Dark Passage (2015), GCGCA(i)
Dark Passage
Conceptual versus Medium Specific Modernist Formalism
Rothko Chapel, Houston
22 Dec 2015 - 20 Mar 2016
Conceptual art as a movement constituted a series of different forms of negation of the work of art as traditionally conceived. Dark Passage imagines a battlefield upon which competing regimes of art fight for survival, playfully internalising a suspicion of ‘the conceptual’ by tradition, which tends to have a reactionary attitude towards the conceptual aspect of art (and the post-conceptual character of ‘contemporary art’ in general), even though this standpoint ultimately consumes itself like an ouroboros; for it entails a disavowal of its own conceptual status; for all art is conceptual to some degree, just as all conceptual art is to some degree ‘aesthetic’. This battle is envisaged as ending in synthesis - in a curiously mutual melding of conceptual and aesthetic aspects: ‘There can be only one.'
Rothko Chapel of Metaphysics; Dark Passage (2015), GCGCA(i)
Dark Passage recreates scaled versions of the four purportedly emblematic works of passage, forming an interconnected, four-part temporal and material gallery journey through ‘sculpture’.* It refunctions as a battlefield, and engages with elements from the adventure game show Knightmare, which aired on British television from 1987-1994.
After a brief screening interview, gallery-goers are divided into opposing camps: ‘Conceptual’ or ‘Aesthetic’. They are then each fitted with a 'Helmet of Art Justice’ that renders them blind to their surroundings, and enter the Dark Passage from either opposing side (1 or 4), with the aim of navigating through and successfully discovering the sword in the philosophy of art’s stone. The sword is rigged to release only when both a conceptual and an aesthetic hand land upon it at the same time.
*At the end of Passages in Sculpture (1977), Rosalind Krauss gave pride of place to four works figured as emblems of a 'new syntax for sculpture’, marking the achievement of the transformation of sculpture from a static, idealised medium to a temporal and material one.
Yet from another standpoint, these four works constitute an explicit rejection of the medium-specific modernist formalism that Krauss was extending to embrace the three-dimensional art of the 1960s and early 1970s - in order to extend Greenberg's medium-specific modernist formalist project (Greenberg transformed the concept of self-referentiality into that of medium-specificity - medium-specificity means medium self-referentiality).
HIGHartLAND: There Can Be Only One; Dark Passage (2015), GCGCA(i
