18 December 2008

"The emblem, depicting the image of three people-you, me, him/her holding hands together, symbolizes the big family of mankind."



"In a group, the exchanges are always between the same people, whereas in collaborations, it's occasional: the associations are temporary and more diverse, they disappear and reappear, taking on new forms elsewhere, producing singular situations. Discussion has become an important moment in the constitution of a project; you can enter or leave it at any moment, which also affects the modes of production and allows you to escape a rigid and monomaniacal way of thinking. (...)
"We all have a relationship to the group that varies in intensity. It starts with the groups that form at school, the little gangs, then you never cease moving from group to group, and you keep fine-tuning your relationships with each one; that way you are paradoxically independent and attached at the same time. (...)
"[The group that I began working with in the '80s] didn't have so much to do with the ideological dimension [of the groups of the '70s] as with the dynamics. There were six or seven of us doing interventions in public space. It was a very short experience, but enough to see the limits of a collective, whereas with collaborations, a re-negotiation is always possible. It's a way to keep on learning. When you ground yourself in one form of knowledge, you domesticate it, you polish it. But knowledge should remain rough. To remain that way it has to be fed by a continuous dialogue."
- Pierre Huyghe, in Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Vol. 1.

10 December 2008

This song reminds me of my mam and dad spliting up and no-one giving a shit


Apparently M's dad is designing and building an artificial island
for ferrari off the coast of abu dhabi. Supposedly it will have a
shopping mall on it that will have a roof made of imitation metal
bamboo, printed to look like real bamboo. I may be conflating more
than one project here, but have been promised links. The intention was
to use real bamboo, only in the desert climate it would have dried out
and crumbled away, and also collected a 10cm layer of sand on top, and
to deal with this the owners would have had to employ workers to
constantly patrol the roof and sweep it away. Because the mall will
have enormous TV screens dangling inside displaying advertisements,
the roof has to be counterbalanced by having dangling sculptures
outside, hanging from the eaves. I think I suggested giant pandas
(maybe live ones in cages?) would be appropriate. but I'm not sure how
far this will penetrate the design process. I feel like I'm saying
this more than ever, but you really can't make this shit up. A baroque
acid dream indeed.

The Duck Prostitute


These two have been the principal companions of my enterprise, and the art is indefensible as a whole if it does not make clear the nature of my debt to them. In all those areas where our occupations have been distinguishable during the period in which the art was thought about and made, theirs has furnished my own with its most demanding context and its least uncertain purpose. In view of their close attention to the deficiencies of succeeding tests, I am confident that responsibility for the remaining failings rests with me.