Coins by Artists

Coins by Paul McCarthy, Maurizio Cattelan, Jess Dobkin, Paul Couillard, Claire Fontaine (twice), Micah Lexier (thrice), Bill Woodrow, Germain Koh, Micah Adams, Jan Sokota, and Ryan Gander (twice).  

Douglas Gordon | Museum Keys

Douglas Gordon 

Museum Keys

Dublin, Ireland: The Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1992

15 × 38 cm.

Unlimited edition

If George Maciunas' collection of keys (see previous post) proposed the idea of random theft as a means to "purge the system", Douglas Gordon takes a more pointed approach, by invoking the art world. 

His 1992 work Museum Keys is a set of three printed envelopes containing a set of duplicate keys for the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, as well as a set of blank keys, should the buyer wish to further duplicate (and distribute?) the keys. 

The Claire Fontaine collective produced a similar work (a stand-alone piece, not editioned) in 2006, called 371 Grand, which was a set of keys to open the Reena Spaulings gallery (see below). Jon Sasaki also explored similar ideas involving access and security in his work (see next two posts). 

Museum Keys is billed as an open edition but I've only come across a few copies online, accompanied by little or no information. Luckily, artist Ross Sinclair (a friend and collaborator of Gordon's) was able to send me photographs from an exhibition catalogue where he interviewed Gordon about the work, which I hope I have transcribed correctly:

Ross Sinclair: How did this work develop? 

Douglas Gordon: It came about through being in a situation that most artists find themselves in at some time. I was installing some work in a gallery last year and, as happens often, the gallery gave me a set of keys to let myself in and out of the building whenever I wanted. I couldn't help thinking how easy it would be to copy those keys. They might even have fallen into the wrong hands, if you know what I mean. 

RS: But it's not as if the wrong hands are going to the be the audience for the work. 

DG: You never know. 

RS: Who do you reckon is the audience for the work if it won't be the casual passerby? 

DG: Well, you have to aim for the audience that you anticipate. The people who will see the work in the museum, or those who might come across it later. ____ there to spend a bit of time on ideas. That's a situation that can be used to present the work which will involve those people's expectations and desires. 

RS: So what will the art lover get in this work? 

DG: They'll get a duplicate set of keys to the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. I want to sell the keys as a cheap multiple to alter the significance of the originals. The originals are unique and valuable precisely because they're unavailable. I want them to be very available so that the more keys that go out the further the idea can travel, literally and conceptually. This element of distribution is emphasized by the fact that the multiple includes a set of blanks, so that whoever has a set of keys can go along to a key cutter and continue copying as many sets as they want. 

RS: Do you want to anchor the idea in the context of The Museum? 

DG: I hope that people who read the work will recognize the significance of the "keys to a museum". In recognizing this it can trigger off all the other ideas we might have about keys. 

RS: Yes, the key has a strong metaphorical value. Like in films and stories keys represent access, privilege, success, power, fulfillment, and so on. But the main implication seems to be a reconsideration of the status of The Museum. I mean, here we are being offered a set of keys to a repository of cultural and economic value. That's going to appear to some people as an odd thing to do. 

DG: The main focus of the work may appear to be the reconsideration that you're talking about. But the work needn't be limited to a pure critique of museumology. The motives are more pragmatic, less specific than that. I reckon that whilst I'm working in this museum I should try and do something here that might not be possible elsewhere. 

RS: So why the keys as opposed to anything else? 

DG: Out of all the museum accessories I could have chosen to work with, I chose the keys because they have this metaphorical and allegorical currency outside of, and as well in, the critique on the museum. It means that the keys can operate alongside all our ideas to do with relics. 

This week on Tumblr: Questions

This week on Tumblr: Interrogative Statements by James Lee Byars, Barbara Kruger, Ben Vautier, Robert Filliou, Cary Leibowitz, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ruppersburg, Kay Rosen, Alec Finlay, Bob & Roberta Smith, Fischli & Weiss, Richard Artschwager, Jenny Holzer, Ben Patterson, Claire Fontaine, Etc.

Claire Fontaine | Some Instructions For the Sharing of Private Property

Claire Fontaine
Some Instructions For the Sharing of Private Property
Paris, France: Onestar Press, 2011
150 pp., 14 x 22.5 cm., paperback
Edition of 250

"This book is a tale of seduction. It reveals how to win the resistance of closed doors that we all face each day. We can read that a lock is not a hostile obstacle to our desire but a new potential lover, whose interiority we have to see with the eyes of the soul and whose qualities and defaults we have to imagine. A world of silent dialogues between unanimated beings and humans discloses itself in these pages. Chapter after chapter, a disquieting light is shed on the triad of the artist, the consumer and the lock-picker, all belonging to the same confraternity of bilingual creatures, fearless explorers of the deserts of reification, able to communicate with and through objects. Smelling, touching, listening are to be learnt again by the ones who might want to succeed in lock-picking, and if they do – they are warned - they shouldn’t think “I made it” but wonder “what exactly happened ?”. Because the point isn’t why resistance leaves the place to openness, but how that happens. There is a science of quality that defies logic, it rules the domain of the love conquest whose champion is Don Giovanni, restless wrecker of moral boundaries and petty bourgeois common sense, moved by the mere pleasure of adding another name to his list. There is a use value that ruins all exchange value. And there is an accumulation of competence that threatens all other possible accumulation.If this manual contains information, it must be said that it can only be used in the way one would follow directions for spiritual exercises. Never think about yourself and never think about the lock : ego gets in the way of lock-picking as much as it does for any Zen practice. Visualizing the invisible, evaluating the con-sequences of the least of our gestures, reaching a state of concentrated relaxation are parts of the process, whose unspoken aim is becoming something between flesh and metal - like Odradek is both a bobbin and a begging creature, but he is neither of them.Some instructions for the sharing of private property is a story of asceticism told by various anonymous voices. Because the morality of the lock-picker resembles the one of the fidèles d’amour : there are many easy ways to break into places, but picking a lock is the more virtuous one. Cultivating this virtuosity involves sensing the world more intensely, sanding one’s fingertips until each grain of sand paper can be distinctly felt, making oneself as rigid and cold as a key until perfectly understanding what every clicking noise means, being aware of the infinite states that exist between closed and open, all to be inhabited and influenced. Lock-pickers belong to a clandestine congregation, which has the means to enter our houses and our hearts, but here a choice is presented to us : becoming one of them or taking closed doors for an answer."

- Claire Fontaine, March 2011

Available from the publisher, here, for 60 €, and from Printed Matter, here, for $55.00 US.

Claire Fontaine (the Paris-based collective who borrow their name from a brand of school notebooks) give a free lecture on the subject of Italian feminists of the 1970s today at OCADU at 6:30pm, room 190. 

The event is organized as part of the Getting Rid Of Ourselves exhibition, curated by Helena Reckitt and featuring works by Becky Beasley, Adrian Blackwell, Heath Bunting, Kajsa Dahlberg, Jesse Darling, Janez Jansa and collaborations by Kernel, Goldin+Senneby and Claire Fontaine. The works in the exhibition "question the link between art and self-expression through tactics of anonymity, shared authorship, appropriated identities, delegated production, and financial speculation." 

The opening of the exhibition follows the talk, from 8pm to 10pm tonight, at Onsite [at] OCAD University (230 Richmond St. West). Several of the artists will be present. The show runs until October 11th. 

For more information, visit the Facebook page, here.