art > untitled 2 (2008)
untitled 2
2008
coat hangers on a bare wall
30cm x 30cm x 30cm
Please see the previous work in this series untitled (2005) upon which this work depends
In this work, the project of the artist is to explore the confronting notion of the project as conceptional coat hanger and its potential for interaction with an us as conceptual organisation, in, with or for which we work.
Viewed ontologically, this arrangement provides a dialectic for exploring the behavioural phenomenon whereby those identifying as being outside the project, an emergent or emerging other, choose, either consciously or by mechanisms not in immediate or perceivable awareness, to hang qua hang their projections qua projections on the project qua project.
By starkly focussing attention on the hanger rather than the hung, the work, which paradoxically was hung by a hanger working so that it may be observed in the state identified by convention as hung as a work, illuminates the latent contrasts between the organisation as subject, the project as object, and the other (emergent or emerging) as a priori source of action, creating a semiotic matrix of dynamic expression in which the scope of observation is signified and therefore comes into awareness, establishing a polarising conflict that undermines the us even while deploying itself through an amplification of the potential for affect.
Placing subject as object without scope against the bare wall serves to impose a subliminally signified alienation by locating the wall as signifier in the proto-landscape of void as void in memory, with a consequent redefining of the habitual epistemological impact of affect in the context of unconscious but subjective observation recalibrated to a normalised experience, one too often dwarfed by the presence of an organisational convention hung on the perception of project as object.
Exhibited as part of "ambiguosity", At The Vanishing Point, June 2008
photo courtesy of At The Vanishing Point