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ARCHIVED 02/14/03 Guide to Trust No. 2
at the Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsFebruary 9 - April 21, 2002 "I'm completely alone. Not to raise my solitude over anyone else's. It's just scary sometimes. That's all I can say about that, sorry it's vague." excerpt from "Guide", published in 1997 by Grove Press. Based on "Guide", a novel by Dennis Cooper, and using international art to create an international dialogue, this project is an attempt to study the way visual language and fiction functions, a mix of the artful and the vernacular, a search into its various limitations and abilities - or lack thereof - to seduce. This project brings together the competing strains of intellectualized and aestheticized craft, while smartly exchanging different solutions for the same context. HOW? Each invited artist is asked to translate the complexity and wealth of ideas from 'Guide' into a visual form, and in some cases into a musical form. The artist needs to create a work specifically for the exhibition. "Guide" is one book of a five book cycle that began with ‘Closer' and ended with "Period". Cooper considers the cycle as a whole piece that resembles "a novel slowly being dismembered down to nothing". WHAT? Starting from a no-nonsense practicality, Guide To trust No2 will be an absurd riot of obnoxious visual stimulation, at the same time causing visitors' eyes to buzz, their heads to spin and providing a meditative-like balance. Conceptual confusion, symbolic representation and ordered geometry are all part of an ingenuous fragmentation that will be united by contemporary artists. DENNIS COOPER Dennis Cooper is notorious for sparsely written tales of lost teenagers and predatory adults laced with sexual explicitness and unnerving morbidity. He was once described by a critic as Georges Bataille trapped in Disneyland. He is the one who puts an ever empty, swallowing loneliness to words; who succeeds in giving a seductive yet dazzling complex image of contemporary urban life, its alienated loneliness and gruesomeness. He offers a swallowing look into the universal territory of obsession, need and possession. The combination of death, pop stars, hallucination, reality and sex all result in love and indifference walking hand in hand. The overall tone is one of distance, because anything else would be unbearable. By describing nihilism in a very accurate way, Cooper fills in Nietzsche's rational theories of the term by describing how nihilism is not about a shortage of feelings, but about having too much of them. WHO? list of artists: ricci albenda, lisa beck, huma bhabha, dike blair, anuschka blommers/niels schumm, jesse bransford, alex brown, sico carlier, beatrice cussol, jimi dams, sue de beer, bert de beul, lorenzo de los angeles, roberto deluna, david dupuis, vincent fecteau, jason fox, margi geerlinks, vincent geyskens, anthony goicolea, janine gordon, sam gordon, erik hanson, risk hazekamp, scott hug, kinke kooi, michael lazarus, miranda lichtenstein, john mc cafferty, cameron martin, ives maes, david moreno, bobbie oliver, philippe perrot, jerry phillips, peter rudolph, bill scanga, vincent szarek, john tremblay, lily van der stokker, guy vanbossche, torbjorn vejvi, b. wurtz. for more information on the first site of Guide to Trust No. 2, visit the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts website. FULL COLOR CATALOGUE AVAILABLE english 8 x 5"/ 20,5 x 13 cm 44 pages double folding cover containing artist's statements ISBN 0-9720113-0-7 |
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