The Unfair Fair: Life Live

Friday 22 February 2008

Life Live

ARTIST: Christian Proaño
TITLE: Oral
DESCRIPTION: A broadcast sound environment made in real time into which listeners can enter or leave at will.
12:00 Friday 29 February - 12:oo Monday 3 March 2008
http://giss.tv:8000/chrispunksonico.mp3

Inspired by the slowly changing flow of sound of LaMonte Young and Eliane Radigue, Oral is a sound installation broadcast in real time from Quito to the world. Anyone can tune into it anytime, anywhere.
- Christian Proaño

ARTISTS: Diastolic Murmers (Richard Crow and Adam Bohman)
DESCRIPTION: Live performance. A physical re-presentation of objects and materials (relics) from the action/performance “Live Electronic Dissections” by the audio group Diastolic Murmurs (The ‘original’ live performances will also be available as limited edition CDs.)
Courtesy: Richard Crow/Institution of Rot Archive
(Presentation by Richard Crow with assistant - Time and date to be confirmed).

From an undated early photo session for Diastolic Murmurs (Adam Bohman and Richard Crow) at Institution of Rot, London (circa 1986)
Photo: Ania Dobrowska/Institution of Rot Archive
Courtesy of the artist

Diastolic Murmurs (Adam Bohman and Richard Crow) performing Live Electronic Dissections #3 (28/5/89, ICA, London)
Photo: Nick Barker/Institution of Rot Archive
Courtesy of the artist

Richard Crow performing Live Electronic Dissections #3 by Diastolic Murmurs (28/5/89 ICA, London)
Photo: Unknown/Institution of Rot Archive
Courtesy of the artist

Deeply inspired by Artaud’s writings and the Theatre of Cruelty, the group Diastolic Murmurs (1985 -1994) operated within a physical, visceral sound world given full rein in audio-visual spectacles that employed ‘directly injected’ contact microphones to amplify an array of sound sources and sound objects, including prepared and specially modified ‘instruments’, (pseudo) medical items and hospital paraphernalia.
- Richard Crow

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.