'The Decade 2010–2020'. The museum as hostage to fortune.
An Endless Supply #12
Exhibition
17 April to 14 May 2010
The Pigeon Wing, London
Featuring: John Baldessari, Simon & Tom Bloor, Bernat Daviu, Book Works, Sophie Dutton,The Happy Hypocrite, Will Holder, Hannah James, James Langdon, Jeff Nuttall, Toom Tragel
Curated by Harry Blackett and Robin Kirkham
“I erased the de Kooning not out of any negative response.”
— Robert Rauschenburg
‘‘The decade 2010-2020’. The museum as hostage to fortune’ is a quote taken from an interview with Art & Language in 1991, in which Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin discuss a series of paintings that address ‘the fatuously necessary cultural observance which is to constantly wonder ‘what’s next?’’. The interview, and other output by Art & Language from this period such as Study for Impressionism Returning Sometime in the Future II, 1984, reasons that ‘what’s next’ is inevitably informed by what’s been before. It is this forward-looking looking back that centers ‘The decade 2010-2020’, an exhibition of works by artists, designers and editors who negotiate existing artworks, texts and models of production.
The forms of the selected works span performance art, architectural structures, participatory events and, predominantly, printed matter, journals and artist’s books. Through the act of appropriation ambiguous relationships emerge between artist and source: Simon & Tom Bloor have produced a print that uses Barbara Hepworth’s 1969 sculpture Disc With Strings (Moon) to celebrate legacies of imagined vandalism; John Baldessari’s subversion of Sol LeWitt in Baldessari sings LeWitt, 1972, is further extended by an accompanying 40-page song book by Estonian designer Toom Tragel; Obscure publishing histories inform both Will Holder’s and The Happy Hypocrite’s modi operandi; A plywood screen installed in The Pigeon Wing by Bristol-based artist Hannah James blurs craft and minimalism; Bernat Daviu’s series of apron’s dedicated to iconic painters of the twentieth century are monuments coloured by humour. ‘The decade 2010-2020’. The museum as hostage to fortune speculates on complex exchanges and historical re-arrangements to challenge the notion of a linear ‘what’s next’, and all that it might represent at the foot of this decade.
