ARTIST STATEMENT

“Faux” Crit

By Dimitar Velkov.

On the 7^th of November, 2016, a group of MFA students from the media program at Southern Illinois University left their classroom, and went into the Cinema & Photography department’s small gallery. The class had been going to that gallery every Monday for the past several weeks. Each week, a student had installed their art in the gallery, and the rest of the class gathered to critique it, along with their teacher. At the door, I greeted them with name-tags, divided in three categories – “student”, “artist”, and “art”. After getting the tag, one by one, they entered the gallery where they saw three sticky notes on different areas of the floor. The note in the corner said “Art Stands Here”. A few feet away from it, another note said “Students Stand Here”, and “Artist Stands Here” on a third one, opposite the other two. The participants took assumed their positions, and I joined them with a “Teacher” tag on my chest. I asked the artist to explain the art, as pretentiously as possible. By this time “the art” had already begun to perform as such without explicit direction. After the artist had finished his explanation, I asked the class to critique his art as viciously as possible, which they did with eager and ease. Then, I asked the artist to retort, and be as defensive as he can. I then directed both sides to let themselves be as aggressive as they wanted, and to talk over each other if they had to. The piece ended with the artist giving up, and abandoning the space, to, quote “go to Venezuela”, thus leaving the class as “the winner” of the critique.

Faux Crit is a continuation of my Master’s thesis “The Author is absent”, which was an attempt to create what I called at the time emergent narrative event environments. The first two such events were a “faux” movie shoot, where a crew and cast of people pretended to shoot a movie around an unsuspecting improvising actor-protagonist, and a “faux” exhibition, where “faux” artists pretended to put on a “faux” exhibition to an unsuspecting audience. The goal of these game-experiments is to remove authorship from the artist, and to give the audience agency to act within certain perimeters to create a meaningful narrative on its own. It also aims to create a new form of entertainment. One, which is free from authorship, intellectual property, technology and reproduction

Kaprow’s un-art tried to undermine its own foundations, by escaping from institutionalized spaces and meanings into the chaos of nature. Ultimately, it failed, because it brought what it was trying to escape along with it. In a time when the institutionalized forms of art under late capitalism have spread beyond the gallery, beyond the home, and beyond any physical limitations, it is time to go back to the most traditional and tired modes of art production and appreciation, and undermine them from within, by making their reality ambiguous. Within the space of the “faux” art, the very clear, fundamental rules of a movie shot, an exhibition, and a critique become ambiguous and ineffective. This leads to a fundamental confusion in the participating subjects, which if guided right could lead to true spontaneity, produced by the very “fakeness” it inhabits. It aims to free artist and audience from themselves, and their self-imposed inhibitions, and set them free in new world, where nothing can ever make complete sense. In that way, it is a hope of escaping the realm of the imaginary and symbolic, and approach what Lacan called “the real”. It is part of what shall from now on be called “faux”-sus.

samcsrennie:

[Diane walks in. There are hundreds of Make-Your-Own-Plane-Kits stacked on top of each other. Each kit reads: “No I said I’d like to make a complaint do not send me those kits why would you even sell kits like that it’s 2016 this is the last time I’ll be calling you goodbye.”]

wasalswearengen-deactivated2016:

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