Curated By Meenakshi Thirukode

A Note:

Having read Russian philosopher Boris Groys theories about relationships and contexts between art, culture and the media I was interested in the idea of a project that went beyond just exhibiting art work within a certain theme. I wanted to explore individuals whose creative practice is subject to a lot of tags and categories (artist, musician, writer, entrepreneur, art activist).

Boris Groys discusses a world in which we are constantly bombarded with visuals that are in essence synthetic fragments of reality. A reality that once was considered to be the inspiration for art as projected through the Renaissance idea of art being a window to or illusion of, the real world. Groys describes how that thought is pretty much obsolete and contends that an image-making machine that is the media, has overpowered the romanticized notion of artist as craftsman and image-maker. So there is greater ambiguity in trying to understand or describe the works of individuals who spend their lives seeking to express and question what life, politics, love or coca cola might mean to them. Information spreads within mass culture often times taking on different meanings and impacting us at varying emotional and psychological levels. For instance how is Ryan Tricartin’s Youtube videos different from the millions of videos uploaded everyday by thousands of people? In another context is the band Lucky Dragons just a music ‘band’ when they play at a general venue or is their work a performance art piece if in a gallery or at the Whitney Biennial? What is the impact of an artist like Shepard Fairey whose iconic image of Obama seeped into mass culture becoming a symbol that stood for hope and change for a lot of people. How many of those people know or care about the person who created the image? And it also begs the question – how do you define what is and isn’t art these days?

These individuals’ practice and their creative identity are not easily definable within mass culture no matter how many tags we use to categorize them. To a large extent the implicit elitist perception that often times goes with being an artist within the closed institutional art world (museums, galleries, fairs) is losing relevance and giving way to those who create art that seeps into mass culture. Perhaps it’s always been that way.

Artists who are part of the project include:

Amir Fallah, Lucky Dragons, Pooneh Maghazehe,Raqs Media Collective, Jaishri Abichandani, Colleen Asper, Kiran Subbaiah, Aakash Nihalani, Parlour (Leslie Rosa and Ciara Gilmartin)

These individuals and groups are all part of creating culture and contexts in ways that make it hard to describe and pin down and categorize what they do (we live in a word where everyone and everything needs to be ‘branded” so that somehow that explains who

we are..) Their work transcends just functioning within the art world. They reach and impact the mass audience.

I am also functioning within a schizophrenic dilemma. The concept for this project is available for any gallery to ‘buy’ so that it may manifest in a physical space. At the same time the project functions on certain ideas related to institutional critique, something within whose framework I have been working as a writer and curator.

At Gallery Open Eyed Dreams the project is primarily archival. The works are presented as “glorified objects” – the quintessential character of works in institutions such as the museum (traditionallty considered as the ‘temple’ of art). I am dealing with how as a curator one might archive current practices and how it can manifest as traces. This is why the installation in itself has a significance. The ‘museum box’ like presentation of some of the work serves to function as this critique on ideas such as institution, curation, installation and also as a visual counterpart to the glorification of specific ideas and objects by institutions.

Another significant and preplanned act in installing the project was to not give defined spaces to each artist. So Colleen Asper’s Mirror sits within the Parlour installation which also has Beautiful Decay (Amir H Fallah) publications laid out on the table. Another such dialog includes Jaishri Abichandani’s work with SAWCC that has been archived (and glorified by the institutional installation methodology) through catalogs and flyers along with a publication of Lucky Dragons and Colleen Aspers Credit Card. This thereby stimulates an interesting dynamic to how one could interpret these pieces by their mere placement. Many such layers exist and they aren’t spelled out as clearly as I did above. Explore.