This is one of the cooler concepts for a show I’ve heard about in New York recently.  Here are the details:

What would do if you could do anything you wanted and knew you could get away with it? 20 artists from New York, London, and Italy, working in a variety of media were posed this same question. They were asked to make works in which they banished self-censorship and were encouraged to make art that provokes, annoys, and insights outrage. By wearing the mask of anonymity they could put any feelings of consequence aside. The artists, in turn, made works that confronted racism, homophobia, unpatriotic acts, and the sexually taboo.

Please join us Saturday April 11, 2009 at Envoy Enterprises for this one night show.
Opening reception 6pm -9pm with performances by Tough Slutting at Home Sweet Home (directly bellow the gallery)

envoy enterprises
131 Chrystie Street, ground floor
New York, NY 10002
212.226.4555

“To make sense of what is and has been meant by documentary, we need to examine it from three perspectives. As a historical construction, it must be situated within the framework of its contemporary discourses, practices and uses … As part of a larger system of visual communication, as both a conduit and agent of ideology, purveyor of empirical evidence and visual ‘truths,’ documentary photography can be analyzed as a sign system possessed of its own accretion of visual and signifying codes determining reception and instrumentality… Last, we would want to examine the position of documentary photography within the discusive spaces of the mass media (and more recently, within the discursive spaces of the gallery and museum) in order to grasp the role it plays, the assumptions and attitudes it fosters, the belief systems of conforms.”

-Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Annika Eriksson’s Staff At Sao Paulo Biennal (video 1/5, 2002), effectively acts as the conclusion to The Greenroom: Reconsidering The Documentary And Contemporary Art at the Hessel Museum. No, better yet, it acts as the credits. The 12-minute work, projected at near life-size onto a gallery wall, occupying its own room, features [literally], in a single frontal shot, the more than thirty people who each play an integral role in the production of the art exhibition. When I say the art exhibition, however, I am not referring to Greenroom, which curator Maria Lind conceived as an attempt “to explore where the land lies for documentary practices within contemporary art.”¹ Rather, I mean, and I believe Eriksson means, the art exhibition in general, as a social, cultural, and economic product. But this is my interpretation. In fact, the people depicted, who one-by-one step into the frame and introduce themselves – their full names, and their roles in the exhibition – then step into the background, have each been employed to produce the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennal, perhaps South America’s most internationally regarded regular art event. How is it exactly, if the premise for Eriksson’s piece is ostensibly so simple and, relative to many other examples of documentary (art and not art), unmediated, that one can form such an interpretation? It is possible, naturally, because of a contemporary understanding of documentary and artistic practices and the discourses surrounding them; it is also possible because of assumptions about the mechanism of the camera, and in this case the digital video medium; further, it is fostered by the physical situation of the work within a museum exhibition and academic setting. These preconditions are loosely reflected in the three criteria for understanding documentary set forth by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and we should consider, among other things, how Annika Eriksson’s Sao Paulo engages with them. As always, we should keep in mind the triangulated tension between words, pictures, and presentation.

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