Clandestine Art-Reality-Adventure: UACAWSACCADB
This solicitation letter announces UACAWSACCADB as a fake global art movement born from mystical retreat, professional flattery, public-health pseudo-science, and unembarrassed erotic attention. Williams addresses the "Distinguished Art Professional" with the language of gratitude and tribute, only to convert curators, collectors, and dealers into participants in a delirious gaze-based artwork. The piece mocks the inflationary rhetoric of participatory art: exhibition, documentary video, book, poster, website, confidentiality, permission forms, and dedicated email addresses all appear as bureaucratic organs of an obscene joke. Its intelligence lies in refusing the art world's usual separation between vision and appetite; looking is treated as primal, institutional, comic, and fatal all at once. What begins as a leering proposition becomes a cruelly accurate model of how professional culture sanitizes desire by calling it research, collaboration, and discourse.
- DATE:
- August 6, 2010
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Michelle Obama; Dr. Karen Weatherby; Kenneth Anger; Stan Brakhage; Leonard Cohen; Gustave Courbet; Eadweard Muybridge
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Estate of LG Williams; UACAWSACCADB; New England Journal of Medicine; YouTube; Get Fit America Program; San Joaquin Valley
- KEYWORDS:
- Distinguished Art Professional flattered and manipulated; fake global movement; mystical retreat as credential; public-health pseudo-science; gratitude weaponized; erotic solicitation as art letter; UACAWSACCADB globalized