Basket - not Basket
10 Sep - 08 Oct 2011
Then came cleromantic botanomancy, subdivided into favomancy, practiced with several white beans and a black bean, as well as the disciplines of rhabdomancy and belomancy, in which wooden rods were used. She had nothing against any of these arts and hence nothing to say about them.
BASKET - NOT BASKET
10 September - 8 October, 2011
“Basket” was the name of Gertrude Stein’s dog – a large white poodle.
There were several poodles and several “Baskets”, at least two in fact, or even three, a poem titled “Basket” and one or two theories about this odd choice.
“Basket” actually refers as much to problems of identification – the “Baskets” are interchangeable – as to the work of language itself – the basket in which words rise up. But the said dogs, which incidentally lived in France, were named precisely “Basket”
dans le texte. Why did Stein give her big white poodles this name? Naming was her job. And if we reckon that “naming is a call”, because “the word calls things, tells them to come here”*, we can see how quintessential it was for Stein that, in answering its name, the dog could appear both in her sentences and on her knees.
In this light, “Basket” is an invitation to come here – a word with no (French) translation even though appropriated for the purposes of this show. And “Basket – not basket” becomes the space of equivocation** – a playful formula which can embrace the familiar content brought in by artists: collections, geometry, associations, accumulations, fictions, repetitions, experiences and models. For “Basket – not basket” brings together artists who, oddly, deal with equivocation, that abstract space defined by divergences between different things which have the same name. Otherwise put, artists work precisely where it is a question of observing things from many different perspectives and, in addition, from the perspectives of the things being observed. What happens when the observed do observe? When the classified do classify? The inhabitants of “Basket – not basket” reverse questions and viewpoints alike. They naturally invite betrayal, deformation and transformation of our own conceptual systems. It is regularly a matter of metamorphoses. Experimental architecture rubs shoulders with documentary sculpture, narrative models, analytical drawings, scientific fictions, magical objects and didactic operas. The various methodologies, operations and forms introduced by Jean-Pascal Flavien, Christoph Keller, Benjamin Seror, Kristina Solomoukha, Seulgi Lee, Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, which are usually based on lengthy experiments, explore the interval between different language games and thus produce or provoke many over-interpretations.Elfi Turpin, july 2011
*Roberto Bolaño, 2666, Barcelona, Ed. Anagrama, 2004
**Martin Heiddeger, Acheminement vers la parole (1953-59), Paris, Gallimard, 1976
***cf. Perspectivism according to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in Métaphysiques cannibales, Paris, Puf, 2009
10 September - 8 October, 2011
“Basket” was the name of Gertrude Stein’s dog – a large white poodle.
There were several poodles and several “Baskets”, at least two in fact, or even three, a poem titled “Basket” and one or two theories about this odd choice.
“Basket” actually refers as much to problems of identification – the “Baskets” are interchangeable – as to the work of language itself – the basket in which words rise up. But the said dogs, which incidentally lived in France, were named precisely “Basket”
dans le texte. Why did Stein give her big white poodles this name? Naming was her job. And if we reckon that “naming is a call”, because “the word calls things, tells them to come here”*, we can see how quintessential it was for Stein that, in answering its name, the dog could appear both in her sentences and on her knees.
In this light, “Basket” is an invitation to come here – a word with no (French) translation even though appropriated for the purposes of this show. And “Basket – not basket” becomes the space of equivocation** – a playful formula which can embrace the familiar content brought in by artists: collections, geometry, associations, accumulations, fictions, repetitions, experiences and models. For “Basket – not basket” brings together artists who, oddly, deal with equivocation, that abstract space defined by divergences between different things which have the same name. Otherwise put, artists work precisely where it is a question of observing things from many different perspectives and, in addition, from the perspectives of the things being observed. What happens when the observed do observe? When the classified do classify? The inhabitants of “Basket – not basket” reverse questions and viewpoints alike. They naturally invite betrayal, deformation and transformation of our own conceptual systems. It is regularly a matter of metamorphoses. Experimental architecture rubs shoulders with documentary sculpture, narrative models, analytical drawings, scientific fictions, magical objects and didactic operas. The various methodologies, operations and forms introduced by Jean-Pascal Flavien, Christoph Keller, Benjamin Seror, Kristina Solomoukha, Seulgi Lee, Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, which are usually based on lengthy experiments, explore the interval between different language games and thus produce or provoke many over-interpretations.Elfi Turpin, july 2011
*Roberto Bolaño, 2666, Barcelona, Ed. Anagrama, 2004
**Martin Heiddeger, Acheminement vers la parole (1953-59), Paris, Gallimard, 1976
***cf. Perspectivism according to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in Métaphysiques cannibales, Paris, Puf, 2009