Covert Activities: JUNK OUT OF CONTEXT
Beginning in March 2004 Secret Society will deposit specially recorded audio cassette tapes, CDRs and VHS tapes into various charity shops throughout Dublin but also anywhere else they or their friends may be over the next 12 months. The new merchandise will be added directly to the stock on display without consultation with staff, put into the basket of unboxed cassettes on the floor, onto the shelf with the stack of home-taped videos and into the box on the counter full of flopped CD singles and free PC software. It will be shoplifting in reverse with all money going to charity. Each one will be identified only by a small hand written sticker reading secretsocietyinfo@eircom.net and the title of the piece.
Each piece will embrace its format and will explore the feeling of experiencing something out of context. Perhaps an audio cassette with part of a scratchy Leonard Cohen album on one side with what sounds like a child's birthday party coming in half way through. A film of a burnt out tractor originally recorded for an insurance claim, but now nothingless than bizarre, bringing with it questions never to be resolved. The pieces, once given up to the shop are lost to the artist but found by the buyer, that sense of losing something, not knowing where it might be, has it survived intact, has it been discovered, all these questions will be reflected in the pieces themselves.
format/discipline/theme
Audio cassette/Tape collage/Context
CDR/Ambient electronics/Loss
VHS/Hand-held Hi8 footage/mystery
As a society we have already produced a colossal body of work in various durable formats. To take just one of the more recent; the millions of CDRs that must already exist with no information written on them, a live recording of a professional band or a bands first gig, a lost gem from a renowned composer or a students class project, an enactment of a funeral in a play or an actual funeral service? Remove context and you lose understanding, sometimes not a bad thing.
I want these pieces to follow wherever this kind of junk finally goes, perhaps the piece will be taped over and never discovered by its new owner but the object itself goes on. These things are the axe heads of our time, having the potential to outlive us all, that home video of Christmas dinner, what is its destiny, to be part of a house clearance sale, or to be inside your stolen camcorder, where does it all go?
In concentrating on the less tangible human records of our age I must say that when enough time passes even The Beatles will be forgotten, their music heard at best as an historical reference only. You can imagine for yourself the fate that awaits whatever does not reach that standard of reverence.
If not obviously broken when does someone decide an object has reached the end of the line, to be finally thrown-away. Even then who's to say someone-else won't find it in a bin and decide they could use it or even sell it. Only if something is finally broken up or incinerated is it actually gone. After-all, to put something in landfill is to put it only a future archeological dig away. I think that might be the ultimate context to hear these pieces again, but would they be seen as art?
So to all the future archaeologists I give you junk out of context.
Stephen Rennicks
