Geoffrey Farmer: A Pale Fire

Immediately I’m concerned with the waste of useful furniture, can’t it be put to a better use than being burned in the name of Art?

The moniker of Art takes an object out of its context, removing its use value only to re-present it for us to read its use value back in. The real-world object is neutered (bad/wrong word, suggests sexuality is overriding meaning), the Art object becomes the paradigm of the real.

That’s all well and good, but so what? If the artists activity involves wastefulness, they invite censure from a social/environmental point-of-view. Does an aesthetic bonus outweigh a social penalty?

Certainly this piece engages with some contexts, the artist is said to have an “interest in the latent potential of the gallery as a site for social engagement”.

…the work is advertised as a political action – a sit-in. Here, rather than burning logs in Imbert’s fireplace, furniture is used as fuel. The furniture is amassed in an installation that is slowly transformed through the progressive dismantling and combustion of its individual pieces. Each day these pieces of furniture are set alight using a broadsheet with politically related texts and manifestos.

While the metaphor engaged here of the sit-in could be interesting, the surrounding, ‘real-world’ consequences of the enactment of that metaphor are ignored. I also think it is misplaced to imagine ‘the gallery’ as an effective place for social engagement. My main concern, though, is that the pieces political aspirations are overshadowed by its material reality. And that material reality is a nihilistic waste of resources.

UPDATE 22/2/06: You know, maybe I was being a little harsh on Geoffrey Farmer. I guess the piece is just trying to elicit a response, get a reaction (which it succeeded at). But, if this work wants to be judged as effective politically or socially and not just aesthetically then it has to accept the consequences for meaning inherent in those discourses.

1. Gallery

The Walls of the Gallery

2. Gallery

The Act of Noticing

3. Gallery

The Prisms Channel

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The Walls of the Gallery become more expedient as a bridge across that which divides the courtyard. In the process it takes on the characteristics of the viewers perception of the framing edge of the wall, cutting out wedges of viewed material, in a sculptural sense. These wedges act as prisms laid along-side each other, to channel light along their lengths into the gallery and, ultimately, into the viewers eye. In the courtyard this division turns round the limits of the walls, introducing perspective curving akin to gravitational space.

The Act of Noticing: the first moment of viewing sets up a program of incidences, between the viewer and the viewed. Note: the viewer looks out to the incidences before him. The incidences project back and into the eye of the viewer. The drawing is unrelated to the act of viewing. It tries to understand what you see in relation to what is thought to be there. An imaginative movement from your eye out to the position from which the picture is drawn /or which the picture represent.

The Prisms Channel two ‘world lines’ of light through their material and the material that creates the curve in spatial perception (conceivably this may be a function of the eye-ball). Looking at this arrangement in reality we do not see these bodies but only their composite actions.

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