On Preferring Not To

It’s important to remember that the way we conceive of the activity of “creating art” now isn’t necessarily how people who created art in past times conceived of it. In other words, a lot of the stuff that we go look at in museums now wasn’t considered art by its creator in the same way that we’d look at it.

Counter-activity can have value even if the original goal is discarded entirely, he said: his friend Mike Harte, who at one time aspired to be an artist but always seemed to find something else to do (sitting about, karaoke, eating Choc Dips – we were treated to a little slide show), used to write letters full of trivia, newspaper cuttings and “general nonsense” to his friend Jamie Shovlin, who was then studying at the Royal College of Art. Shovlin kept the letters and made them into an art project of his own, Mike Harte – Make Art, which was commissioned by the collective art collection V22. Pieroni has lately been researching what he calls the effluvia of office work – which include humorous pictures and signs such as the ones on this page (other slogans include “A tidy desk is a sign of a sick mind”) – for the exhibition Xeroxlore, which opens tomorrow, January 20, at SPACE.

Read the whole thing for Spurious-author Lars Iyer’s contributions to the panel.

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