Coincidence, Secrets, & Myth

 Dear Friends,

 

I have been charged with the task of summing up our final aims for our group project. The best way I felt to do this was in the form of a letter. I am sure my perspective is limited to my experience of the project and that there are valuable insights that you four have gained from it that I will inevitable leave out, but I will do my best to express what I know of our common intent.

 

There is no doubt for me that this social experiment of sorts has been a success, if not in the ways we originally envisioned. We set out to start a conversation through media. What brought us together was a pigeonhole assessment of our work that brought to light a common interest in the preciousness and importance of everyday life. We were team banal. We, each in our own way, recognized art’s capacity to venerate, communicate, and shift our experience of the ‘everyday’, and we were interested in using the ‘everyday’ as a platform for communication. Site specificity, at the inception of this project, was about the inescapable, yet seldom recognized nuance of public space. Through this space we were interested in making visible (and vulnerable) artefacts of basic personal experience, and therefore to start a dialogue with each other and the general public inspired by a cacophony of personal perspectives. I don’t think any of us foresaw that such an endeavour would foster such a great sense of intimacy between the five of us.

 

The project experienced a shift. Turmoil in the group as to how to define and capsulate the project and the necessity of encouragement and perseverance through great spaces of doubt and estranged worry meant that each of us had to let go of our particular agendas for the sake of a common good. For us, Art became an act of faith. Doubts, instead of being resolved through a structured way of being together, facilitated a bond that negated their need for resolution. The project ceased to be about the space, or what was in it, but about the narrative flowering up from or efforts to communicate through media. The result is a project that talks a great deal about intimacy and communication, but is actually impossible to communicate. The work, instead of being a set of discreet objects or specific acts within a space, is the community of five, our relationship to each other. We are unicorns, hoorah!

 

In this way we have made a work that talks about the [quotidian] divide between an experience and an assumed audience in the art context, and the doomed efforts to express what has manifested as a closed circuit bond. We are not elitists; this project was always open to whoever wanted to participate. I feel sure it was only out of necessity that the five of us committed to this social experiment. Nevertheless, together we share the limitations of methodology that can never truly articulate our experience. We are interested in failing publicly then, as a presentation of some sort is required of us. Through a banal and mass communicate medium that asserts the desubjectification inherent in efforts to present individual experiences to a public, we have created a personal catalogue that means more to us than anyone else.

 

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have spent this time with all of you. I have learned a lot. Not only that, we had a fucking good time. Your individual passions and awarenesses have fed and nourished my own practice, and helped to shape my understanding of relational art. I think you all are the bee’s knees and before I get gushy I will stop typing.

 

Much love

Bet.