First Iteration: 41 Wooster Street
SINGULAR FRIENDS: Heaving up on one another's shoulders
October 29th - November 23rd 2008
is proud to present its inaugural exhibition "Singular Friends: Heaving up on one another's shoulders." Referencing the Guggenheim Museum's past exhibition, Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), this show is an attempted examination of the unraveling of Post-Minimal practices into an even finer array of artistic models. Here, the urges of the 1960s are not reanimated as much as refigured. It is growing more apparent that Post-Minimalism as a category has accrued such a compendium of criteria that its identification approaches near absurdity. There are multiple manifest heritages that could be considered Post-Minimal. The work here is not to diagnose a situation, but meant to point out the term's suspension. "Post-Minimal" is not so tired as to be relieved to disuse, but is not so valid as to determine a set of strategies, working patterns, or formal characteristics. We cannot discard it, but we cannot accept it.
Also important to note is the show's very making. The artists included in this show make up a small system of friends, connected one way or another. The show is in itself a work, demonstrating the possibility of a collectivity or participation outside the known gallery system. This gallery has no artists it represents, no owner, and no stable location. As well as referencing the Guggenheim's past show, the title is an effort to point out a more differentiated conception of a collective, as heaving can be taken in either a constructive or destructive way. Instead of seeing the group as an undifferentiated whole, spoken for at all times by one another, it is more likely that each individual maintains a sense of difference while participating in the "same." The community, is therefore always in flux, and far more fragile than we realized.
The possibility of a "floating" gallery is perhaps the final hope for, and it is an apt metaphor as it is not between anything, only between. It also seems appropriate to begin with caution, not choosing one or the other, but instead attempt to follow contradictory instructions -- both avowing and disavowing a legacy, both avowing oneself and disavowing oneself. Auspicious beginnings are not necessarily those that manage a false face of surety. Perhaps now, it is more appropriate to slow down, to contemplate, and to simply lift a foot in order to take the very first step once again.
