“How to get free gifts from artists – an attempt at deconstructing the obligations of sculpture.”
Let me explain. I have started a new project as Animateur in Residence at Fabrica in Brighton. Part of the Summer Exhibition that Jonathan Swain is project managing (and covering in his Projects Unedited Blog).
My brief for the project was, as is the nature of all things Fabrica, refreshingly considered to give latitude and permission to the artist, Me. Recognising a rare freedom I grabbed the opportunity and then floundered around for a while trying to cope with the responsibility of defining my own prison.
As you do, I rather arbitrarily settled on a starting point that appeared out of nowhere – which I shall cover in subsequent posts no doubt.
The Immediate need to develop a title, for publicity and such, led to me rather broadly defining what I will do as "an exploration of sculpture, the object and its exchanges with those that experience it". Hence the second part of this blogs title.
The first part of the title is directly influenced by an article on Blog search engine optimisation that I read recently – which stated that blogs that ‘offer things’ get more readers. Who could possibly resist such wisdom. There is also another reading, that when you encounter sculpture you always take something away with you – this is the key notion for my handling of the project. Finally to wrap it all into a neat little conceptual bundle and end this rather hurried post – The Gift, a work by Marcel Mauss begins to lay a framework for the exploration.
