Spectacle Studio: Words describing corrupted views 2017
Men’s shaving cream painted on museum window
MODEM, Center of Modern & Contemporary Art, Hungary

I was a guest artist at MODEM between May 2 -12, 2017 and was provided a spacious studio space at the front of the museum’s glass enclosure, a glass cube, which just before my arrival they decided to call “spectacle studio”. On my first day, MODEM expressed interest in keeping work(s) produced during the 10 days spent in the studio for their collection, offering to compensate material cost. After requiring information about the collection (location, ownership, whether state or private, list of artists) and was given no answers, I felt inspired as it was important to create a work that is unownable, unmovable, unsellable, a gift that after its removal terminates, without a need for storage.

The resulting work is a thin layer of shaving cream painted on the museum window. Originally meant to function as a projection surface* is now an unused screen emphasizing the displacement of the image, as well as a symbol of lack of transparency and manifestation of an impossible paradox, the location of an unsafe cultural spectacle.

As absurd as the situation, the gift was as much given as it was not: a cold conceptual reflection to that physical and cultural space, a representation of the current normalized culture political glass cage situation that artists, thinkers and cultural organizations navigate.

“The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle,1967

*At night, after museum hours, I projected one of the displaced images of Fracture Analysis for the museum guard and a friend to witness for about 15 minutes.