Glossed Over appears as a large-scale sampled text in white gloss finish vinyl that explores critical understandings and framings of the roles of power, participation, and ethics in relation to art and its institutional contingencies. Sentences drawn from a series of writers including Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciere, Chantal Mouffe, and Sol Lewitt, among others, are stitched together to create a winding statement on the embedded challenges in which contemporary gallery spaces (and the art contained within them) are necessarily implicated, while the emphases added to the texts creates a secondary entry point into the work. The text could be read as a caption, response, critique, or commentary on the context and potentially hidden frameworks of support, antagonism, or compromise within which the gallery space exists. The books from which these texts are drawn will be catalogued and available for reference at MOCCA.
This work appeared in the exhibition, TBD, curated by Su-Ying Lee.
The text read as follows:
References from Glossed Over:
1. See Jean Baudrillard’s The Agony of Power (pg 24, Semiotext(e), 2010).
2. See We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change by Myles Horton and Paolo Freire (edited by Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, pg 206, Temple University Press, 1990) for the extended conversation from which this particular quote by Paolo Freire is selected.
3. See Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (pg 27, Vintage Books, 1995).
4. See Dispossession: The Performative in the Political by Judith Butler, Athena Athanasiou (pg 95, Polity, 2013) for more on the conversation from which this quote by Judith Butler is selected.
5. See Chantal Mouffe’s The Return of the Political (pg 12, Verso, 1993).
6. See Markus Miessen’s incredibly useful The Nightmare of Participation, (pg 244, Sternberg Press, 2010).
7. See Jacque Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator (pg 14, Verso, 2009).
8. See Ben Davis’ collection of essays, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (pg 28, Haymarket Books, 2013).
9. See Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (pg 132, Verso, 2012).
10. See Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, as featured in Verksted No. 11, 2009 (pg 58, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, 2009).