VERSUCH: NOTES AND PROJECTS_AGAIN
12/05/11 to 12/06/11 at TPSby / LOOP, Barcelona
Opening Thursday 12th May at 19.30

VERSUCH is an exhibition and journal project, it is a work in-itself defined alongside and by the works within it. Notes and Projects_Again is about making something because you love something else. This exhibition will look specifically at a notion of doing things again - as a reading or repetition. The works in themselves deal with this issue of making something through a number of movements and referents. In this sense, the works are transformations between memory and expectation, intention and realisation: performances of another object.

EXHIBITION
12th May - 18th May_Babette Mangolte / Robert Morris
23rd May - 29th May_Redmond Entwistle
30th May - 5th June_Manon de Boer
6th June - 12th June_David Raymond Conroy

JOURNAL
Jesse Ash, Ed Atkins, Andrea Büttner, David Raymond Conroy, Jesse Aron Green, Pablo Lafuente, Liang & Liang, Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, Charlotte Moth, Francesco Pedraglio, Colin Perry, Heather Phillipson, Paul Pieroni, Hannah Rickards, Alexandre Singh, Luke Skrebowski, Alexis Marguerite Teplin, Jesper List Thomsen

LOOP FAIR
Thursday 19th May_Babette Mangolte / Robert Morris
Friday 20th May_Redmond Entwistle
Saturday 21st May_Manon de Boer
Sunday 22nd May_David Raymond Conroy

Screening from 17.00 to 20.00

The Private Space By
C/ Mare de Deu de Grácia 26 Bajos
Barcelona, Spain

LOOP, Screen from Barcelona 2011
11 -21 May / Fair 19- 21 May

VERSUCH NOTES AND PROJECTS: EVENT 3 / DAVID RAYMOND CONROY

INTRODUCTION

So, thanks again everyone for coming to this third and final event for VERSUCH Notes and Projects. I have been reading through my other introductions today and I previously talked about making something about making and making something unknown or desiring an object. I think in both these ideas and perhaps generally today, we are seeing a revival in a concern with objects, not strictly objectivity (as in subjectively removing a subjective bias) but about objects in themselves. A concern with their substance, their mystery, the way they work.

Now this concern is all very well but I think it is important to understand it is we who make things, even if we are trying to make them make themselves. So at some point there is a responsibility to make things adequately to the object we are concerned with, to show your hand if you like. This tends to get confusing when what we are trying to show is just the object and what we want to make is with/about that. I guess the problem is that the specific autonomy of artworks is something produced. As, I have said previously, when I started this project I wanted to avoid looking at making things via the usual lines of process/production and appropriation/ownership. The classical structuralist mode is to show the means of production but this does tend towards process in itself being valued over what this act of showing is trying to accomplish.

Perhaps the best way of evaluating this problem and what I hoped to do with this project, is to look at practice not just as a process or product but as an ongoing way of constructing or building - a way of showing something as adequately as you can. The idea of 'making something because you love something else' then, which was the starting point to this project, is about attempting something despite its impracticality, despite the fact that you are complicit, that you might make it shoddily or badly but because you must make it, because it is important. In another sense then this is about encountering or dealing with the kind of complicated responsibility we have to something other than ourselves. The fact that we must try to say something.

So, I suppose I wanted to invite David Raymond Conroy to do this talk because maybe it deals with this question of trying to say something or trying to be adequate somehow to something that we love.

EVENT:

Conroy, David Raymond. A Talk (The one that begins with Bruce Springsteen), London, Hollybush Gardens 2011.

VERSUCH NOTES AND PROJECTS: EVENT 2 / HEATHER PHILLIPSON AND FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO

INTRODUCTION

Thanks all for coming. So, in the previous event in this series I talked briefly on how this journal and exhibition and the events accompanying this were a an attempt to make something about making - or the relation between an object of thought and a material presence. More to the point then, this object of thought is not some segregated, original form gestating in the mind, but something that is in fact invisible or incommensurable to us at the time of making. It is something we cannot grasp but that we are trying to find. So we see it in other things or parts of it in other things - in a position, in a moment, in a time, in a thing. We see a thing an maybe we get a little closer to what it is we are trying to say.

