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.