You Are Next, sodium chloride on limestone. The statement is proposed to hang on a vitrine. It refers to the next customer in line at any shop in Valletta, and infers the new ways of being social by keeping a healthy distance.
This type of work builds on self referential statements such as A Syntax of Dependency(2011), a work by Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner. The primary component of their work is a presentation of three statements at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. The statements are displayed on the floor of the entire gallery, and refer to the forces (political, natural, infrastructural, etc...) which determine our relationship with art in a national gallery. Each sentence is embedded in a large sheet, designed and split by vertical bars, all of them coloured by a darker shade of a stripe from the Belgian flag. They are printed in linoleum, a material which in addition, carries a sense of national pride for the city of Antwerp. The artists agreed to identify their contribution in part with an international effort to intervene in a gallery and also invited the biggest producer of linoleum in the world as a partner and manufacturer.
The work in itself refers to the possibilities of making art under national constraints, and the extent of how this part of the art world is always determined by a wider network of activity that stretches beyond its walls.
The intervention proposed by Johannes Buch and Aidan Celeste also aims to engage a global force. However, rather than creating an abstract and objective statement from the art world, the artists developed these statements from a local perspective, such as engaging a local store as if it were a city in itself.
Following an introduction by the the Valletta Cultural Agency, the artists first engaged the storekeepers with a general question, „How was your first lockdown in March?“.
As the rhythm of the conversation picked up, Celeste and Buch started to frame the conversation with more direct prompts. These prompts were developed from objects of art made in isolation, and confinement in reference to an international crises, such as that of Duchamp‘s Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy?(1921) Gillick and Weiner‘s A Syntax of Dependency(2011), and Jenny Holzer‘s Survival Series.
Together with the store managers, the artists identified a few analogies between these objects of art and examples from life in the pandemic. For instance, one of the store-managers is also a tour guide, and since the work by Gillick and Weiner separates a gallery space in three parts, the artists asked him to host a tour of this shop in three parts. He first spoke about tourism and the impact of hoteliers on his shop, in addition, he went on to point out how under lockdown, it was hard to walk out, hang out, and find yourself looking at an empty street in Valletta, it’s as if the joy of people watching expired in March 2020. Nonetheless, the panorama from his desk at the centre of the shop took on a whole new social role. Customers would cross his doorway, hang out, and take a few extra minutes to check on each other before leaving. Along with other store managers, it is the social aspect of working in Valletta which they all highlight as necessary, highly international, and impossible to do without.
The artists will take a closer look at the experience of living, working, and mediating from a single space of isolation over a Webinar on Saturday 5th December 2020.
If you were to redefine your own space of isolation, such as when your home took on the role of an office, a bar, and perhaps even a gallery, which part of your place is the grand entrance to watch your guests arrive from? What is your commute, or more specifically, how do you like to transition between work and leisure? Essentially, the main question is alway, what parts have changed over the last few months, and what parts will never change again, under any given context?
