Series

Tertium Non Datum: Gman, 2002

Poject: “Tertium non datur’ – the third is not given” - Gman, 2002.
Tracy Ann Essoglou

“G-man” starts where use is finished. In literal terms, this series – without end – only becomes, only comes into being, with the conclusion of usefulness. Bundling wires are cut away and cast into project sites and empty lots. My eyes notice, my hands fetch. My privilege(s) are their saving. I house and home, and in some such sense defend their existence. They give company and brilliance to form. In their presence, I am (a/the) reoccurring witness.

“G-man” refers to the first named figure of this series, first appearing (February 2002) in “Anthology-of-Art: a vision of an as-yet unknown art” website exhibition and publication, organized by Jochen Gerz, Academy of Fine Arts in Braunschweig.

“‘Tertium non datur’ – the third is not given.” [Jeanette Winterson]
Statement Date: November 16, 2002.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT:
The Anthology of Art 
Art and Theory in Dialogue
Jochen Gerz 

The Anthology of Art offers an internet-based platform for dialogue between artists and art theorists from all over the world. Its theme is the vision of art and its relationship to theoretical discourse.
 The appropriation of art by its institutions has shown that art and discourse are interconnected, placing equal emphasis on theoretical reflection as on the work of art itself. Contemporary art reflects the conditions of its own production and promotion.
 Instead of presuming the connection between production and theory, the Anthology of Art is investigating, and demonstrating it. At the same time, it confronts the global medium of the Internet with the traditional relationships within international art. As a result this experiment provides information about the contemporary artistic process.
  
The game
In the beginning six artists and six theorists were invited to contribute to the Anthology of Art. These artists chose one of their own images, while the theorists wrote a short text (one to three pages) in their native language or in English, both answering the same question:

"What is, in the context of contemporary art, your vision of a yet unknown art?"

Family Tee

Project: Family Tee Series, 1991.

The Family Tee Series consists of a small child's t-shirt collection bearing photos from a family's archive – in this case the family is my own: each t-shirt bears a different image which, reproduced on acetate from the original photograph, was then heat transferred to the chest of the white cotton tee, making the photographic record of a personal history newly accessible; each image renders an intimate record of transformed expectations and circumstances; each successive generation is seismically removed from those previous. The t-shirt itself, originally an undershirt unfit for outerwear in much of the world, is emblematic of the intimacy of successful colonization: not unlike Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Rock and Roll.

This transformative use of what is now a commonplace multimedia application transfigures individual history to the status of popular consumption. The child, often not allowed to handle photos, inadvertently, through the collection of t-shirts, becomes a vehicle for her or his own historical placement and social/political narrative.

Ironically, the diversity of experience and place evidenced by this particular series lends itself explicitly to making a spectacle of one's own identity and circumstances: the images themselves alternately expose, impose, and/or are exposed to a perverse hierarchy of interest wherein the exotic opposes the mundane in the arenas of the sacred and the profane. Not all histories will be (are) similarly endowed with cultural cache, begging the question: what can multiculturalism be for those who may not know themselves to be of (a) culture or as 'having' history?

NYC © Tracy Ann Essoglou 1991

Excerpted from the artist invitation; exhibition, Micro-Colonization, 1991:

How far is it between the imperial centers and the colonies today? Another exit on the freeway? A plane flight? A flight of stairs? Around the block? Across your bed? How do you measure this distance? How is it traversed, acknowledged, ignored, determined, maintained? How do the vestiges of colonial practices survive, indeed thrive, in the microcosm of your local environment? How do they relate to your own sense of place? Where do you locate yourselves in this complex?

A/C invites responses in the form of 'local' work; the critical art you've made that is experimental because it shows the colonial experience in your life. This is not a request for autobiography in the sense of philosophical, spiritual, or psychological development, but for a record of the dynamics of the environment through which you move every day, or a symbolic history of the systems which have placed you and against which you identify yourself in relation to the world.

Nipple Series.

Stuffings.