Duchamp, nothing and an already made artwork

Every summer, I take time off from the gallery life, and take a sabatical from the exhibitions at Valhall Arts.  Instead, I leave behind something for my visitors to see.  Something that is nothing.

Last summer it was an installed hole in the ground, dug in the middle of the gallery, an obvious falsity, (and Andy Goldsworthy reference)

I presented it as a joke, but also a truth.  The title, The Artist is not Present, was a direct reference to Marina Abramovic's performance (that I went to see) at the MoMA, and the shovel left in the space as a nod to Marcel Duchamp (specifically his "In Advance of the Broken arm"). The multiple choice question didactic was a way to playfully engage the audience, while dropping clues to some of my favorite popular cultural ephemera, as well as a statement of my feelings toward the reception of my artwork by my local audience. It's a construction of an environment, one that the audience was excluded from (only able to look through the window in the closed and locked door), using common objects, symbols, and cliched ideas.

This year I have installed something along this vein, however at the this point in my work, I have reached a state of utter disregard for my local audience. I feel like after the 4 years that Valhall Arts has been open, I have taken them as far as they are willing to go in regards to viewing and thinking about contemporary art. Their responses are baffling and frustrating, and mind blowing in their ineptitude. I am instead focusing on my ideas, my work, and marketing it to a broader audience, beyond my neighborhood, hopefully for viewers who care to take the time to understand it. This situation could be considered a brief re-enactment, an homage of sorts, to Duchamp and his behavior at the end of his career when he stated that he was no longer going to make any more art, and instead, just play chess. (Image below is Duchamp's window display for Andre Breton's  Arcane 17 at the Gotham Book Mart, 1945)

Time would reveal that this was a sort of performance art in itself, as Duchamp was busy for many years creating his final grand artistic gesture. (The creation of Etant donnes -- link via ToutFait.com, is to an animation by Robert Slawinski, and involves the five following unaltered works by Duchamp in the order in which they are listed below:

Window Display for Andre Breton's Le Surrealisme et la Peinture, 1945
Given: Maria, the Waterfall, and the Illuminating Gas, 1947
Study for Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1947
The Illuminating Gas and the Waterfall, 1948-49
Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-1966)

I want to leave my audience to wonder where I've gone, as I go out into the world to enjoy all it has to offer. I leave them only a tiny clue, easily overlooked, a QR code to scan, itself a bizarre object unique to our contemporary digital culture. I wave a fond farewell, as I bid them  to "piss off!".  To those curious few who make the effort (and have the smart phone ability) to scan the code, a surprise. See what it will bring? Yep, "Nothing Here."

New Exhibit in the Works

The new exhibition planned for November is called "Moving Pictures". It is an installation with two video works by Laura Brent, that look more like photographs. It is an experimental piece, and the videos, in which very little happens, will make the viewer wonder about what they are seeing.
The title, used before in a 2002 exhibit at the Guggenheim (NYC), included works by Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Kara Walker and Shirin Neshat, among others. The exhibit explored the affects of this new reproducible media in art making, it ability to render visible conceptual concepts and questioned the supposed objectivity of representation in itself .
This small solo presentation could never attain the drama of the museum's show, but I want the viewer to gain a sense of themselves, their youth, and their mortality. This piece follows my ongoing study of how we see things, how our media saturated culture has affected our way of looking, and visually experiencing and interacting with our environment. It is similar in feel to Brent's previous exhibits, Public Practice, and "pinching the light fantastic".