In this sense, making things is not about our ideas as much as the abandonment of our formal preconceptions and an infatuation with these objects that seem to speak to us. Now, this obviously sounds like fetishism and no doubt it is because this is how we operate in the world of things. Perhaps we could regress this to a question of commodification and it is also that but perhaps, beyond and within that, what interests me here is that there could be an object that appears to have something in-itself, have an autonomy; for something to matter other than ourselves. I suppose when I was thinking about this project of 'making something because you love something else' it was this 'something else' that I found important to practice.

Perhaps if we want to make something about making it is important that we make something else, something that exterior to ourselves. Something not known, not verified. Perhaps this is how we can make something new. Now we could say this was about appearance or transformation, incomprehensibility, transcendence or radical materiality, but I think what really matters most, what matters to why we make things, is that there is some space or stillness or surplus that seems to speak to us. So, the two talks we are about to see are both in some way about such objects or rather, about objects of desire and so back to loving something, which is maybe about letting go.

EVENT:

Pedraglio, Francesco. Yet another Tiger in the Room... , London, Hollybush Gardens, 2011.

Phillipson, Heather. Well, this is embarrassing. Half an hour in 12 episodes, London, Hollybush Gardens, 2011.

VERSUCH NOTES AND PROJECTS: EVENT 1 / REDMOND ENTWISTLE

INTRODUCTION

So, thank you all for coming. I just want to say a little bit about the show and why I wanted to show Monuments as part of it. So, when I started thinking about this project, the exhibition and the journal, I wanted to make somethingabout making; something that was not so much about process or just about process (as in five words in blue neon) and more about why we make things. I suppose giving a reason to make something is difficult, it is usually more of a compulsion - I definitely couldn't justify this project as useful in anyway, at least not verifiably useful. So I suppose I make things, including this project, because I love them. Now, that doesn't mean that I love the things I make, it means that I love the thing I am trying to make, which is different.

Loving something is about something exterior to yourself mostly, like loving a peson or a thing or an object. So I suppose I wanted to look at that thing, that object of my affection. I think at this point we must see that this is somewhat a question of taste. Not that I mean subjectivity to a point of solipsism. I mean that I am, obviously, effected in my tastes by that which went before me. So there is a role for memory and expectation in loving something, for instance, 'it is the kind I like.' When I begin to make something, often I start by putting together all the things I like and trying to work out the relations between them (what it is that works or is good about them) into some kind of mean or average - what it is in these things that I want to take away. I would say this was in some sense essayistic, not necessarily because I am writing an essay, but that I am arguing for something through a structure of referents, objects and ideas.

In the exhibition and the journal I wanted to see if I could make this methodology into an editorial and curatorial way of working. A way of working that was not about process or appropriation, or, in another sense, production or ownership, but in terms of the relations between these objects. A sort of montage or in other words a kind of distribution, a structural and formal inquiry into the nature of appearance - that one thing could be another thing at different times. So, I wanted to show Monuments because it deals with some of these ideas in a way of scoring or quotation or notation.

EVENT:

Entwistle, Redmond. Monuments, (UK/USA 2010, 16mm, 30 mins)

Entwistle, Redmond. Footnotes (or 'What About Limits in Art?') (UK/USA 2011, 16mm to HD, 25 mins)

Entwistle, Redmond. Monuments Script, New York, LUX Journal, 2011.

Cranston-Csuri Productions. Demo Reel, 1982. Sourced from http://www.youtube.com/user/VintageCG#p/u/87/ghNjMCHyu5w

Kazan, Elia. The Last Tycoon, Starring Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, 1976. Sourced from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKlHtJjcAz4

#1 Jean Renoir - Parle De Son Art, Jean Renoir interviewed by Jaques Rivette about the technical progress in art. Sourced from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKCrOLcDbjE

#2 Jean Renoir - Parle De Son Art, Jean Renoir interviewed by Jaques Rivette about the technical progress in art. Sourced from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSTbujrDVfI&feature=related