BLINDSIDE Summer Studio

Rather then leave the gallery empty over the holiday season this year, Ben Johnson & Nickk Hertzog and Agnes So & Janson Chau were given the keys to BLINDSIDE and, starting from scratch, asked to have an exhibition ready in four and a half weeks, a duration far exceeding the usual two-day installation time. From this Wednesday the public are invited to view the results that both highlight and fracture the boundaries between idea inception, exploration, creation and presentation. 

Studios open - Wednesday 11 January - Friday 13 January 2012, 12 - 6pm 

Ben Johnson & Nickk Hertzog’s work at BLINDSIDE explores the complex relationship between place and context in the studio. The studio echoes the logic of spatial peripheries - it is a complex and organic whole. To remove a garbage bag is just as incongrous an action as removing a painting. The work will be indelibly linked to the edifice of the studio. Johnson and Hertzog’s assembleges cohere into a sort of DIY post apocalyptic desert island, where accumulation and entropy have become implicit in the studio space. 

All documentation is under general suspicion of inexorably adulterating life. For each act of documentation and archiving presupposed a certain choice of things and circumstances. Yet, such a selection is determined by criteria and values which are always questionable, and necessarily remain so. Furthermore, the process of documenting something always opens up a disparity between the document itself and the documented events, a divergence that can neither be bridged nor erased. But even if we managed to develop a procedure capable of reproducing life in its entirety and with total authenticity, we would again ultimately end up not with life itself, but with life’s death mask, for it is the very uniqueness of life that constitutes its vitality.

Modern Shaman: Celebrity vs. Eccentric

For him who’s vacant eyes still dwell on the land of the living. He looked too far, he journeyed too deep. His medicines brought visions both fantastic  and terrifying. His gaze is caught between the world around him and the world beyond it. These people were once shaman. Before artists, before priests, there was only the simple eccentric. A single minded drive towards something we can’t see, he barks and drools in a doorway. Society is no friend to the raving eccentric not since its great sanitised development of celebrity. The eccentric receives our disgust, or worse, our pity. But mostly they receive our non-attention. They create zones of non-interference, of non-witness. They exist in that solely shamanic space beyond the horizon and behind the eyelids. The celebrity exists in a super-social space; heightened attention until their every move is recorded and disseminated. Thus the accepted shaman is mass produced celebrity, the object of both our fascination and disgust. The spectacle makes no room for the anarchic communion of the eccentric. The eccentric is forever barred from society. Shamanic space becomes anti-social space and the eccentric recedes to the fringes. His visions are lost to us now.