#island

#island
Keith Farquhar & Torsten Lauschmann
13/05 – 17/06/23
Open Friday – Saturday 12–5pm, or by appointment

A Television Upon a Table on a Wall on a Wall 
by Andy Grace Hayes

Mundane placates boring. The latter isn’t academic or kind, it sits in that greyness tipping either way along the line that separates descriptive criticism from insult. Few hope to make boring art, but to make art that is interesting and fun and a good time. Art that puts out. The mundane, concerned with (‘work that is concerned with’) mundanity, does a conceptual art circular route from dull to interesting. All without the need to stop off and linger around the aesthetic insult of boredom. It happens too quick, in a gallery with artworks — perhaps Keith Farquhar’s or Torsten Lauschmann’s — one thinks, ‘quite dry,’ and then ‘but isn’t that interesting, being in this dryness?’ In the everyday, in the purposeful display of non-interest.

Of interest is the literary critic, the definer of ‘interesting’, Sianne Ngai who wrote (to paraphrase, poorly) that calling something interesting is a pretty good way of saying just about nothing at all. ‘Interesting’ is vague, pointing only to the novelty of the object, acknowledging it exists. Interesting as a judgement abstains from critique, Ngai called it a step away from merely interesting, a step away from boring. Salvaged office desks lacquered with laminate in less than convincing wood effect is itself interesting as a step away from boring (Admin Fireplace, 2023). The woodgrain lines; it’s not a tree, it’s a polymer and wood fibres, it’s bran flakes and videos of divorced men making coffee tables with pours of epoxy resin. The shape of it, the fireplace arrangement, takes you to the office, to the home, to the mantle with the kid’s picture on it; a devastating reading, perhaps, might this be post-2020 flexible working? The everyday, the mundane, the readymade, the interesting. The world is full of interesting objects, boring objects, those that shift in definition from one form to the next, whereupon they may transform into something else. Can interesting objects, step merely, to boring, to fascinating, to interesting, to boring? Do objects sit still? […]

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Photo credit: Torsten Lauschmann and Matthew Barnes.

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