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The Opening
The installation can be viewed in any sequence, but this is the suggested starting point. The readers are encouraged to choose between two official openings to the installation; one 'a quote by a more famous artist', and the other 'a pseudo artist statement'. What these two entry points do is to set up a mindset or attitude with which you can view the work.
quote from Friedrich by William Vaughan
The first possible opening is a quote by a German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich, denouncing the increased theorizing activity that got associated with artists, such as the kind that Phillip Otto Runge undertook. Friedrich had initially discussed matters of art with Runge and his circle, but would increasingly grow tired of their talks, and in the end, sarcastically remarks that "we will in future only have to stick on wall the most beautiful and sublime thoughts expressed in words". Unfortunately for him the arts would become increasingly more theoretical and conceptual after his time, and this installation - certainly not the first in the method and strategy used - does exactly what he had imagined with a shudder: a twenty-four scribblings of what art is in one breath.
The second possible opening is a piece of writing by myself on what I perceive as the irony of expression, here acting as the pseudo artist statement. The irony I see is this; expression is inevitably bound up within convention, and the very convention that makes expression intelligible also threatens the integrity of expression. How and where, then, do I position myself on the scale of unintelligibility and better articulation? The rest of the installation struggles with the question in some way or another, until the very end.
Together, the opening piece represent the way viewers act toward a given artwork; they like it or they do not like it. They approve of it or they disapprove of it. No matter how the viewers see the artwork - good, bad, relevant, irrelevant, etc. - behind all reflection and critical thinking is the question "how does it relate to me?". Here I offer two possible points of relation out of many; one disapproves with a more authoritarian reasoning behind to support the viewer's disapproval, and the other suspends judgement momentarily to explore the ramifications of such a question posed. But by approving and including two seemingly opposing stances within the work itself, the piece welcomes open interpretation of any kind upon itself and embraces even the negation of itself. After all, if expression is ironic it's only natural that the understanding of expression be ironic.
