Filed under: Plus 3 Ferris Wheels
Biscuits Thrown From a Window, 2006
Running Time: 2:00 mins
Dave Ball – London United Kingdom
I make work based around subversive interactions with the stuff of the everyday world. The aim is to interrogate and interrupt existing codes of behaviour. By giving visual form to minor transgression the works aim to derail the normally smooth running of sense seemingly inherent in the way things are. Through humorous incongruity an alternative, non-sensical, ir-rational, or sur-real alternative state of affairs is presented.
The works however tend first to be utterly rooted in the real, the rational, the sensible. This is the basis from which they operate. Specific places are described, recognisable situations are encountered, familiar art-historical references are utilised, well-understood thought-processes are employed, and straight-forwardly logical conceptual premises are executed. From within these solid groundings in normality humorous incongruities and minor subversive jolts can thus be effected.
The works are based in a playful philosophical attitude; poetic, humorous and questioning, they are intended to act as visually articulated minor ruptures to the way things are. Specifically influential philosophical figures include the Lyotardian notion of “paralogy” (in which a particular figure of thought is rendered nonsensical according to a dominant theoretical model in place); a Deleuzian notion of “deterritorialisation” or “becoming-differently” (in which particular states of affairs are understood as merely habitual stopping points containing within them the potential for a flight to an alternative state); and a Badiouian “evental-break” (where something unaccountable happens, something radically inconceivable according to already-existing structures of understanding).
Some of the outcomes of this have included: doing literally hundreds of actions with biscuits, throwing vegetables in the air, swinging bread around my head in a park, arranging cheesecake slices in a large circle on a woodland floor, writing ephemeral and poetic messages in second hand books before selling them, interrogating house-plants, pushing toy cars around city streets, cataloging garden hedges, and making meticulous drawings of local bus stops.
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