THE END OF FAILURE
CURATED BY KATRINA LAMB
LOUIS V.E.S.P.
140 JACKSON ST., #4D, BROOKLYN, NY, 11211
OPENING RECEPTION: APRIL 29, 2011, 7:30-10:00 P.M.
PERFORMANCES BY ROSS MORENO, CHRISTIAN OITTINEN, AND RYAN WILSIE
BEGIN AT 8:30 P.M. TELEVISION FOR GHOSTS, BY SHALO P.,
WILL CONCLUDE THE PROGRAM AT 10:00 P.M. AS THE DOORS CLOSE,
AND WILL CONTINUE INTO THE NIGHT.
FEATURING (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):
ROSS MORENO
MICHELLE O’BRIEN
CHRISTIAN OITTINEN AND KELLIE MCCOOL, http://cmoworks.com/
SHALO P, http://thatsforsure.net/shalo.php
ANNA PRATT, annaprattjournalist.com
JEFF RAY, jeffrayart.com
CHRIS SOLLARS, http://667shotwell.com/ChrisSollars.html
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE, http://www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com/
ANNE YALON
RYAN WILSIE, http://boogrlips.blogspot.com/
MICHAEL ZHENG, http://michaelzheng.org/
Hosted by Louis V.E.S.P. in Brooklyn, The End of Failure features a group of contemporary artists and writers whose work operates with failure at its core. I invited participants in the exhibition to consider what place failure has had in their work at different points in their lives, and what their relationship to failure is today.
From liminal modes of artistic production to conscientious socio-political positioning as a daily performative act, “failure” has been adopted throughout recent art history as an alternative strategy for making things. I would argue that failure as a creative strategy emerged with the advent of the Avant-Garde in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems worth taking a moment to note that while failure, as a theme, can be located in a much longer and broader historical landscape, Avant-Garde movements including Dadaism, Surrealism, Conceptual Art, Anti-Art, and the Situationist International comprised the first wave of artists that created methodologies revolving around the purpose of rejecting bourgeois class values. Beyond artistic production, these groups worked to form practices that reflected a completely new way of operating in the world.
In more recent art history, many practices first introduced in these Avant-Garde experiments have become assimilated into the expansive array of methodological options available for our use and new interpretations of. Failure has been championed for its reputation as a strategy that carries radical connotations—one that implicitly rejects mainstream values and measures of success and creates a way to turn attention to things that may be otherwise ignored or erased.
Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art) (Lisa LeFeuvre, MIT Press, 2010), Beautiful Losers (directed by Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard, Sidetrack Films, 2008), A Conference on Failure in the Arts (hosted by University at Buffalo’s Department of Visual Studies, February 2010) and P.S. 1’s event An Afternoon of Failure (April 2, 2011), are just several from an inventory of recent publications and exhibitions dedicated to the subject of failure in contemporary art.
While failure has been promoted from side note to superstar status by such exhibitions, I have been increasingly plagued with doubt and concern about the way that failure has had undue influence on my peers’ as well as my own work. For too long, I fear that we have become entangled with failure as a highly seductive strategy without maintaining active engagement in the process, or in the implications of these projects. The work by folks in The End of Failure is among my favorite anywhere—I am by no means suggesting that we should retreat from seeking out working methods that repel mainstream notions of success and failure. I do, however, feel that we carry a responsibility to articulate what our past efforts around failure were about—it seems especially important that we not rely upon a vague or unspoken (“poetic”) assumption of failure.
In response to this quandary, The End of Failure brings to the surface the twelve participants’ reflections on their involvement with failure over time. The pieces included for view reflect the artists’ and writers’ current relationships with failure—some folks have already been working in ways that demonstrate a drastic departure from failure as we knew it; others maintain a commitment to the practice of failure and embrace the challenge of bringing resolution to the numerous tangents within avant-garde, modernist, and postmodern movements through their own work. The writers featured in The End of Failure bring additional perspectives on failure, and the end of it, in relation to far left political and social activism and organizing.
The dialogue surrounding The End of Failure will be presented along with more formal pieces, utilizing Louis V.E.S.P. as a sort of project space. The End of Failure features documentation and additional materials including text, interviews, audio work, a mix tape, and blog projects in addition to video pieces, installation work, a public art project, live performances, and a political essay with personal notes and revolutionary strategies. It is my goal to work toward an eventual publication that will bring these pieces together with other writing and further collaborative dialogue.
-Katrina Lamb, April 2011
