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Works by: Karlie Marsh, Robert Raushenberg, Mark Florian, Mia Riley, Katue Furness,
Curated by Xenia Benivolski
a
sick
painting
or
a
sick
readymade.(1)
This
Duchamp quote, taken from his collection of notes the Green
Box refers
to the piece Readymade
malheureux (Unhappy Readymade, 1919),
which implies that an artwork's physical condition is integral to its
meaning. It was comprised of a geometry book that he instructed his
sister, then living in France, to hang on her porch. Predictably, the
weather gradually destroyed it. The inspiration for Unhappy
Readymade,
then, involved the notion of the physical vulnerability of artworks.
The Unhappy
Readymade
is
unhappy because it will not endure; it is gradually deteriorating.
Insofar as real weather tears the work apart, the piece is a metaphor
for the damaging effect of time on art.(2)
The
exhibition make a Sick
painting or a Sick readymade
functions as a single assembly installation and a homage to modernist
exhibition aesthetics. It includes works by students of Red Deer
College, pieces from its permanent collection, and found objects, all
of which function as vulnerable readymade objects. Obscured by flaws,
the ceramic works are floating in a formatic limbo. Mia Riley's small
clay maquettes, suggest a possibility of scale play and scale
dynamics that ultimately leads to meditation on miniatures, the
ambiguity of its organic forms a contributing factor, giving room to
mystery of both scale and function. Katie Furness' fractured and
unfinished ceramic bowls stacked on top of one another find a new
agency as an aesthetic assembly. Carly Marsh's unfinished test tiles
demonstrate an open material fragility.
This exhibition is complete with the inclusion of five true
readymades: Robert Rauschenberg's collage piece Ploy,
which operates in a conceptual vacuum of its own creation, and two
partially abstracted tone silver gelatin prints by Mark Florian, as
well as two untitled found objects,
marked by their lack of authorship.
The
gesture of exhibiting a work's weakness points to metaphorical
intent; in this we are inclined to look at the objects as entities,
with a particular agency separate from function. There is a window of
possibility that becomes available when an object has yet to reach
its eventual form, or if it has passed that mark. According to
Novalis, only the incomplete can be understood, can lead us further,
and what is complete can only be enjoyed.(3) In this process crossroads, one may explore
formalist reactions against content(4) and focus on the discursive function of the form. Form, is a
possibility of reflection in the work. It grounds the work as a
principle of existence. It is through the form that the living work
of art is a centre of reflection.(5)
This work was created for and within the context of the artist in residency program in red deer College, Red Deer, Alberta.
1
Marcel Duchamp, Salt
Seller: The Writings Of Marcel Duchamp,
Da Capo Press; New edition edition , Mar 22 1989
2
Mark B. Pohlad, "Macaroni repaired is
ready for Thursday...." Marcel Duchamp as Conservator,
tout-fair articles, volume 1 issue 3. December 2000
3
Georg
Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg
(Novalis),
Novalis:
Philosophical Writings,
State Univ of New York Pr. April 1997
4
Robert Smithson, Entropy and the new monuments, Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press,
April 10 1996
5
Benjamin
Walter, The
work of art; The concept of criticism,
Selected writings 1913-1934, Harvard
University Press, June 15
2005
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