Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing)
The work Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) documents an action performed on the streets of Mexico City in 1997. The film depicts a simple and seemingly pointless endeavour - a large block of ice being pushed through the city streets for 9 hours until it melts away to nothing.
On the same streets, thousands spend their days pushing, carrying or towing wares or chattels.
His task at the beginning is laborious and sisyphean, as he struggles to move the imposing weight along the pavement in what seems to be a futile performance. By the end his act has become playful as he delicately kicks the small ice stone across the sidewalk, akin to a child entertaining himself by kicking a pebble on his walk home from school. The city absorbs it.
(via nihilisticall)
Michael E. Smith, Troublestand, 2011
Smith’s work simultaneously evokes and makes direct use of the detritus of a narcissistically wasteful culture that scorns conservation and valorizes rampant consumption. His redemptive project runs contrary to this “more is more” philosophy through its industrious ability to make more with less, if not next to nothing.
Smith offers a bracing riposte to the high production values of spectacle culture—to which much contemporary art practice is not immune—and an urgently relevant reminder of the value in looking at the overlooked.
(via nihilisticall)
Mladen Stilinović
Conversation with Freud - The Artist as his own Complex, 1982
Immensity and Repetition: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Konrad Smoleński
Polish Pavilion, Venice Biennale
