From Depiction to Event, From Posed to Unposed and Back

A thrust of contemporary art can be described as unbounded by the reign of depiction and marked by continued openness; to forms, materials, situations and contexts. In this sense the art practitioner works to situate the possibility of art, to invent its possibility, to put under the aegis of art, all forms and situations.  Her role is to produce the very event of art. 

Where and when does art happen? How do artists understand that they are inside the event of art, that indeed they are making art?  

In his essay, Depiction, Object, Event Jeff Wall gives a very exacting and concise history of the reductive program of conceptual art that then leads perhaps surprisingly to an extraordinary opening to the possibilities and forms of art. 

I hope to give you a sense of how to read or take pleasure in some of these practices by seeing them as setting up the very event of art.  But such an event must create a memory for itself. 

Images give us a complex of clues to begin to explore this idea of art as event. For these images are not the work of art themselves. They're simply documents and documents can be anything but simple. 

Numerous artists will use the photograph as documentation of actions. The are not constructing the event of a picture, but using photography to document an event.  

There is no interest per se in light, in the inherent nature of the optics of the camera, but the action in front of the camera. The camera is like a mobile stage. It delimits any space for action. It turns everything into performance. 

When I spoke about the post conceptual image, it was with this idea of the image that situates itself, and its making in the expanded realm of art that comes from understanding of the advance of the readymade and the second avant gardes of minimalism and conceptual art. It knows that the possibility of art is everywhere and that is art is creating the event. 

There is in this a modality of being in the world where life forms and art forms intersect each other, become each other. 

Photography here is performance, a body in space, in the social, in the realm and discursive of the everyday photographic. A sculpture of chance, indeterminacy, instructions, restraints and repetition,  a kind of happening.

Art is an event of materials, audiences, institutions, cultural practices, representations – and artists situate, displace and refigure all of these to create the event of art.

Contemporary art is an event of thought and practice and the pleasure of it is taking that event with you in life. This is not to say that the realm of depiction and objects does not still rule the the global art market but that the self-critique of art used in your experience of the world opens self and social understanding. 

The artist moves between maker and conceiver of situations, from the creation of objects or tableaux, to instructions to be carried out by visitors, the performance script as an art form, instructions for fabrication, the trace and its supplement, exhibition as instructions and objects. Depiction and events.