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Store_Blp is a new site-specific installation made at Articulate to work out relationships site specific artworks could have with their (live) site while the artworks are dormant (uninstalled). It has three main elements: the moveable material remnants of multiple site specific artworks (some stored on the gallery-floor near the blp in the first week); photographs showing them as originally installed (available to visitors using their phones to access website-links given below); and the site present firstly as the place of Articulate itself, and secondly as a floor drawing of a blp, a shape that is used by its inventor, artist Richard Artschwager, as a pointer to ‘here’ to help us (visitors) notice that that is where we are. The Store_Blp plan is that the three interact over the duration of the exhibition—starting with the floor drawing storing the remnants, the remnants marking out the blp and the photos showing how components were arranged in the past. Essays discussing the blp-shape and its use are available at the exhibition and attached below. . . . . . . Store_Blp came from wondering how to document site-specific artworks without undermining their intention to intervene in the modern culture’s devaluation of place, through the model or example they provide when they give place an important role within their own construction. At the same time, the dissolution of the materiality of all artwork into image for use in print and screen is almost inevitable, and for site-specific artwork, the ubiquity of the image easily slides the actuality of place into its visual likeness as if they are the same thing. Store_Blp approaches this conundrum by borrowing Richard Artschwager’s punctuation-like shape that he called a blp and used as a sign to ‘here’. Blps are lozenge shapes that Artschwager made and drew directly onto built surfaces from the 1960s onwards. Store_Blp borrows it for a blp-shaped floor-space that both stores and is marked out by extant elements from my longer-term art practice, where these elements were inserted directly into locations to exhibit the physical presence of artworks’ locations as artworks’ contents. The floor-blp stores the extant elements, as well as stands-in for the now absent locations of these installations, at the same as its points to the presence of Store_Blp’s own location in the project space of Articulate. Even though Store_blp’s intervention will still become images for print and screen, the hope is that in including Artschwager’s blp pointing to the presence of place from within the photographed work, the ambiguity that Artschwager gave it will provide those images with a self-awareness of their role in the dissolution of place.
from Store_Blp roomsheet: Store_Blp is the latest in 30 years of making site-specific artworks. I eventually realized my attraction to working with site specificity came from its advocacy for place through the role its artworks give to the presence of their own physical locations—making them models for how people can also value the places we live in. Actually it’s a model for the globalised Western culture in particular, as Indigenous cultures care for Country as a matter of course.
https://www.articulateprojectspace.org/project/22-06-D Links to photo and text records of site-specific works whose remnants Store_Blp includes: |
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(or click on last or next till you find images using Store_Blp remnants) |
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Store_Blp, week 1 (sketch), photo the artist 
Store_Blp, week 2, photos: Silversalt
This project is supported by the National Art School.