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About three months ago, my brother Harry and I began to discuss a joint curatorial venture. What started as a conversation over a beer at Corner Bistro in NYC recently came to fruition as the Super/Prime PAVILION – a site-specific, independently curated annex to VOLUME at AT1 Projects in Los Angeles.
As we started to toss around some ideas, artist names, logistic questions we kept one thing in mind: ersatz. From the German, ersatz is literally “a replacement.” It is a substitution, and often used to imply an inferior imitation. Clement Greenberg once used the term “ersatz culture,” to mean kitsch. The Super/Prime PAVILION has set out to prove that ersatz is neither negative nor inferior– it is a place beyond materiality where an idea can be simultaneously and equivalently represented.
Working in New Haven and Baltimore respectively, my co-curator and I searched for artists whose work embodied our definition of ersatz. After reviewing her work for RR several months back, I contacted Stacia Yeapanis about the project. We ultimately chose an installation piece titled 90210 House which consists of a framed photograph taken on a trip to california and video video loop of appropriated footage form Beverly Hills, 90210. By juxtaposing appropriated footage with a real-time photograph, Yeapanis creates a dialogue between photography and television, fiction and reality, art and popular culture. There is an implicit battle over familiarity. Are we closer to those establishing shots from a tv show that we watched as children, or the first-person narrative presented by the photograph’s inscription?
Also included in the show were several works from Gary Kachadourian’s Life-Size series. With these pieces, Kachadourian combines the most basic form of artistic creation– scale drawings made with a pencil and paper– with the most common form of mechanical reproduction – a photocopy machine– to create work that is neither basic nor common. His use of quotidian object as subject matter confounds the idea of art as an imitation of life– the art-objects that he creates mimic and then replace that which they depict. He brings our attention to the mundane objects and places that we interact with daily while retaining their ordinary status.
This notion of art that transcends material boundaries, that a substitution is of equal quality to the original became an important part of not only the art that we chose, but in the process of installation. In addition to the general disadvantage of planning a show on the other side of the country, in a city I had never been to, we seemed to face challenges at every turn. I am not referring to the various fender-benders, moving violations and parking tickets that occur when a city kid who just learned how to drive at 22 is forced to spend days at a time in a car, merging on freeways and navigating an unfamiliar town. Those minor setbacks aside, we arrived without access to the apartment space for which we had planned our show– the building is still under construction. We did not have access to the tools or equipment we had expected. We were still waiting on several packages containing the artwork. On top of this all, we were on an endless search for Kogi.
As we declare in our curatorial statement: “By means of appropriation, mechanical reproduction, and transformation: This is our ersatz show.” This statement became more and more true as we rolled with punches, created contingencies for our contingency plans, and made more trips to Home Depot in a few days than I ever thought possible. When our second choice gallery space turned out to not have lights, a third and ultimately perfect option surfaced – a former bookstore in the adjacent building hit the exact right ambiguous tone of an abandoned space with an alternate specific purpose. By means of jet-lag, trips to Home Depot, a lot of tacos, and some truly worthwhile artwork: the Super/Prime PAVILION is our ersatz show.
the Super/Prime PAVILION
part of VOLUME at At 1 Projects
3229 Casitas Avenue
Los Angeles CA, 90039
21 May – 6 June 2010
Tags: AT1 Projects, Brendan Griffith, Brian Randolph, Gary Kachadourian, Harry Gassel, Mathew Lippincott, Molly Danielss, Mylinh Nguyen, Naomi Gassel, Riley Hooker, Stacia Yeapanis, Steven Sarkozy, Super/Prime, The Cloacina Project, VOLUME
Filed Under: Feature Sights
Análise: Super Mario Galaxy 2…
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June 6, 2010 2:29 amWow, interesting stuff!
June 8, 2010 2:05 pm