DDDG: Extended Caption
A collection of items originally shown in the magazine (Dot Dot Dot)
Culturgest Porto, Edifício Caixa Geral de Dépósitos
April 25 – June 27, 2009
Curator: Stuart Bailey
Statement: «This is the seventh occasion of my showing a group of artifacts whose only objective connection is that they have appeared in the pages of Dot Dot Dot, a magazine I edit, at some point since its conception in 2000. In 2004 I first assembled an exhibition of source material — by which I mean the original items represented in print by screened images. In the regular hierarchy of the magazine, texts are generally primary and images secondary, and the fundamental idea of these exhibitions was to invert these roles, as a kind of parallel operation.
Our contributors rarely write directly about the formal attributes of this kind of cultural residue, but draw on it rather to trigger, illustrate, or reference broader sociological, art historical, or philosophical ideas. Take the cover of Scritti Politti’s 1982 ‘Jacques Derrida’ double A-side 12-inch, for example. This illustrates a short text by Diedrich Diederichsen which, rather than discussing either the music, lyrics, or sleeve design, more broadly recounts a certain moment in the 1980s when French philosophy mirrored the cultural currency of a certain strain of British post punk. Or below and to the left, the upside down photograph of an early sketch of Harry Beck’s 1931 London Underground map. This refers to the occasion of the diagram having been hung the wrong way up when first shown at London’s V&A museum, an accident which innocuously prioritises its abstract over representational qualities. Paul Elliman introduces this anecdote to frame some thoughts around the idea that abstraction — and by implication, modernism — was only acceptable to the British public when grounded in function. …»
Read the full text by Stuart Bailey via http://www.dot-dot-dot.us/
