dw(-h): home page
... profile
... books
... web projects
... articles
... interviews
... cv
... teaching
... miscellaneous
matrix 2: you whores
We all have our price. What's yours? Bill Drummond knows. And he ought to: on August 23, 1994, he burned a million pounds of the hard-earned money that you paid for the albums he produced as one half of the KLF, aka The Jamms, aka The Timelords, aka The Justified Ancients of Muu Muu. It took about an hour, and, by all accounts (okay, only one: that of journalist Jim Reid, the sole witness), it was kind of boring. Gimpo, a frequent collaborator of the KLF, filmed the entire incident. Only one print of the film exists, and, from time to time, Gimpo will screen it in a gallery somewhere. After the first showing of the film, Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the other Justified Ancient, asked the audience the following question: "Is It Rock 'n' Roll?". Concensus was that it was not rock and roll. One of Drummond's more recent projects, You Whores , is more amusing and less expensive. Launched in 2004, You Whores is Craigslist with a brain, or the infamous eBay auction "I Will Kick Your Ass" with less malice and more density. You Whores is an exercise in style. It strips the classified advertisement down to its very core, flensing away utility until all that's left are the obscure objects of desire:
... and so on. The general process behind You Whores is not particularly new. Doulas Huebler's 1973 conceptual art project Secrets is a direct ancestor. Huebler asked gallery attendees to write a secret anonymously on a slip of paper and to drop it into a collection box, then documented the results in book form. Secrets shares the same unhinged declarative mode as You Whores, but lacks the crass commercialism. That doesn't make Secrets better or worse than You Whores, just more poignant in places:
It's possible to argue that with You Whores, the use of the Web as a combined collection and publication device makes all the world into an art gallery, but that would be missing the point: a few lines of code obviates the need for either the presence of the gallery system or of a self-identified artist. Not that You Whores renders the world of galleries and blue-chip artists obsolete; big art is a closed, self-sustaining system that doesn't give a rat's ass about the whimsies of a former music producer and a handful of antisocial but clever adolescents. Nor does You Whores quite finish the project of democratizing art that conceptualism promised but never delivered. The Web doesn't turn everyone into an artist; it turns everyone into a nerd. In the end, it's a lot like taking a million pounds to the Isle of Jura in the middle of the night and setting fire to them fifty quid at a time: briefly entertaining, but not rock and roll.
|
Darren Wershler (aka Darren Wershler-Henry) is the author or co-author of ten books, most recently, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (McClelland & Stewart, Cornell UP), and apostrophe (ECW), with Bill Kennedy. Darren is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and is also part of the faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program. alienated.net is the most visible part of Darren's brain. links: status update
|
