Public Artwork
Passage
Location:
Future Cities, Art Gallery of Hamilton off-site project, Hamilton, ON, Canada
See map: Google Maps
Artwork creator(s):
Jurakic, Ivan
Text author(s):
Baudrillard, Jean
Installation year:
2004
Remarks on location:
Occupied a long, narrow corridor in an abandoned downtown bank
Description:
Hand-cut directly in sheetrock and drawn into with graphite, the single line of text occupied a long, narrow corridor in an abandoned downtown bank.
Text of the artwork:
no longer in the age of grandiose collapses and resurrections of games of death and eternity but of little fractal events smooth annihilations and gradual slides with no tomorrow from here on
Text theme:
Jean Baudrillard, “Ecstasy and Inertia”
Artwork theme:
Contact and location; the city as a place of passage; terminal nature of commerce; post-industrial space Dimensions:
Height:
1.16m
Depth:
0.1 m Note(s):
Passage featured an excerpt from the essay Ecstasy and Inertia by philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Beginning with a negation (no), the text created a metaphoric circuit by ending with a preposition suggesting contact and location (on). Functioning as a memorial to the post-industrial space where the phrase was contained – a gutted commercial site transformed into a temporary art gallery – the inscription also alluded to the terminal nature of commerce. The installation proposed a kind of formalist vandalism, akin to carving ones name into a public bench. Set behind a glass façade, Passage was visible 24 hours a day, taking its place alongside the flood of other signage and graffiti that marks the city as a place of passage.
Document(s):
Syndicate
