Frieze Series
Documentation

Frieze Series Documentation

ART & CRISIS

The "A Short, Vague Introduction".

Based on Pascal Bruckner's "The Temptation Of Innocence"

Western society seems to be engaged with an overwhelming series of structural problems emerging out of some organizational paradigm in the late XX and early XXI Centuries (Gregorian calendar).

Here, marketing strategies meet political practices meet ubiquitous technology. Meet democratic means of representation aka. the social media. Not so democratic in fact, but hey, nobody's looking. Meet entertainment. Meet computing. Meet audience. Meet leisure. Meet demographic explosion. Meet globalisation, precarious living and invisible work.

Hello Space Crisis. Time Crisis. Capital crisis. Identity crisis. Representation crisis. Policy-making crisis.

We're in the great sewer system. Some artists feel responsible for engaging with and putting forward models of living that serve to redeem the world from the art-as-excess accusation. Pointers seem to merrily float around ever since we realized that art and power seem to make a lovely couple. Therefore, as all great artists are even greater diplomats, the key element in successful contemporary art making is, in fact, persuasion. The who's following the verb are yet to be mapped.

Nowadays artists have to be super heroes. Unlike scientists, their pragmatic use of time and expertise is at all times questionable (at least until it isn't; but that's just because you can't question anything dead). Subjectivity is indeed a bitch.

Unlike politicians, their authority is questioned and their police is most often poorly armed. Democracy is an even bigger bitch and always leads to conflict. But in this case this would mean somebody paying attention. So, nothing to see here. The Larger audience is reasonably circumspect. Their theories flawed because populism is bad. The Smaller elite audience is retrograde, stubborn, hypocritical, has its own ideas as to what needs to be conformed to and also doesn't seem to explicitly exist. Poor artist... Regardless of how rich he is, he will always remain poor having to serve so many, many masters. Forget beauty. That subject is impossible.

As superheroes, artists seem to have the responsibility of signalling human crisis and putting forward strategies to overcome it. But all artists are human. And so the plot just thickened.

The "A Short Manifesto"

TIME, money, and success. We have too little of these. Note that we're aiming at capitalized TIME, small money and moderate success.

But, as we are ambitious and pesky little concrete dwellers, we'll work with what we've got. As we are young, poor and lack the abilities, we are going to work with shortcuts.

We will take the responsibility to enunciate our practice. That is: repetition. We like giving polished quotes because it makes us sound fancy and because we're too lazy to write our own texts.

Enter Ecclesiastes:
" What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

Based on the last issue of Frieze Magazine, we have made a list of trending strategies in the contemporary art landscape.

We will make a series of artworks based on extracting themes and modalities out of successfully awarded artworks made by other people. We are going to arbitrarily pick and choose at least any two rules or themes and implement them into performance-based settings.

The "Fact-Exposing Convincing Argument".

Short lexicon

The most frequently used words in describing an artwork:

The "Jumping To Conclusions Without Further Reasoning Intuitive Conclusion"

Contemporary art is very very boring.

It is increasingly formalized, although aims to be experimental and engaging.

Most artists seem to be under a lot of stress and not really enjoy their work.

Bored people make boring artworks.

The vast majority of artists are depressed, depressive and blasé.

Art and play need to go to marriage counseling.