LG Williams: 9 + 1 (New) Installations
This press release announces 9 + 1 (New) Installations as a site-specific assault on the Princess Art Center and its surrounding commercial ecology. The works were reportedly made two days before the opening, a detail that converts haste into method and mocks the fetish of studio seriousness. By placing most of the exhibition inside a regional shopping mall and one work outside the visiting artist's luxury apartment, Williams collapses public display, consumer space, artist mythology, and hospitality into one unstable exhibition machine. The catalogue apparatus, complete with essays by Mike Dike and Dr. Xie Zhao Ping, adds fake-scholarly weight to an enterprise that is already testing the absurd limits of institutional framing. The project's radicality lies in treating the mall not as an embarrassing compromise but as the exact place where contemporary art's pretensions can finally be measured.
- DATE:
- September 1, 2002
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Mike Dike; Dr. Xie Zhao Ping
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- Princess Art Center; Montreal; West Island; Perfect Corner Press
- KEYWORDS:
- nine plus one installations; two days before opening as method; mall as real-estate for art; luxury apartment as site; pretension measured at shopping center; fake-scholarly apparatus; haste converted to method; venue as unstable art machine