has first been shown at the Institute Torcuator Di Tella, Bueons Aires, in 1967. Two projectors are set back to back in the exhibition room. The first one is projecting a picture on a wall, the other one diffuse light in an open space where it disappears. For his solo show at CAC Brétigny in 2004, David Lamelas built a corridor that will stay permanently. When the exhibition is over, the concrete parallelepiped turned into a new entry for the art centre.