The Memory Project
A realisation of the score ‘Do You Want To Expand Your Parameters Or Play Museums Like Some Dilettante’ is played back using vibrations to activate the window as a speaker.
“Do you want to expand your parameters or play museums like some dilettante?” are provocative words spoken to Lou Reed by Andy Warhol in ‘Work’ from ‘Songs for Drella’. Lou had been somewhat lazy in writing songs and Andy is expressing his Catholic work ethic.
Warhol’s Factory industrialised artistic production and attempted to dissolve the hierarchies of such labour. Despite this it was impossible for the work to escape the gravitational pull off the ‘art star’.
Recently art again attempts to play with collaboration, authorship, improvisation and non-hierarchical strategies though again it is rare for such work to escape it’s association with an artist’s name who carries cultural or economic weight.
I am interested in the art workers whose names don’t appear in vinyl lettering, who aren’t recognised in the blurb and who don’t feature on the website.
The installation by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd features the labour of a revolving cast of performers whose role is to bring the works to life for an audience.
This intervention attempts to make such labour audible and tangible, making it recognisable to the public and collectable by the institution.
A range of bands, most infamously the band ‘Lightning Bolt’, eschew the stage and play in the middle of the crowd. Born out of necessity such practice becomes a vital critique of the hierarchies of performance.
Placed on the floor, barely audible and in a transient space we return to the questionable assertion that “It’s work, the most important thing is work.”
The Memory Project presents the work of students of MA Fine Art (Nottingham Trent University). During the Tala Madani and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd exhibitions, each participant transformed their own practice into an indirect form of documentation.
The works act as a means of remembering these recently-closed shows. Whilst our galleries are in changeover, they will occupy subtle and incidental places within the building, before forming part of the archive of Nottingham Contemporary, contributing to the memory of its programme of temporary exhibitions and events.
Participating artists - Christiane Bressolier, Louise Creuzeau, Karen Hazelton, Katja Hock (MA Course Leader), Murray Royston-Ward and Susanne Thoene.