The Unfair Fair: From one to the other

Wednesday, 27 February 2008

From one to the other

ARTIST: Walead Beshty
TITLE: Untitled (Museum Museum)

Click on image to enlarge

ARTIST: Carla Zaccagnini
TITLE: Museu das Vistas
DATE: 2002-04 ongoing
DESCRIPTION: A collection of drawings mediated by discourse

Collaborators until December 2007: Roberto EcheverrÌa (Rincón, Puerto Rico), Tamara EspÌrito Santo (São Paulo, Brasil), Larinca Lobos (ValparaÌso, Chile), Cassius Clay (Florianópolis, Brasil), Mario Arieta (Mexico City, Mexico), Juan Carlos Hernández Sierra (Medellin, Colombia), Jorge William Gallo MejÌa (Medellin Colombia), Juan Galvis (Medellin, Colombia), Nevio Alonso Salinas MejÌa (Medellin, Colombia), Ida Bjöns (Stockholm, Sweden), Anna Giertz (Stockholm, Sweden), Lotta Jarlsdotter (Stockholm, Sweden), Kerstin Ahlgren (Stockholm, Sweden)

This project, initiated in 2004, consists of a mechanism for constituting a collection of drawings of views mediated by discourse. These drawings are made by police artists, according to descriptions of views provided by any person willing to take part in the project. Each of these drawings in made on auto-copying paper, the original graphite drawings are given to describers while the MdVcollects the copies. The idea is that the resulting archive testifies to the ways in which landscape becomes a mental image and how this mental image can become discourse and be translated to drawing. By means of the dialogue established during this process and of what is possible to communicate in this way, these images can be shared and made visible.
-Carla Zaccagnini

ARTIST: Carl Trahan
TITLE: Untitled (erased drawings)
DATE: Work-in-progress. 2007-2008

Friends of different origins were asked to do a drawing on a given piece of paper with different words—often used to describe translation—as a starting point (trust, treason, incorporation, annexation, fidelity, otherness, transparency, mediation, double). A description of each drawing was written and then the drawings were erased. Their description were finally inscribed on a similar surface, using blue carbon paper.
-Carl Trahan

Participants:
Anne-Claire Budin (France)
Sylvie Cotton (Canada)
Anke Dessin (Germany)
Kasper Muttonen (Finland)
Carla Zaccagnini (Brazil)

ARTISTS: It’s Our Pleasure To Serve You
TITLE: WHEN YOU SEE ME AGAIN IT WON’T BE ME / WOULD YOU LIKE SOME COFFEE? DATE: 2008

When You See Me Again it Won’t Be Me is a series of interrelated events and collective demands. It purposefully includes all fields of creative production and seeks to invite an infinitely growing number of participating artists and collectives. A magazine under the name When You see Me Again It Won’t Be Me was produced by Kerstin Braetsch and Adele Roeder for The Announcement and for Would you Like some Coffee?

It’s Our Pleasure To Serve You
Is not a dance group
Is a constant demand for meetings and associations
Extension of music, movement, painting and voice
Signs of constant territorial creations
In search of optics and fantasies
Desiring obstacles, undoing the chains, asking how to screw vibrations
Looking for codes of arms and legs
It’s our pleasure to come closer and break apart
-It's Our Pleasure To Serve You

About

This blog catalogues the inaugural UNFAIR FAIR, which took place in Rome from Friday 29 February to Monday 3 March 2008. The first UNFAIR FAIR project was a sort of event, situation, exhibition, intervention, action and infiltration timed to coincide with two new contemporary art fairs in Rome - ARTEcontemporaneamodernaROMA and ROMA (The ROAD TO CONTEMPORARY ART). The UNFAIR FAIR is in no way formally associated with these art fairs, though it does have a strategic relation to the mainstream economy they represent. Whereas the raison d'être of the contemporary art fair may be characterised by maximization and accumulation, the conditions of the UNFAIR FAIR relate more comfortably to the states of minimization and disintegration. The aim of the UNFAIR FAIR is to show the process of artistic production and transitional art works that index broader practices by each of the invited artists.
Click here for further information

The Principle of Equivalence - Well done, badly done, not done

In 1966, Robert Filliou proposed that the world economy no longer be considered from a political angle, but rather from a poetic point of view, so that work as pain would become work as play. From 1968, he developed his Principle of Equivalence - the principle of the equality in value of the Well Done, the Badly Done and the Not Done. Filliou proposed an unfinished work, by essence not done, but in the process of being done, realised in a state of "Permanent Creation" - "to decide nothing, to choose nothing, to want nothing, to possess nothing, fully awake, sitting quietly, doing nothing."

Going, going gone for ... how much?

The highest price ever paid for a Francis Bacon (£14 million), for a photograph (an Andreas Gursky, 1.7m)... all auction records were shattered in London last week. But who is buying art at these prices - and, frankly, is it worth it? Carole Cadwalladr went in search of the top bidders.

The Observer
Sunday February 11, 2007
Click here to read the article

Silly money

5 Dec 1766
Date of first sale held in Pall Mall, London by James Christie, founder of Christie's

$104.168,000
Record sale at a fine art auction: for Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe, May 2004, Sotheby's, New York

£186,645,960
Value of total sales realised last week at Sotheby's, London

40
Record number of days for an auction sale (for Duke of Buckingham's collection at Stowe House by Christie's in 1848)

£2.51bn
Total global arts sales by Christie's in 2006

85
Number of works sold for over £1m last week at Sotheby's and Christie's, London

£1.7m
The record price for a photograph sold at auction (Andreas Gursky's 99 Cents II, Diptychon sold last week at Sotheby's, London)

£70.4m
Total revenue from Christie's Post War and Contemporary Art Sale last Wednesday. This broke the record set by Sotheby's just 24 hours earlier for a contemporary art auction in Europe.