Brookhart Jonquil
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Work from On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox (where each of the six pages of Bell’s Theorem is crumpled up identically) and Untitled (Essay Without Words no. 1 + no.2).
“Brookhart Jonquil’s work, On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox, confounds our sense of time and space, working off the assumption that crumpling a piece of paper is a singular act, performed in a specific time and a particular space. By presenting six mimetically crumpled papers (Bell’s Theorum whose content is inaccessible to us and seem like remnants of cast off ideas), one is led to question the evidence, and wonder if the same action is happening in different spaces, repetitively, simultaneously or somehow entangled.
Use Value and Access in Contemporary Art
In Das Kapital, Karl Marx makes the distinction between use-value and other, more abstract kinds of value, including exchange and labor value.1 Indeed, use-value is only one particular form of value. Something need not have use-value to have exchange value, and vice versa. Art is often seen as having no use-value whatsoever, despite typically having an exorbitant amount of commodity value. Then what does one do with art when it specifically challenges its own usefulness, incorporating materials from the so-called “useful” world? This question has been frequently raised in art history by Cubist collages, Dada and neo-Dada assemblages, postminimalist sculpture, and continues to be as persistent as ever. The artists in this exhibition enter this dialogue in their own unique ways, complicating the issue through the themes of labor, reclamation, and social critique. However, perhaps the most prescient issue they tackle is mediation’s role in how we defining value and usefulness. It is only through the distance of mediation that we can ask ourselves what these terms mean and how they apply to contemporary art. It is through the mediation of an object’s “art” status that the useful is redefined.” – excerpts from the catalog Usefulness: Construction, De-construction, Reconstruction by Cecilia Vargas and Greg Stuart