Put Up Your Dukes!
Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin 18 June – 20 July 2013
the latest Achronological Manor project is Put up your Dukes! an exhibton/pulicaton/performance played out as a visual debate between Gabrielle Amodeo and myself. The project utilised the structure of the Douglas-Lincoln debate format used in the campaign for the Illinois senate in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as the structure for a counterintuitive mode of collaboration.
The moot: In art, as in life, we occupy an ad-hoc middle ground in which the only certainty is the impossibility of certainty.
Put Up Your Dukes! Was played out as an elaborate standoff in which each of us (over)stated our case and elaborated on a claim to common territory. In the build-up to this exhibition new works were developed in a call/response fashion using the idea of nature as a foil, a subject matter and directive, but the debate itself centres around our different methodologies.
Sorensen states:
I am interested in the territory where art abandons good-sense to joyfully embrace the vernacular of the stupid, the obvious, simple, pointless, pleasurable, silly, excessive, lazy, expedient and useless.
Amodeo Proposes:
Labour as it’s own reward / the person who cuts his own firewood warms himself twice / validation through accumulation (being able to cite a big number validates a project) / refer to things obliquely, answer questions with questions
the debate format:
looking down the gallery, in the centre is Garden (JS Affirmative Constructive)
at the back: PODOCARPACEAE/Dacrycarpus – ASTERACEAE/Pachystegia (GA Negative Constructive)
left wall: Resisting Societal Norms (JS Cross-Examination of Negative By Affirmative)
Media room:
Pictures and Things from our Walls (GA Cross-Examination of Affirmative by Negative)
back room:
Fir Tree Small II (JS Affirmative Rebuttal)
Sound and Vision (GA Negative Rebuttal)
A Pile of Boxes (JS Affirmative Rejoinder)
JILL SORENSEN 