Readers' Reader by a constructed world

Table of Contents: Event Explaining contemporary art with live eels 14 June 2008 Introduction List of speakers Speakers biographies (incomplete) Drawing from the notes of Sigmund Freud Jean Charles Zêbo Architecture for eels Guadaloupe Echevarria / Madame Bim All Tomorrow’s Partys Olivier Bardin Celles qui s’exposent te ressemblent François Bresson drawing Veronica Kent & Sean Peoples / Superflou The Telepathy Project Sébastien Pluot Birds and cats to eels François Bresson drawing François Piron To blow into eels ears, if they have some: angry thoughts borrowed from David Hammons (not in the right order) Superflou Novocaine For The Soul, The Eels Lili Reynaud Dewar reading Claus Oldenberg Volunteer from the audience Fabien Vallos La criée (not documented here) Geoff Lowe from Bruno Latour Jeanne Quéillard Anguilles chéries, mes amours Lydie Vignau reading Michel de Certeau Romaric Favre Un océan pour les anguilles: hommage à Lautrámont Jacques Donguy/Yann Chateigné Robert Filliou Marie Legròs Stéphan Mallet Reader text and image contributions Huang Xiaopeng, Guangzhou from Chalotte Moorman and the New York Avant Garde, Fred Stern 1980 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiEJdOlgcDE Simon Barney, Sydney Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1965-67/1970), Bruce Nauman La Dentellière baptisée par Dali et Gala à Cap Creus, en 1957 Vincent Romagny, Paris Justin Clemens, Melbourne, Explaining contemporary art to live eels Charles Green, Melbourne, Evolution and art (Madras Art Gallery and Museum, 1986) Jarrod Rawlins, Melbourne, RAD

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I can’t explain and I won’t event try 2003, Stefan Brüggemann Sarah Ciraci, Milan, Crop Circles Anthony Gardner, Melbourne, Abstract, Dan Perjovischi art of today – yesterday news 2002 Hao Guo, Melbourne/Beijing Rob McKenzie, Melbourne/New York Glen Gould en Katheinz Klopweisser 1980 Conical Intersect (detail) 1975, Gordon Matta-Clark Eros and Agape 2008, Stuart Koop ACW, No need to be great (in Jimmy Durham font) ACW biography Acknowledgements

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Aquatic environment works and contributions: eels, drum kit, various small floating works, laptop computers, monitor, fountains, books and various printed matter, plastic tarpaulin Tania Bruguera, Chicago, Revolution is on hold, T-shirt The Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York, L’eau de vie un film de Jean-Luc Godard, dvd 74 mins and Untitled painting Superflou, Bordeaux, Spiral Jetty Daniel Dewar & Gregory Gicquel, Bordeaux/Paris, Hook Common Room (Justin Capuco, Lars Fischer, Todd Rouhe, Maria Ibanez), New York, Marquee Callum Morton, Melbourne, Monument #20 Tequila Crumble Bert Theis, Milano, Gropius Drifter ACW, various small floating works, Explaining contemporary art to live eels, dvd 6 mins (Milan event)

(english below)

De : CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux A: … Cher… Dans le cadre de Saisons Increase, projet d’une durée d’un an confié par le CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux au les artistes australien A Constructed World (Jacqueline Riva et Geoff Lowe), ACW réalise, parmi leurs futures installations au CAPC, « Expliquer l’art contemporain à des anguilles vivantes ». Le lendemain du vernissage, le samedi 14 juin, de 15h à 18h, ACW propose au CAPC un événement auquel ils souhaitent vous inviter à participer. Votre contribution consisterait à parler durant cinq minutes d’art contemporain à des anguilles vivantes, évoluant dans un environnement aquatique. Cette intervention peut concerner votre domaine d’activité, et peut prendre des formes diverses: présentation d’une œuvre d’art, d’un concept ou d’un évènement en particulier, lecture d’un texte ou encore celle d’une réponse informelle ou impromptue à la proposition. Vingt personnes sont invitées à participer à cette performance, parmi lesquelles Thomas Boutoux, Sébastien Pluot, Lili Reynaud Dewar, le groupe d’artistes bordelais Superflou, François Piron, Jacques Donguy, Sean Peoples et Veronica Kent (des artistes de Melbourne travaillant par télépathie). Les artistes espèrent sincèrement que vous accepterez leur invitation à participer à ce projet. Si c’est le cas, merci d’envoyer un message au contact ci-dessous, et nous vous ferons parvenir tous les détails concernant l’organisation de cet événement. Vous trouverez également plus bas un court texte au sujet du projet. N’hésitez pas à me contacter ou à contacter ACW si vous souhaitez avoir plus d’informations sur leur projet. Très cordialement, Yann Chateigné CAPC musée d’art contemporain 7 rue ferrère – 33000 Bordeaux T. +33 5 5600 8182 y.chateigne@mairie-bordeaux.fr constructedworld@mac.com ACW T.+33 6 25 27 19 97

