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Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) 1997
Francis Al˙s
1997
photographic documentation of an action, Mexico City - video, 5 minute loop
Courtesy the artist / David Zwirner, New York
Callum Innes
Peter Liversidge
Iran do Espírito Santo
Cornelia Parker
Alexander & Susan Maris
Francis Al˙s
Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing
13 February 2009 - 28 March 2009
Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing takes its title from a work by the Belgian born artist Francis Al˙s. In his short film Paradox of Praxis I, the artist pushes a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City: at 9.15am he is battling with the traction of a huge weight, by lunchtime he is shuffling it with his feet, and at 6.47pm all that remains is a small wet stain on the pavement.
The theme of transformation, poetic by definition but also a little subversive, is central to Al˙s’s work and to that of all the artists that are gathered in this exhibition. It manifests in different ways: in the near violence of a Callum Innes painting, the surface dissolved as well as applied; in the shift between grandeur and banality in Iran do Espirito Santo’s black granite forms; in Maris’ painting, made with the burnt ashes of Jacques Derrida’s 1978 treatise The Truth of Painting – one read and one unread copy – bound into acrylic medium; in the reverse alchemy of Cornelia Parker’s flattened silver objects; and in the metamorphic potential of Peter Liversidge’s floral tribute, the letters picking out a phrase that echoes the paradox of Al˙s’s endeavour and perhaps provides an alternative title for the exhibition: One Man’s Vulgarity is Another’s Lyric.* In all these works there is a balance between absence and presence… between the idea and the object… between what isn’t there as well as what is; the space between things in which transformation occurs.
This exhibition is the first to make use of both Gallery I and Gallery II.
*One Man’s Vulgarity is Another’s Lyric refers to the arrest of a man for wearing a jacket in an American court emblazoned with the words: fuck the draft. He was charged with breach of the peace, but found not guilty.
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