other writing

Sentences on Sentences on Conceptual Art, 2010

On Leftism in Art, 2010

artist statements in reverse chronology

It is a truism that a good artwork cannot be made from a bad idea-- and it is this truism with which I want to take issue.  I claim that a concept is not what much conceptual art thinks it is.   A concept cannot preexist a work, and does not exist outside of its instantiation; it is not something indicated or referred to, but embodied (and embodied in such a way as to preclude disembodiment).  The idea of the work might indeed be necessary for an artist in order to begin, but the artwork itself does not care about a good idea.  I suggest that the beginning need not even be conceptually sound at all.  One can reasonably begin from anywhere as long as one is willing to move away from it.

I've heard many artists quoted as trying to produce a given object in the most efficient way possible.  The idea of a shortest distance between two points.  The problem with this strategy is that it requires point B to be previously contained in point A.  Why settle for a terminus that is simply a representation of a start to varying degrees of exactness?  My course between two points is by varying degrees of roundaboutness.  My artwork aims at the cultivation of the ill-conceived.  My shapes are sitting at the cusp of being a shape.  I am not them; they are a not me; they are themselves, and only they can express themselves.

This space bunching and bundling up.  These ideas between objects.  We are a certain shade of boring.  We are shapeshifters.

Brian Edgerton, 5-14-2008 / 6-15-2009

My proposal is to begin from an inessential point--anything that contingently catches fancy--and walk away from it.  Covering it over in its own passing wake, it is folded into its dissolution.  This avoids, I think, the temptation for the artist to become too attached to an idea, or the idea of an idea; of perfect relations and pure vision.  I rarely begin from a blank slate, but more modestly seek to re-cover a populated field.  To pass from an idea, necessarily signifying, to something which that idea is not, which is neither that idea nor any other: an unmooring from mundane fact toward a space of indiscernibility, not even empty at all with nothing there. Abstraction by means of obfuscation.

This is, of course, a gamble, for I then risk making a thing which is of no value to anyone.  A pure nothing, pejoratively.  But this is the way the world makes: with great effort and little foresight: trial without possibility of error.

My aim is towards a depth which resides ever more palpably in the shallows.  A work that navigates the distance between the first and the second, between that which is and that which colonizes that which is.  This disjunct whispers by proxy the fundemental second-order character of all beginnings.  Happening itself is this piling on of distance, always abandoning while never fully leaving behind.  At this rate, one never gets very far at all.  And one must sometimes always say the same thing in order to get anywhere.

The thing of the thing, then, is not something conceived, but unraveled.   It is the work of Time, on whose debris all meaning tautologically rests upon.  Intention has nothing to do with it: it happens on its own.

Brian Edgerton, 1-6-2008 / 7-24-2008

Always beginning from a point wholly arbitrary, each successive iteration away from this point simultaneously reinforces it.  This double movement secures an essence, implicit from the beginning but only so after the fact.  Between the point of departure and the point of termination the work becomes what it is about.  Simply about what it is about, it is about its becoming of itself.  The "aboutness" of this movement, however--not being retroactively traceable--is at the same time invisible.  Accusations of obscurantism are not, then, unwarranted.

But what is obscured is useless, not a key to anything.  The work exists not as its conceived, but as the remnant of its concept's obfuscation; as the indeterminate in-between of the passage.  Not the passage from point a to point b, but the passage into that which is created in passing.  It is a solipsism not of the artist, but of the work itself.  An artwork always the same saying of itself, as the saying of nothing, made available through the simple saying of saying, itself.   And through this passage of the artwork into itself, Time thereby expresses itself, as it always does: the archeaology of its formations.  

(A stubborn refusal to see the forest for the trees; the world has a mind of its own.)
One only ever consists of the residue of the covering over of one's own tracks.

Brian Edgerton, 9-3-2007 / 1-6-2008

The earth is a quite dumb creature, blindly producing itself.  Its stupidity, however, is a quite profound stupidity.  It is the blind and meandering stupidity that one can only hope to emulate with the crude mechanisms of representation.

There is much more to thought than that which occurs within the confines of the cranium.  It is, most basically, an interaction, while knowledge is the record of this transaction.  A brain, then, as a site of thought, is unique not in the kind of interactions that occur, but simply in their density, and in their ability to register and fall back upon themselves through recollection as well as then to inject themselves back into the world of which they are a reflection.

A guiding principle in my work is to attempt to fall back below the representational system of knowledge into the stupider, yet infinitely more expansive transactional system of thought.  An impossibility that yields only the tiniest of glimpses beyond ego and personization.  My work is an activity through which I attempt to follow through on this ethic of the wanderer.  The advantage of this kind of work is that it does not demand inspiration; just a small step outward and its correction.  Every step, a wandering away from and its retraction (but of course the backwards into which one retracts is not the same place he left behind).  The work emerges from my interaction with it, a thought, as dumb as I can make it.

Brian Edgerton, 7-15-2007 / 8-27-2007

I allow myself to digress: decomposing materials, a transmigration occurs.  A series of consecutive sequences, each iteration a drifting from the previous.  To guide this process and to follow it at the same time is to wander.

The final object is the mark of this journey, demarcating its trajectory (--a trail of breadcrumbs).  A path that has been traced in the dirt forms a picture.  The picture does not determine the path, but vice versa.  Neither is a product reducible to its point of departure.

Meaning in art is a paranoid fantasy.

However:
Just because everything is meaningless does not mean that nothing is meaningful.

To clarify:
Simply because there is no meaning does not mean that there is no meaning.  There is an infinite between any two points.  A thought is essentially a shape.

Brian Edgerton, 7-11-2006 / 5-13-2007