Expliquer l’art contemporain à des anguilles vivantes En 1965, Joseph Beuys réalise l’action « Comment expliquer les tableaux à un lièvre mort », dans laquelle il marche dans la galerie, le visage couvert de miel et de feuilles d’or, tenant un lapin mort dans les bras à qui il parle, lui expliquant les tableaux devant lesquels il se tient. Les spectateurs de cette performance étaient tenus à l’extérieur de l’espace, seulement capables de voir ce qui se passait au travers d’un écran. Il existe différentes versions relatant ce qui s’est exactement passé ce jour là ; nous savons néanmoins que cela concernait le fait d’expliquer l’inconnu.

A Constructed World présente, dans une version étendue et pour la quatrième fois « Explaining contemporary art to live eels » (Expliquer l’art contemporain à des anguilles vivantes), travail dans lequel des anguilles évoluent autour d’une exposition collective (Callum Morton, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Bert Theis entre autres), avant d’être remises à l’eau dans un bassin, une rivière, l’océan et finalement le fond de la mer des Sargasses. Ce travail parle d’expliquer ce qu’on ne sait pas, regard ce qui est hors de notre possession et inconnu, et considérer cela comme une ressource que l’on peut partager. 3

Nous savons peu de choses au sujet des anguilles : elles traversent les routes la nuit, font des détours par des cours d’eau et dorment dans des meules de foin pour retourner à la rivière, l’océan, leur terrain où elles évoluent, l’endroit le plus profond de l’océan, et finalement meurent. Les jeunes anguilles voyagent des milliers de kilomètres pour arriver jusqu’à nous. Aucune anguille n’est née en captivité, elles peuvent vivre pendant des mois dans un frigidaire en abaissant leur métabolisme et peuvent être extrêmement robustes mais, comme nombre d’autres espèces, déclinent en masse. Expliquer l’art contemporain à des anguilles vivantes est accompagné d’un évènement qui inclut une série de spécialistes d’art contemporain qui proposeront des explications sur l’art contemporain à des anguilles vivantes. Samedi 14 juin, à partir de 15h Nef, entrée libre avec le ticket d’accès à l’exposition Explaining contemporary art to live eels In the context of Saisons Increase, a year long project at CAPC Museum of contemporary art in Bordeaux, Australian artists A Constructed World(Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe) will present the installation “Explaining contemporary art to live eels”. On the day after the opening, Saturday 14 June from 3h – 6h, ACW will make a performative event. The artists would like to invite you to participate in this event and present a five minutes talk about contemporary art the eels in their aquatic environment. This presentation can be in the area of your specialisation, about one art work, a concept, a reading of a text, a chosen event or an informal or impromptu response. 20 speakers will participate and invited guests include Thomas Boutoux, Sébastien Pluot, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Bordeaux artists group Superflou, François Piron, Jacques Donguy, Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent (Melbourne artists who work telepathically). The artists very much hope you will accept their invitation to contribute to this project. Please respond to Yann Chateigné or A Constructed World for further information, and we will give you all the details regarding the organization of the event. Please also find a brief text about the project below. Best regards, Yann Chateigné CAPC museum of contemporary art 7 rue ferrère – 33000 Bordeaux T. +33 5 5600 8182 y.chateigne@mairie-bordeaux.fr constructedworld@mac.com

