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.