Take One

by Bill Davenport May 2, 2006

The poster by Josh Smith for Take One at the Glassell School's upstairs project space was a sheet of used newspaper, but it should have been a bag. 25 pieces are chock-a-block in the 12×12 room, and each piece in the show includes something to take away. The total haul is a little over a pound of stuff, mostly literature, but also three compact discs, a penny, a Polaroid photo, a resistor, and a lollipop. A bag would be handy.

Installation shot


The getting is fun and easy, but looking through the swag later is a lot less interesting than taking the things in the first place. I'm keeping just four things: Jay Sanders Ladyshapes/Yacht Rock DVD, T.G. Gibbon's The Last Winner , an untitled letter culled from Jonathan Horowitz's trash pile and, of course, the penny.

Six pieces are primarily writing, stapled to the wall and available to take and read. I'll save you some time by summarizing the contents of the 38 pages of text I discarded and the one I didn't.

David Reinfurt's Post-Master is a biography of Benjamin Franklin, with a couple of less interesting paragraphs about the US postal service and the similarity of modern web publishing with the author/printer/publisher of Franklin's time. 3 pages.

Kayrock and Wolfy Part II...George Washington Was a Terrorist... 2006...Silkscreen on paper...


Seth Price's Dispersion is a tedious, prolix, pretentious, academic treatment of conceptual art even more dour and dry than its subject matter. "Problematic" is used as a noun, as in "Duchamp staked out the problematic." Really. Not complete bullshit, but even I couldn't get through it all. 10 pages.

Privateers: A Sourcebook for an Essay on Piracy by Elizabeth Schambelan is a collection of news excerpts about Indonesian sea pirates and China's disregard of intellectual property rights. It's OK, but repetitive. 13 pages.

The Shooting Starts by T. Christian Miller is an excerpt from his forthcoming book on the Iraq war. It's mildly slanted journalism, an eyewitness account of civilian truckers under fire. Readable and interesting. 7 pages.

Pink and Black by Rachel Kushner is a five-page wallow in obscure, oh-so-poignant childhood memories of islands, revolution. Bad literature. 5 pages.

The Last Winner by T.G. Gibbon is worth keeping. It's a one-page story about a fictional presidential candidate. A rolling powerhouse of words like a good rap lyric.

Two of the best pieces are about giving and taking itself. In Jonathan Horowitz's Recycling Sculpture (World Trade Center Memorial) , a stack of wastepaper a few inches high sits on the floor. It's trash; old newspaper, discarded envelopes, rough drafts of unfinished writings. What you see is what you get. The artist plays with our curious appetite for reading other people's discarded mail. The World Trade Center bit ruins it, of course, but it's easy to ignore.

 

Jonathan Horowitz...Recycling Sculpture (World Trade Center Memorial)...2005...Blue tape and replenished papers...


Next to the trash pile is a worn shoulder bag full of lollipops. It's a brilliant Felix Gonzales-Torres rip-off, the bag filled with candy taken from Gonzalez-Torres piece on display across the street at the MFAH. Naughty, but nice. Testing the limits of institutional generosity.

In the corner, an enigmatic unmarked CD-R is hung over a nail in the wall. As with most of the work in Take One , the contents are better left to the imagination. Placed in a drive, it pops up as an audio CD labeled as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean , but no such luck. It's 27 minutes of dull, rambling audio collage organized by an ominous-sounding entity calling itself the Invisible Hand. Near the end there's some splashing and grunting which might be a walrus, but it's not worth waiting for.

Various artists...Exquisite Corpse...2006...Organized by the Invisible Hand...


Jay Sanders Ladyshapes/Yacht Rock DVD shows why understanding authorship is important to understanding art. Yacht Rock is hilarious. Low quality video is colored to look like fading film stock, complete with faked scratches and leader. Actors in grotesque costumes and hairpieces play musicians like Kenny Loggins, Hall & Oates, and the Doobies with an amateurishness so consistent and effective it must be good acting. But wait; Sanders didn't create Yacht Rock; he's just sampling it. Sanders" piece is about creating a backwards-technological flow in which freely available Internet content is distributed via physical DVDs, a less interesting idea. Knowing who made something is sometimes key to understanding what it is.

The phrase "Take One" isn't an offer; it's a command. We are drowning in free information, and the artists in Take One are hucksters, using the "free giveaway" tactic to attract our attention to their ideas. The most valuable resource we've got is our time and attention; the whole media industry is fighting for it, our friends and families demand it, and we want a little for ourselves. It's got to work both ways: artists are doing us a favor by making art , but we are also doing them a favor by paying attention, and it had better be worth it or we'll quit looking. The show has a refreshingly funky, low tech feel, but the idea of pamphleteering as an alternative means of disseminating information is antique. With a surplus of distribution channels, the problem today isn't how to get the word out; it's whether you have anything to say.

Images courtesy the curator.

Bill Davenport is an artist and writer and was one of the first contributors to Glasstire.

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