Yann Sérandour s cat & Marcel Broodthaers s cat

Miaow – Miiaaw ..mm ..mmiauw ..miauw – Miaaw ..MiaaW .. miiaw ..miaw – Miauw – Miaw – Miaw – Miauw – Miaauw – Miauw – MiiauW ..mia – Miaauw ..mm ..mii ..miAuw ..maaw ..Miaauw ..miaw ..mm ..Miauw ..miauw ..MiAUW – MIAUW – Miaouw – miaouw – miAOUW – miaouu – miaOUUW – miaouuw – miaw – mm.. – miaouw – miAO ..miAOUW – miaouw – miaou – MiAOU ..miao – Miaou ..miaw – Miaouu – MiAOOUU – mia.. – miao.. – miao.. – Miaouw – Miaoouu – mm.. – mm.. mm.. – Miaow – MiAOUW – miao.. – Miaouw – mmi.. – MiaOU – MiAAOUW – miAou – MiAAOU ..mm.. – Miaaou – Miaao ..mmi – MIAAOUU – MiAAOUUW – MIAAOU ..MiAAOU ..MiAOUW – Miaouw – ..mm ..Miao – ..mm ..Miao ..MiAouW – MiAOU ..MiAOU ..MiaOU ..MiaouW – MiaOUW – MiAAAOUU ..MiAAOU ..MiAOOU ..MiaOOUW ..MiAAOU ..MIAOU ..MIAAOUW – Miaou ..Miaouw

To be blown into eels’ ears, if they have some : angry thoughts borrowed from David Hammons (not in the right order) Anyone who decides to be an artist should realize that it’s a poverty trip. To go into this profession is like going to the monastery or something ; it’s a vow of poverty I always thought. To be an artist and not even to deal with that poverty thing, that’s a waste of time ; or to be around people complaining about that. Money is going to come, you can’t keep money away in a city like this. It comes but it just doesn’t come as often as we want. My key is to take as much money home as possible. Abandon any artform that costs too much. Insist that it’s as cheap as possible is number one and also that it’s aesthetically correct. After that anything goes. And that keeps everything interesting for me. I think someone said all work is political the moment that last brushstroke is put on it. Then it’s political but before that it’s alive and it’s being made. You don’t know what it is until it’s arrived, then you can make all these political decisions about it. Most people are really concerned with their image. Artists have allowed themselves to be boxed in by saying yes all the time because they want to be seen, and they should be saying no. I’ve invented a rule book for myself, that’s gotten me over all of this stuff. If an artist doesn’t have his own rules then he’s playing with those of the artworld, and you know those are stacked against you. Most of my things i can’t exhibit because the situation isn’t right. The reason for that is that no one is taking the shit seriously anymore. And the rooms are almost always wrong, too much plasterboard, overlit, too shiny and too neat. Painting these rooms doesn’t really help, that takes the sheen off but there’s no spirit,

they’re still gallery spaces. I think the worst thing about galleries is, for instance, that there’s an exhibition opening from 8-10pm. The worst thing in the world is to say, « well I’m going to see this exhibition ». The work should instead be somewhere in between your house and where you’re going to see it, it shouldn’t be at the gallery. Because when you get there you’re already prepared, your eyes are ready, your glands, your whole body is ready to receive this art. By that time, you’ve probably seen more art getting to the spot than you do when you get there. Beacause art has gotten so… I don’t know what the fuck art is about now. It doesn’t do anything. Like Malcolm X said, it’s like novocaine. It used to wake you up but now it puts you to sleep. There’s so much of it around in this town that it doesn’t mean anything. That’s why the artist has to be very careful about what he shows and when he shows now. Because the people aren’t really looking at art, they’re looking at each other and each other’s clothes and each other’s haircuts. This is the garbage can of it all. The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and never has any fun.

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (ReliĂŠ) de Bruno Latour (Auteur), Catherine Porter (Traduction)

The first thing to understand about contemporary art is that it doesn’t exist. It has long since been replaced by ritual. Art was once something made and appreciated by a select few. A distinction between high and low culture echoed the class distinctions in society. The democratic era heralded ideas such as universal education and with it universal access to Art. Of course, people everywhere already had access to popular art. But, in a sleight of hand, democratisers persisted with the idea of the museum’s superiority. What was good for you had to be made accessible. This process reaches into all corners of the globe. Today we are attempting to make this goodness available to eels. This is, of course, one of our rituals; instead of making art, we make art available. What of all the museums and curators you say. Don’t they deal in Contemporary Art? Of course not. The curators, uniformly attired in their slimming black vestments, are our high priests of ritual. They’ve long abandoned attempts to distinguish art from dross and instead rely upon scriptures that dictate that in place of art they pursue a thematic agenda. Like the more successful missionaries of old who adapted their Christian practices to co-exist with those of the animistic head hunters amongst whom they found themselves, today’s successful curator adapts to a public (here eels) with no understanding or interest in Art. Instead of talking about art, the trick is to connect with broader themes already of interest to the prospective art lovers. So, for example, here it might be something to do with rivers. The rivers of myth, the river as source, the river of life, the ecologically bankrupt rivers of the contemporary world, the very river that perhaps runs past our curator’s museum. Let’s call the show ‘Deep Water, the River in Art’. Naturally the eels won’t immediately be keen to fork out for admission. They’d imagined that the intricate looping underwater patterns they formed in collaborative unison were enough art for any animal. Though happy to spend the rest of their day eating and having sex, they somehow found themselves in a museum. (Their one compensation – their folk-art patterning – was thereby recognised as Art.) In the museum, some encouragement will be needed for the wandering worshipper with the attention span of an eel. The curator will engage artists to provide all manner of thematic distraction, all of it leading the viewer back to the water. So, you say, isn’t this stuff Contemporary Art? Are you kidding? All the oversized knickknacks and tedious memorabilia? These are votive objects, adjuncts to worship. The artists will be highly professional and totally unskilled. The curator will illuminate the importance of their ideas. Their apparent lack of skill in carrying out their ideas will be a positive – making them less remote from their viewers. Lest this flattening suggest that the museum is merely a social space like any other, curators, like good priests, ensure that while the doors are open, the interior remains sacrosanct. At the opening of the doors – a ceremony called ‘The Opening’ – we experience the ritual with the wine goblets and the whispered imprecations, sorry incantations. As with odd bits of rotting timber that have apparently felt the touch of the saviour’s lips, so with the various keepsakes and bric-a-brac over which the curator has waved the leaves of a catalogue essay. These items are for the moment blessed. Just as that dried up bit of flesh is Christ’s foreskin, so these items are Art; and a brisk trade ensues. Perhaps, you say, these rituals are the real art? You may be right – but as traditional practices they can hardly be considered contemporary art. It only uses tradition when conducting the perennial ritual known as ‘The Overthrowing of Tradition’. The best chance such votive objects have of becoming art is some time in the future, when their motivating agendas have been forgotten and, like an oddly shaped bowl left behind by an extinct tribe, their ritual function has long since been abandoned. Once again somebody will have the bright idea of calling objects with no discernible purpose by the name Art. But, of course, by then they won’t be contemporary.

Here is an example of a non-existent contemporary artwork. It’s one I made myself, in the year 2000. With another artist, Chris Fortescue, I gave free haircuts in a gallery in Vienna. With the blessing of the curator, we plied our non-existent skills on willing gallery goers. (The photo, I can assure you, shows the subject prior to his haircut.) It was an idea that had been kicking around and when the Vienna show came up we submitted our proposal (contemporary art is always foretold in a proposal.) for our project to the government in Sydney and received two air fares to Vienna. At the opening we cut hair. It was all a bit of a show really. We had all the props of the hairdresser – except a mirror. So our customers had to put their trust in us. After the opening we took turns cutting in the afternoons. One day a woman came in with a pile of thick curly hair. I had a very small pair of scissors and had been snipping away cautiously for 40 minutes with little result. I thought I had better apologise for my inefficiency. “Not at all,” she said. “I’m enjoying the slow going; when I came in here I felt uncertain in these galleries. Now I feel at ease. It is as though the whole place has been transformed while you’ve been cutting.” Just at that moment I realised that it didn’t matter that contemporary art didn’t exist. Simon Barney

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Explaining contemporary art to live eels

Before he became famous for his invention or discovery of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud had tried his hand at a variety of other pursuits. He published papers on cerebral palsy, aphasia, got into hypnosis, and, most notoriously, contributed to the unleashing of cocaine — familiarly known at the time as the ‘third scourge’ — upon the European continent. It’s less well known that Freud’s very early work engaged him in sexing eels. This is perhaps less hilarious than it sounds. The problem of the sex of eels — indeed, their entire lifecycle — was a longstanding and difficult one in biology. Aristotle himself had maintained that eels grew directly from mud, without any need for sexual generation. The observational complexities vis-à-vis eels proved immense for millennia; indeed, they remain so even today. For the young Freud, fresh out of college and looking to contribute to the vast march of modern science, it seemed like a real opportunity. So off he headed to the Zoological Station at Trieste, the only sea-port of the immense Austro-Hungarian Empire, and itself a key town in the history of modern art (not to mention contemporary geopolitics). James Joyce, for instance, famously sojourned there, hobnobbing with another influential modernist litterateur now best known as Italo Svevo, author of Confessions of Zeno, the greatest text on (not) quitting smoking ever written, and professional purveyor of submarine paint to the Emperor. In his time there, Freud dedicated himself to dissecting eels, before returning to Vienna a disappointed man. In his publication ‘On the testicles of eels,’ Freud had to admit that he really didn’t have any clear idea of what was going on there. He did suggest, however, the possibility that eels were ‘intersexual’ beings. As K.R. Eissler was later to put it in his biographical sketch of Freud, regarding this research: ‘Freud was the first to approach the idea of intersexuality, proposing the possibility that sexual differentiation in the eel is not genetically predetermined. This was not confirmed by experiment until later.’ So there’s the analogy. Appreciating contemporary art is like looking for the testicles of eels. Hard, dirty, painstaking, thankless, not much fun, what you’ve got on your hands and smeared across your

