Invited by Melissa Canbaz
‘Wonderful Audience Member’ is about being open to the individual member of the audience that is invited to consider their own perceptions as legitimate as the examples they see in front of them. The audience member is thus unpinned from an amorphous entity and detached from a specific attention adjustment predefined by the gallery as an “institution”. Through the gesture of invitation and a particularly dialogical approach, the show aims to suggest different forms of involvement and self-positioning within this setting.
The black figure is formally a “good work”, reminiscent of successful figurative sculpture from the 20th century. The blue sculpture is like a bad drawing. It’s wonky and disproportionate. It is, in its very nature, shoddy. This difference gets crucial considering conventional artistic production and the way things are made. What the audience member is looking at isn’t definitely high culture, just because it is placed in a gallery – they are looking at samples of art. The show is really about perceptions, and being open to perceptual processes. ‘Wonderful audience member I’ is referring to this very attempt to “get it right”.
Books lying around, left on the edge of the plinths in order to suggest human presence and resemble a laissez-faire gesture. That one is here, working and thinking. They are also an affirmation towards the idea of studying, looking, learning. At the same time these books are sculptures made in the same way as the figures – the familiar type of art – suggesting that these figures are from the same process of looking, studying, learning. Just like the easel on top of the plinth, is about how this process of perception can be applied – a conduit to achieving art, if you like. And this idea of the conduit is as important as the final piece, because the conduit is what liberates us.
