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In June 2009 I spent an afternoon with my neighbor, Roz, a PR person for AXA Art, the only globally operating specialty art insurance company. I was told about AXA warehouses that store "Salvage Art", the industry name for no-longer-artworks that become AXA's property after the company paid out full market value on a claim in a total loss case. There is a sea of them behind walls. Since
that conversation, I have not been able to think of much more than all that non-art, art?, dead-art or what?.. and have become absorbed in trying to articulate my thoughts around these cadavers, the material that lives in limbo, in secret, as invisible, petrified "art-no-longer" that is scrupulously databased and stored all around the country, all over the world perhaps. The condition that interests me begins when an artwork is declared a "total loss" and ends when it resurfaces in the art market in some form. A pure and radical realm of the un-explored, with implications in many different realms and disciplines I feel I am just beginning to uncover. At
the start of 2010 I applied for a Rockefeller grant (Idea ID 1491) as Salvage
Art Institute (SAI), proposing to focus on "art material"
removed from art market circulation due to accidental damage. I approached
AXA with a proposal for intellectual cooperation and was promised access to
their storage. In May the Salvage Art Institute was registered with a State
of New York, Richmond County Clerk and later was invited to Columbia
University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to
focus a graduate studio course Damage Control on SAI's possible "home". (Summer 2010, Summer 2011) What
I imagine for the future is not simply one more gallery show, but rather the development of an arena of discussion centered on the subject of "total loss art" condition exhaling behind warehouse walls, shut off from the world of commerce and consciousness. Together with a board of SAI advisors I am now devoted to developing discussion and conversation, new themes related to this phantom art world, engaging the most interesting minds from a variety of disciplines, and I see Columbia's support as just the beginning. **** Stay tuned for NO LONGER ART symposium and events planned for 2012 **** Temporary links to studio work: (exhibition list in pdf) 2011 Maria at Modern Women with Maria Krajewska 2011 Battle: Horizontal Vertigo vs Record Projection with John Williams 2009 Lata-Po-Klatkach with Eliane Radigue's Chry-Ptus 2008 BOUND with Anthony McCall and Bunita Markus 2007 Plany Mela with Alan Licht at Bristol Imax 2006 Pole Field with hundreds of Poles and all pre-2006 films that anchor around my favorite paintings and film stills **** Current SAI board of advisors: Felicity Scott - architecture theorist, Columbia University Christian Scheidemann - senior conservator , Contemporary Conservation Ltd. Melanie Cohn - Executive Director of COAHSI Craig Buckley - publications editor, GSAPP, Columbia University Mick Taussig - anthropologist, writer Rosalind Joseph - Head of Global Public Relations, AXA Art |
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