microscope lens are mutilated parts of a bizarre intersexual creature about which you can only proffer learned but unprovable speculations — which will stay so until, long after your death, some scientific research team or another might corroborate your proposals with something that resembles better evidence. Even then, it’s not much help to you. Dead hares — and heirs — may as well have inherited nothing, and their haireses and heresies have taken no cities, nor no prisoners, neither. Still, that’s ‘the oceanic feeling’ which Freud would later discuss in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: nirvana is just an intimation of a return to a prior state of things, that is, death-drive, the obliteration of any difference between you and your environment. You’d have to be pretty sure that the live eels couldn’t care less. Justin Clemens

Abstract This thesis presents a theoretical and historical account of how artists have responded to politics of democracy since the late-1980s. Three questions guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: why, during its apparent apotheosis in recent years, have numerous artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? Secondly: how have artists undertaken this critique? Thirdly, and most importantly: what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy that they critique? Particular case studies of art from Europe help us to address these questions, for Europe has been an important crucible for vociferous, and often fraught, arguments about democracy in recent aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses. The first chapter of this thesis rigorously contextualises these discourses in relation to historical mobilisations of democracy since the Iron Curtain’s collapse. Relying on writings by Pat Simpson, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Mario Tronti, I chart the significant imbrications of political ideology, philosophy and what I call ‘aesthetics of democratisation’ from the end of European communism, through the democratisations of postcommunism to the militarised democratisations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Notions of democracy shift and change during this period, becoming what Žižek calls a problematic ‘transcendental guarantee’ of assumed values and self-legitimation. These shifting values in turn propel the concurrent critiques of democracy that are the subjects of the five subsequent chapters: Ilya Kabakov’s ‘total’ installations; Neue Slowenische Kunst’s mimicry of the nationstate during the 1990s; Thomas Hirschhorn’s large-scale works from the late-1990s onwards; Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti’s collaborative ventures; and the co-operative practices of Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Through examination of the artists’ installations and voluminous writings, and based primarily on archival research and interviews, this thesis examines how their aesthetic politics emerge from the remobilisation of nonconformist art histories, through self-instituted contexts and alternative models for art production, exhibition and interpretation. These models, I argue, counter our usual understandings of art practice and its politics in Europe. They cumulatively assert ‘postsocialist aesthetics’ as an impertinent, yet urgent, prism through which to analyse contemporary art. Anthony Gardner Melbourne, May 2008

A friend lent me Edith Whaton’s classic novel The Age of Innocence. A couple of failed attempts at reading it kept the book by my bedside for months. The cover has a reproduction of a John Singer Sargent painting. Two young women, faces perfectly posed, leaf through a folder together. Their bodies are close; one of the girls even has her arm around the other’s shoulder. But there is no connection between them. They rest and relax in perfectly cordial companionship, but the true passions that might ignite distress and argument, are respectfully left behind glassy stares. The person who lent me the book is terrific in arguments. She is a great believer in saying what one thinks. This can make her prickly company. I like that though. Reading the book during my short Christmas holidays I had extra time to think why my friend would lend me this tale of thwarted love in New York high society. A third of the way into the book I came across a line that was marked with a small biro ‘x’. This line channelled the book’s purpose as an expose of ‘civilised’ society. And for this reason I am sure my friend had given me the book. The line read… a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant. There is always something interesting when people give a new appraisal to (what had been) unpleasant. It marks a reversal of assumed values. The world turns upside down. When this occurs, it opens up a remarkable range of possibilities. If we can make the most worthless objects of our society covetable, imagine what we could do for the value systems that structure human exchange! The Croatian artist Mladen Stillinovic describes a similar mutability: The same goes for money, one day it matters a lot, another it doesn’t. In socialist and transitional countries money did actually turn into paper, it would devaluate over the years: the 5000 dinar banknote with Tito dropped from the largest denomination to the smallest - five paras. There is good reason in shying away from such dramatic reversal. It is during these times that previously secure interests become unstable, up for grabs. It is impossible to know where the money, power or security is going to fall. Nothing is more unpleasant than feeling lost and not knowing. But these are also moments of dramatic change, where power relations turn upside down. Risk verse benefit is totally unknown. Out of a remainder bin I bought a book of photographs by Slater Bradley. It was titled Don’t Let Me Disappear. In the turmoil of the unknown, I don’t think there is anyone who can’t relate to that sentiment. We each have our own formulations for this conundrum. Slater Bradley’s answer was simple, almost naive. Photographs of friends, places he had been, small things he had seen. A desecrated statue, arms missing, her face scarred. A girl asleep, wrapped up in blue and white striped sheets. An expensive meal. A whale washed up, decomposing on the beach. During moments of disappearance, when we no longer know the value of things, when we cannot properly see, Bradley’s is a common answer. Subjectivity is the only thing we have. So often overlooked, it offers something far more grounding and stable than any political theory or post-modern discourse for suggesting a path through the wash of nomadic, global and de-territorialised. Rob McKenzie

