LG Williams: Closed, Ala Moana Mall, Honolulu, HI
This press release relocates Williams's Closed project into the retail theater of Ala Moana Mall, turning a luxury corridor into a stage for art-world absurdity and consumer fatigue. The work is framed as a commission of wildly disproportionate consequence: a twenty-dollar intervention somehow expected to produce controversy, recognition, and mall traffic. The text weaponizes the language of public art, sponsorship, and "wow factor" against the mall's Gucci-Prada-Fendi-Chanel economy, exposing how easily commerce borrows avant-garde aura when it needs attention. Williams's practice is described through photography, drawing, text, video, performance, sculpture, and installation, but the real medium here is the corridor itself--an expensive passage where culture and shopping become indistinguishable. The piece is funny, nasty, and exact: contemporary art is invited into the mall not to redeem it, but to prove that the mall was already an exhibition of desire, vacancy, and managed absurdity.
- DATE:
- April 3, 2009
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Paul Aspen; Sally P. Hole; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Samuel Beckett
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- Ala Moana Shopping Center; Ala Moana Mall; Gucci; Prada; Fendi; Chanel; Sierra Nevada
- PLACES:
- Honolulu
- KEYWORDS:
- Ala Moana Mall as public art stage; twenty-dollar commission as crisis; Gucci-Prada-Chanel as foil; wow factor demanded of nothing; retail corridor as institutional space; Wittgenstein and Beckett in mall