The Title of This Show…
Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels, Belgium
Jan Mot’s current exhibition is called ‘The title of this show is a list that includes the dates in which each of the exhibited works were first made, the dates in which some of them were remade by the artists and the dates in which they were last shown’. There’s no hope now: if you have finished reading, you are already hurtling headlong into the conceptual loop established by artist-curator Mario Garcia Torres and the four artists – William Anastasi, Eduardo Costa, Dan Graham, and Stephen Kaltenbach – that he has gathered for this show.
Works include Lee Lozano’s Time (classified as ‘date to be completed’) – comprising two strings stretched between four nails and strung through a small metallic disk (owned by Stephen Kaltenbach and listed under his name in the press release). Elsewhere is Kaltenbach’s Modern Drapery (1968), an oval piece of felt the folds of which are reconfigured by each new installer, and William Anastasi’s Subway Drawings (undated), seismographic scribbles for which the artist put pencil to paper and let the movement of the train guide his hand.
Lee Lozano, Time (date to be completed)
Despite their visual understatement, it would be wrong to take these works as exercises in aesthetic or conceptual reductionism. Where reduction implies the pursuit of a ‘zero point’ – prohibiting the extension of a work’s meaning beyond its self-stated limits – the pieces on display are united by their conscious accommodation of outside interference. Ceding control of his work’s presentation, Kaltenbach hands over his auctorial authority to an unknown individual, while Anastasi’s drawings are equally as much an index of the train’s movement as the artist’s own autographic mark.
Demanding an altered understanding of the role of the author and the status of the works themselves, Kaltenbach and Anastasi question the same terms which are taken up by the exhibition’s title, and which Eduardo Costa’s corresponding work, A Piece That Is... (1969-2008), throws even more drastically into crisis. Costa’s contribution is an enlarged, framed typewritten sentence that reads: ‘A piece that is essentially the same as a piece made by any of the first conceptual artists, dated two years earlier than the original and signed by somebody else. Eduardo Costa 1970’.
In the exhibition title, the compulsive practice of specifying dates to establish an artistic genealogy takes on a slightly ridiculous edge as well as underscoring the slippery status of the events being chronologically pinpointed. Costa, too, tangles us up in time in order to cast doubt on the status of the art object itself, establishing a cycle of uncertainty that continues ad infinitum: is the typewritten sentence of A Piece That Is... an example of the endeavour it describes, that is, a later ‘copycat’ work falsely dated two years early? Or does it represent precisely the opposite, the paradigm of conceptual originality – an initial, original move designed to engender follow-up works whose very form would serve as Costa’s authorial stamp in perpetuity? I’d go with the latter. If the display of these artists side-by-side shows one thing, it is how they revel in the convoluted system into which they have been born. Costa and the others are trapped in a maze of someone else’s making, but they respond with gleeful high jinks, driven more by the prankster’s faith in the ongoing perpetuation of mischief than the reformer’s impulse to destroy.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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