Conference Call in the Waiting Room

In a world where people want choices, but not too many, there has been an increasingly habitual trend of creating dichotomies between labor and production, legibility and tactility, the personal and the political, the empirical and the theoretical. Works of art embody each of these qualities and concerns, but art as a general form or practice is more nuanced than these dualistic dynamics that are routinely set up to describe it. Yet works of art are casually used in exhibition spaces, textbooks, lectures, and seminars as coded signifiers to prove a point, to persuade viewers or readers into buying the work of art, buying into the work of art, or at the very least caring about the idea behind the work of art. This is the objective of academics, curators, collectors, consultants, dealers, scholars, and anyone who generally has some sort of vested interest in the work of art…that is, signifier…that is, work of art. This is the business of art, which isn’t so far off from the art of business.

Andrew Norman Wilson and Georgia Dickie’s works display cognitive confirmation that there is room for alternative models of thinking, viewing, making, presenting, and debating. What happens if the discursive becomes recursive? What happens if the calculated and clinical becomes intuitive, or vice versa? Why can’t intuition be calculated? It can be. Formalism can be funny. Humor can be serious.

Art history tends to be short-sighted, and art-viewing tends to be momentary. Wilson and Dickie both use these tendencies to their advantage, demanding a more sustained engagement by asking oblique questions through overt presentation. These seemingly disparate yet symbolically connected works, contextualized together, challenge our associations with certain types of imagery, objects, processes, and properties, thus challenging our understanding of how these things can materialize in a studio, office, assembly line, media center, online, etc.

Art is the one instance where there are no rules, only values and judgment. There was a time when peanut butter only went with jelly, until someone substituted a banana for the jelly. There is value in that judgment. Go bananas.

If taste is catholic, this is purgatory: an exercise in highlighting the nuances of an environment. Wait for the release.

Installation View  

Georgia Dickie  

Georgia Dickie  

Georgia Dickie  

Georgia Dickie  

Andrew Norman Wilson  

Andrew Norman Wilson  

Andrew Norman Wilson  

Andrew Norman Wilson  

Georgia Dickie  

Georgia Dickie  

Georgia Dickie  

Georgia Dickie  

Georgia Dickie  

Andrew Norman Wilson  

Andrew Norman Wilson  

Andrew Norman Wilson  

Andrew Norman Wilson