Installed at Rotenberg Gallery in Boston
This project proposes a series of images generated by instructions from a machine designed and built by Harvey Loves Harvey. It is a continuation of a series of ‘Harvey machines’ that serve as meta-artists, and is intended to result in a photographic series.
For this project, Harvey Loves Harvey will create a database of phrases by well-known artists regarding their creative approach, philosophy, or intention. The machine will choose, at random, one of these concepts and ask the members of Harvey Loves Harvey to enact that concept for a camera; this will produce a photographic result. The final photos will be printed as a triptych and presented. Titles will be derived from the phrase/concept generated by the machine.
In order to present the process to the viewer, a screenshot of the machine instructions will be digitally impressed over the triptych, presenting viewers with a clear statement of both process and result.
As a meta-machine, this project is allied with ‘HLHCP20: The Harvey Machine’ and ‘HLHCP22: An Automated Device for the Creation of Artistic Direction and the Removal of Ideological Interpretation: Who Is The Artist?’; any further exploration of Harvey Loves Harvey’s concept of the meta-artist can be studied in these pieces.
“We associate psychosis, particularly Freud’s melancholic clinical, pathological version, with Kant’s aesthetic sublime.”
– Dinos and Jake Chapman
“I would say that it may have been when I started to see the extreme limitations of the romantic point of view, that what seemed to be total chance and total freedom was often just truly an exposition of a certain really fixed expressionist style of work.”
– Walter de Maria
“I see metaphor as an imposition of a value structure that you’re making art in order to destroy.”
– Lawrence Weiner
“Serial systems and their permutations function as a narrative that has to be understood. People still see things as visual objects without understanding what they are. They don’t understand that the visual part may be boring but it’s the narrative that’s interesting.”
– Sol LeWitt
“The failure of conceptual art is actually its success.”
– Joseph Kosuth
“By going really far afield into a completely fake world, maybe there’s a chance to make things resonant somehow – or in this case, truly terrifying. To make it as bad as the real stuff that’s happening.”
– Jenny Holzer
“Appropriation often comes first. The blah blah, the other, is often the objective. Communication and self-realization as hacky hack.”
– Paul McCarthy
“Our point of departure is often the notion of activity and transformation which bears in itself the awareness of past and future.”
– Vito Acconci