Title: In the Usual Direction of Travel
Materials: Div.
Technique: Div.
Size: Div.
When: June 2015
Where: MFA Final Exhibition, Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Photos: Ayat Gali and Ole Brodersen
My contribution to the MFA final exhibition at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Medium and Material based Art at the departement of Art and Craft. I used different approaches in regard of materials and techniques and presented my works as a total installation.
Made-Ready
What is a »made-ready«? hÅkon gÅre came up with the neologism, which might be dened as a cross between the readymade and the relational. While gÅre uses found objects (aluminium foil, candle sticks, even the left-over materials from a fellow artist’s project), he prefers non-planned and participatory works, which turn the audience and its surroundings into each work’s most decisive medium. In short, the made-ready is not so much prefabricated as prepared to be shaped by a public in a specic place.
The Objectified Idea (2014) –an airy sculpture made with metal wire and sealed in transparent plastic wrap – was unwrapped only after a casual vote among the viewers who were invited to test direct democracy in the white cube. Or perhaps to transform the virtual Likes of social media into the bodily actions of a group of people standing in the same place at the same time. Indeed, some of gÅre’s mass-manufactured products –aluminium foil and plastic wrap as well as sandpaper and masking tape –suggest a kind of interface: a common exible boundary that responds to the surface of an object and to the touch of a human hand. Since the artist tends to invite viewers to add the nishing touch to his works – and to debate their interventions as a work-in-progress – the results become the material records of accumulative collective actions.
Moreover, gÅre may treat his own works as made-readys by remaking them all over again with a new audience in a new setting. The artist allows us to realise a novel scenario: what if clicking Like not only produced the statistics of hits but had all the possibilities of an on-going artistic process: made with a paintbrush, chisel or pen?
Jennifer Allen, curator of The Usual Direction of Travel
