Suzi's MFA - De-Wared

Suzi's MFA exhibit went off quite well. In fact I was rather impressed with how it turned out. I hope to get some more information (conceptual statement, etc) to put up on the collaborator's portion of the site with some video that I shot on a digital camera.

Artist's Statement-

In Denis Hollier's Against Architecture the writings of Georges Bataille, Hollier notes Bataille's discussion of language's possibility as a commodity or expenditure for control over subjectivity. Here the implications of exchange value (profit) over use-value (subjectivity), dictate the practice of art and architecture's effect on human experiences and thus resonates as post-modernism's current language of late capitalism.

In De-Wared, I attempt to utilize a new language to reverse the state of postmodernism's domination of exchange value as supported in Frederic Jameson's text: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In defining language, I attest to Bataille's theory of language's ability (both visual and verbal) to either propel "into a dance, or fall into intoxication". Here language is a labyrinth, our existence, were an exit or discovery of freedom from confusion can be found when "lexical prisons are broken open". Confusion occurs when on loses identity and subjectivity within the barriers and entanglement of the web. In this way I search to exit from the commodity value of mass-marketed standards which over-power creativity and individual freedom.

By forcing standard, quarter-inch steel rods down to an unusable item so it is no longer representative of a ware, I find independence from the form it dictates to the user, and therefore coin a language that is not bound by market-value but rather by my own reality within this labyrinth. Although purchased as a commodity, I manipulate the steel to no longer promote the language of commodity and to remove its exchange-value. The de-wared steel serves as a metaphor to a culturally larger problem within late-capitalism in the hopes that it too can be ameliorated.

-Susan Quilligan