i know we all know this one already, or at least those of us in word based art last semester, but i've talked to andy quite a bit about this piece since then, and i thought it was really interesting that after displaying it in an exhibition space, it was put in a pub for a while, and actually worked a lot better there. for those of you who missed this lecture, it kind of acts like a normal vendor, only instead of putting in money, you have to write your own anecdote and put it in a capsule and drop it into one of the tubes, and in exchange for it you get someone elses story. so anyway, apparently the anecdotes left in the pub-exhibition were all more genuine and interesting than the first exhibition, which were a bit contrived. but apart from that, it turned out that in the pub, this machine sparked off all these really interesting conversations, so really the art ended up being the vendor as a facilitator of these random interactions between people, rather than the machine as an object. i'm really liking the idea of the conversation or interaction as art in themselves rather than art-objects.
(Anecdote Vendor, 2005, a pub somewhere in leeds)
Yeah man, right on. Discourse and conversation are the real art work, the artist just produces something that catalyses it. (like jeremy deller....)
ReplyDeleteok i really like the idea behind this piece, & really liked the black dogs!! also.. i think that it would be more thought provoking to the pub people, and fully agree that there answers would ,ore likely yo be genuine.. as they probaly wouldnt be trying so hard to impress and act all clever!!
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