outline

Here is the account of the book, written in December 2011:

 

This is a demonstration

Landmark Seizures is the strata of works by five artists and writers, printed in blue soy based ink and bound rather crudely together with some staples. Instability and the need to negotiate or wield a hidden unknowable material is a common concern within these works. Images and language are not simply faltering and flawed but used as such to a means beyond themselves alone. Rather than a play on the surface each artist here involved is trying to deal with something underneath.

 

If things are unstable, as they undoubtedly are, then among the strategies to deal with this involve perhaps a mutual de-stabilising. However, historical attempts have demonstrated that it is not enough to simply scatter the pieces in protest against the tyranny of reason and ideology. Equally we have been shown that it is not enough to offer commentary upon the indistinction between scattered and ordered pieces. The artists who’s work makes up Landmark Seizures are engaged in different ways with the uneasy acts of poiesis in which their own agency operates alongside an awareness of the raw material they deal with and its inherent potential for generative disorder.

 

Ultimately though, it is important to remember that Landmark Seizures is just a demonstration. The standardisation of its form, the limiting of artists working within video, performance, sculpture to 6 pages of monotone print is an intentional hobbling of the above described processes. Landmark Seizures is both an object and a proposal for (but not a representation of) work outside itself. A combination of super-works not yet realised across five artists in a space as yet undetermined.

 

The hidden unstable space of Landmark Seizures is the unstable exhibitions that it will become at locations yet to be fixed.