| “I still consider it as a great fault, these people running around day after day screaming that they’re not interested in ‘objects,’ and we all know that even a sentence is an object. Everything is an object. Then when you go to their exhibitions, you are confronted with the most incredible amount of documents, which are again objects, framed, signed, dated, numbered, all addressing the fact that they are not objects and they are against objects.” |  |
Exit Music (For a Film) – Michelle Lopez
“I still consider it as a great fault, these people running around day after day screaming that they’re not interested in ‘objects,’ and we all know that even a sentence is an object. Everything is an object. Then when you go to their exhibitions, you are confronted with the most incredible amount of documents, which are again objects, framed, signed, dated, numbered, all addressing the fact that they are not objects and they are against objects.”
—Lawrence Wiener
I’m writing in response to a current crisis of content within art, a condition evident in the supremacy of rhetoric over content, with language cultivating an appropriate counterfeited meaning. This dominant shift relates to my immediate concern: with the state of the object and how our ambivalence with its context has led us to perceive and construct objects in a way that undermines the inventiveness of representation.
While contextualization is a valid historical development, it doesn’t replace an object’s autonomous language. Decidedly though, a fantastic insider’s game of unraveling the mystery of signification makes for an intellectual hunt. As a result, the artistic process has been whittled away, with the physical art itself amounting to less than what it purports to be—“in a condition of perpetual potentiality.” The responsibility to generate meaning in the work has been taken out of the artist’s hands (as opposed to the artist’s mouth); not so much stolen as shifted by the prevailing culture.
Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, describes our present historical situation as one unable to bridge the conflict between old and new, past and present, and, as a result, we have a beautiful, relapsed form of “aesthetic alienation.” Our loss of meaning and poetic resonance has been blind-sighted to the understanding that “only the work of art ensures a phantasmagoric survival for the accumulated culture” and man’s “inability to appropriate his own historical situation” will devastate it once the talk is gone.
This exhibition is an attempt to examine the foundation of our critical judgment both within the public sphere of looking and the private sphere of making, in an effort to reconcile the alienated extremes. The exhibition that inspired this writing, “Exit Music (for a Film),” is an attempt to discover objects borne out of insight into process, by artists who invest in generating meaning through a physical entity rather than through its context. This welcome anomaly depends not on a crutch of rhetoric or mythology, but in its stead, a genuine search for content.
