From Elena Kuroda’s Dissonance
The third of five installments of my editorial project, Retraction, came out this week in A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking. «Retraction 3: Flip of a Coin», which builds on the first two installments entering the topic of chance and determinacy in art, presents work by artists Elena Kuroda, Agnès Thöni, Nuno Carvalho, and Andreas Kaufmann.
An excerpt from this week’s introduction:
«This week we present four works. First, imagine a set of flickering lights about to go out, discovered by chance and plotted as points within a major European city – a global financial center – in distant public spaces over a period of four years. The lights persist in a conceptual state of oscillation in relation to themselves and each other across space and time. As such, they map the terrain of the city like a self-erasing sketch. Second, we find a harmonograph, a hand-built drawing machine designed to produce highly regular, geometric figures through the harmonic motion of oscillating pendulums. Into the machine’s ostensibly natural movements, the artist introduces subtle, arbitrary perturbations from the environment, ranging from slight nudges to steps on wobbly floorboards, that dislocate the reassuring internal order of probability. Third, a sculptural assemblage caricatures today’s recombinatory utopia of absolute openness and the probability on which this fantasy hinges in a series of works that has already been halted at the first assemblage. Finally, consider the oscillation that delineates the art proposal as a writing genre and gesture. The proposal expands or retracts action based on the outcome: if accepted, you go forward; if not, you go back, maybe try again, or maybe change or drop the idea altogether. But imagine then three proposals that are retracted in advance. These works, like all artist proposals, are constructed like Schrödinger’s quantum cat box, which contains a feline that is at the same time alive and dead.The artist of these proposals sees no need to open his boxes – that is, has no interest in their juried consideration and external outcome – but simply constructs and leaves these proposals floating in a conceptual state of superposition. Years later (2020), the artist adds a fourth piece, a rejoinder that retracts the triptych of decisive non-starters, situated in the recent pandemic lockdown. In the universe of this supplemental piece, the observer is no longer positioned outside the contraption’s uncertainty but becomes the cat inside facing the inescapable specter of being simultaneously dead and alive.»
Installments 1 + 2: