PART 2: WORKS, WORKS, WORKS (PHANTASMS OF WORKS)

Collection of texts, gathered while staying at Brunakra Contemporary, Gislöv Sweden,  + performative talk and mini-workshop, Konstitutet, Malmö 2019.

What are artists’ phantasms of perfect works? What are we desperate for? What do we dream of, when we think of making a huge work (a dream almost every artist entertains)? How we imagine tiny works? What precise concepts – known and preconscious – do we entertain when we speak of poetic, daring, or consequent works? What ideals do we have in mind? What are the impulses, the perceptions, the hunches that get us going? What ideas about working processes and states of being passive and active are connected to these ideas on works.

The lecture performance consisted in reciting lists of characteristics and phantasms to different forms of work (big, small, minimal, crass, consistent, poetic …). The motives contradicted each other, changed the level of reference, mirrored each other … After a time, the audience was allowed to decide whether to continue and which topic would be dealt with next, with the lists becoming more fragmentary. Simple projected graphics allowed the visitor to see where in the particular order you were. In a subsequent mini-workshop, the visitors questioned each other about their fantasies of future work.

Read an Excerpt!