a constructed world selected exhibitions and events 2008 An hysterical play about food event at Domus-Lab, Architecture Biennale, Venice, commissioned by Camilla Pignati Morano Athéisme Playlist event at Cneai, Chatou Saisons Increase: partie 2 Temps fou (Wild Weather) the second of a four-season year-long project by ACW, CAPC musée d’art contemporaine de Bordeaux, commissioned by Charlotte Laubard Le Feu scrupuleux, Cneai, Chatou, commissioned by Sylvie Boulanger Young Old: taking care of business for 10 years TCB Melbourne Saisons Increase: partie 1 Ruisseler à rebours (Flowing Upwards) musée d’art contemporaine de Bordeaux Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities, Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Turin and Palazzo Ducale di Laurino, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa & Latitudes Cone of Silence, ACW workshop at Foundation Sandretto with participants from Turin, Istanbul, London and San Francisco, for the exhibition Greenwashing... Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear #1, avec A Constructed World, Justin Beal, Michael Heizer, Richard Prince, une exposition de Antoine Marchand, Etienne Bernard, Jean-Marc Ballée, Vitrine de la galerie Frédéric Giroux Paris Group Group Show, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery Melbourne, curated by DAMP Revolving Doors: an exhibition in memory of Blair Trethowan, Uplands Gallery Melbourne 2007 Labyrinth, Art and Knowledge Space, Chaoyang District, Beijing, curated by Dong Bingfeng hotel room, Hotel La Louisiane rue de Seine, Paris, curated by Olivier Robert, Judicael Lavrador, Ami Barak et.el Blow-Up, Pingyao International Festival, China, curated by Dong Bingfeng Increase Your Uncertaintly, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, commissioned by Juliana Engberg The Melbourne Choir of Complaints, performance, www.complaintschoir.org produced by ACW and ACCA Melbourne Truck Dance, performance, various locations around the Melbourne CBD, produced by ACW and ACCA Melbourne Journée Hospitalités, Cneai Chatou, presentation of the second edition of the publication erreur mensonge méprise tromperie, edited by ACW and produced with Cneai Schifanoia, N.O. Gallery, Milan and four private apartments, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa: 30.1.07 event and screenings of Explaining contemporary art to live eels, dvd 6’40” and Pea & Shell, dvd 3’30”, with live sound performance by Steve Piccolo and Gak Sato, in the apartment of Maurizia Vila. 2.2.07 The Social Contract, event with 91 participants, in the apartment of Giovanna Giannattasio. 6.2.07 event, installations and screening of Where there’s smoke there’s a smoker, in the apartment of Claudio Ades. 8.2.07 screenings and performance of Leviathan and the Mirror Man, in the apartment of Michela Moro and Alan Journo www.aconstructedworld.com

A Constructed World would like to thank the speakers who contributed to this event, for travelling to Bordeaux and taking the time to think about the eels and what might be explained to them. Many thanks to contributors to the reader section of this documentation, especially friends and acquaintances who have contributed to so many ACW projects. And to our friends and artists who contributed works for the eels to swim amongst in the pond. Special thanks to Charlotte Laubard, Guadalupe Echevarria, Sébastien Pluot, and Superflou Explaining contemporary art to live eels, installation and event was in part 2 of A Constructed World, Saisons Increase, parts 1-4, February 2008 - February 2009 at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.