ETTiCUT ISSUE 4- Contextual Document 05/10
CONTEXTUAL
DOCUMENT
Contextual Document I have spent the last year assuming the role of an artist/ curator, exploring the grey area between the two roles. This experimentation has been realised through my work on Etticut. The initial idea behind Etticut was to create a means for myself to maintain creativity without creating specific artworks myself. Etticut seeks to draw out other artists’ passions and work and bring them together to present to a wider audience, providing an environment for them to be viewed both casually and critically. Etticut was originally an online gallery space, whereby I curate exhibitions of work based around a set theme, much like cabinet magazine, with the intention of printing physical copies of each issue too. Having a set theme for each issue meant I could maintain a level of consistency in the themes presented in the submitting artists’ work, making the work feel more like a collection of related pieces rather than a documentation of other artists work. Cabinet Magazine and Implicosphere have been particularly important research sources in my practice, not only influencing how I present the work submitted but also expanding my understanding of how and why art is and can be curated. Publishing Etticut online allows for the magazine to be viewed by a much broader audience, artists such as Cory Arcangel have previously taken advantage of the potential exposure the Internet can provide. As a self described ‘cyber sculptor’ Arcangel has used the Internet to exhibit his digital art. The Internet’s accessibility allows me to achieve one of Etticut’s primary objectives- to expose artists’ work to a wider audience, much like /seconds website does. I was first made aware of the seconds website a year and a half ago, when I started collaborating with other students to create Milliseconds, a sister website to /seconds. This exposure to the world of curating birthed my interest in curation as opposed to creation. Following on from the first issue of Etticut, through discussions with various tutors, I realised that to blur the boundary between curator and artist I couldn’t just show the work I needed to somehow alter the way it is received and interpreted by the viewing audience. My personal tutor Ben Judd pointed me in the direction of curators Francesco Manacorda and Lydia Yee. This led to me researching their exhibition ‘The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art’ they created and showed at the Barbican. This exhibition not only curated artists work, it also fathomed a fictional pretence for the show, altering how the viewer interprets the work, simply by the title of the exhibition and the way they curated each piece into one of four categories. It could be said that not only were they curating work but they were creating their own piece of work too. My work following my research into the Martian museum of terrestrial art, has since adopted this very same approach. Taking submissions and presenting them to an audience under a fictional guise. This has enabled me to input my own artistic spin on the work I am curating, giving the exhibition more depth and creating interest. This idea of ‘re-representing’ another person’s work is similar to Eleanor Brown’s newpaper, whereby she uses articles from magazines to create her own publications. My work sets out to do the same using a fictional back-story to change the meaning of the submissions. Adrian Piper explored the question of “what is art?” in a lot of her work, challenging the traditional contexts of art and how it is made and viewed, I can relate to this philosophical view and interpretation of art, it has always been a key agenda for me when I create work. My housemate once challenged me about the work I create, asking what makes it art and not just a collection of random images with no meaning. This inspired me to create my ,mug affair, piece, so as I can challenge the notion of what art actually is? Is it how the art is made and with what intentions, or is it how and by whom it is viewed? By having my colleagues at work ‘doodle’ for me I managed to collect a series of pictures not intended to be shown in a conventional gallery, and without specific meaning. This then gives me a blank canvas to work from, formulating an ideology from these images and giving them a falsified meaning for the viewer. Putting the images in a gallery where other artists can view them means they are generally viewed critically and assumed to be a piece of
art with specific themes, messages and values, thus transforming the once doodles into an art piece in itself. If Andy Warhol can turn Marilyn Monroe’s face into art why can’t I turn a selection of doodles into art without altering them physically? My work challenges to notion of art and the work’s respective credibility, be that assumed or judged. Exhibiting the pictures in a gallery and transforming them into an art piece provides me with the source material for my magazine. The exhibition being the event, and Etticut setting out to document the event, so I can still expose the contributor’s work to people who were not invited to the exhibition. My intention is for Etticut to sit alongside other art publications that exhibit work, like /seconds, cabinet and Implicosphere. Matthew Higgs once asked, “Does the viewing of art necessarily need to take place within a white gallery?”. Much like Higg’s I see the work I do as a means for artists to have their work seen outside the conventional white walled gallery, and that is what Etticut does. This is all linked in with the idea of relational aesthetics, providing a social space for artists and the public to work together, participate and be involved in the art work. Without the gallery being seen and received as art, the work has not achieved its goal- to deceive the viewers and influence their perception of the exhibited work. So by viewing my work you become a part of the overall concept and piece knowingly or unwittingly.
Bibliography Relational Aesthetics - Nicholas Bourriaud, published by Les Presse Du Reel, January 1st 1988 At The Martian Museum, Art’s Outasight in Outerspace - Alice Jones, The Independent, Thursday 28th February 2008 Art Monthly - David Barrett September 1995 Frieze Magazine issue 77 - September 2003 by Jacob Dahl Jurgensen The 20th Century Art Book - published by Phaidon Press Inc, October 1996
Websites www.thenewpaper.co.uk www.implicasphere.org.uk www.beigerecords.com/cory/