Calum Craik
Leisure [2013]
Space Blanket, bowling ball, image of Californian swimming pool, steel
Sextant, curated by Marco Antonini
Nurture Art, Brooklyn [link]
A cartography of sociologic desire, Craik’s ludicrous simulacra 1earth floats in orbit around a radiant golden mountain2: mythic wealth manifested as hollow skin3 4 5. The heavy hobbyist planet eclipses an idealized cliché of personal oceans, darkening the American dream6. The game sphere condescending to a postcard attenuates an episteme of juvenile vapidity, shallowness a parody of nihilism.7.
Leisure indeed: the surreal map8, a nouveau fabled teleology9 10, amplifies labor for the consumer: discernment is a cultural effort11 12. The key/legend is a vague context pointing at content,13 inferring vast social aptitude only attainable through swaths of leisure labor14.
~Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Nurture Art
- “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept… It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real… Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself – such is the vital function of the model in a system of death.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacrum and Simulation
- Gorillaz “Fire Coming from a Monkey’s Head“
- John Maynard Keynes confidence economics
- “Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content…. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location.” David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, (p 692-3)
- Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain
- ‘It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory…’ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, pg 333 in reference to “A map is not the territory it represents” by Alfred Korzybski
- The Big Lebowski on Nihilism Walter Sobchak: “Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
- “The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious.” ~ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
- “In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the cartographers guilds struck a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations, who were not so fond of the study of cartography as their forebears had been, saw that that vast map was useless, and not without some pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and winters.” Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science.
- “The map he had made that morning was fresh in his mind, but the city had changed.” Maurice Blanchot, The Idyll. pg. 29
- “We have been adequately cautioned about mapping as a means of projecting power-knowledge, but what about mapping as a productive and liberating instrument? … mapping unfolds potential.” ~ James Corner, Agency of Mapping
- Are you working too much?: Post Fordism, Precarity and the Labor of Art, e-flux journal
- “context providers” rather than “content providers,” Peter Dunn quoted by Grant Kester, Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, Chp 12. Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged Art (2003)
- “You can do whatever you like in your non- work time, providing that it affirms your competence as a trustworthy worker and a credible citizen.” Chris Rojeck’s Labor of Leisure pg.2
