In fact, in my estimation, the piece no longer exists. The piece in question is Robert Barry’s contribution to the 1969 Projects Class:
The students will gather together in a group and decide on a single common idea. The idea can be of any nature, simple or complex. This idea will be known only to the members of the group. You or I will not know it. The piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group. If just one student unknown to anyone else at any time, informs someone outside the group the piece will cease to exist. It may exist for a few seconds or it may go on indefinitely, depending on the human nature of the participating students. We may never know when or if the piece comes to an end.
-Robert Barry
On October 12, 2010 a graduate class of philosophy students from the Institute for Christian Studies joined us in the exhibition space for an introduction to their task. This work was different than any of the others in the show in that its execution depended on a closed conversation among the students, to the exclusion of the curators and their professor, Shannon Hoff. After doing a bit of group interpretation on where the work of art could be situated, we left the students to their own devices. We were unsure of how, if at all, we would display any of the results from this work in the show, and so we decided to take some documentation in case we wanted it later (there were notes and an audio recording made by the students). Ultimately we decided that it was intrinsic to the piece that it remain immaterial in the extreme and so we have not put any documentation on display.
[I should add, that although we did not install documentation, we did reinstall the cue card, as we have done in every case in which a work has been executed. In most cases, a cue card was removed from its original place in the southwest corner of the gallery and moved to function as a combination label and score for the completed work. In the instances when a work had no tangible trace--that is, the works by Barry, Ortiz-apuy, and Raufeisen & Witt--the cards were removed from their original place and reinstalled together in another part of the gallery. The only card that remains on the original wall is Joshua Schwebel's instruction "Do Nothing."]
The documentation we have of the Barry piece is almost a conceptual work unto itself. In order that we would be able to hear parts of their conversation without being let in on the secret, the students recorded clips of their roughly two hour conversation, pausing the recorder every time it sounded like someone was going to say something important. The other residual material we have is the photocopied instructions we handed out to each of them. Each student handed back the sheet with a handwritten note on the bottom saying something to the effect of “We’ve decided to decide.” The students deferred their decision and were delighted to be able to share their conclusion with us with no fear of obliterating the piece.
This last point is an interpretive problem for me as the decision to decide is indeed a decision taken by the group. If the decision to decide can constitute an idea, then the piece is gone; more than over, it has ceased to exist, according to the terms set out by the artist. The piece as it was generated in 1969 still exists, according to Ian Murray one of the students in Askevold’s class. Murray’s classmates don’t remember the idea and so Murray asserts that the work will exist indefinitely. Its existence, it should be noted, is contingent only on the terms of the artist–like a ready-made, claimed as art–and not dependent on anyone’s memory. However, the nature of the piece makes Murray’s assertion impossible to falsify: if the decision was ever revealed, the work would no longer exist. We can’t really know if it has been revealed, but since none of his former classmates remember the idea, he is no longer vulnerable to them in his attempt to perpetuate the work.
This work was the subject of contemporary artist Mario Garcia Torres’s What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (in 36 slides), 2004-2006. Torres sought out the 1969 classmates and staged a sort of class reunion during which the former students revealed their sentiments about the class, including some negative ones. One of these is the assertion or rumour that Askevold bugged the classroom during the making of the Barry piece. For more information on Torres’s artistic-historical work on the Barry piece, check out these links:
http://www.johnmenick.com/2007/09/mario-garcia-torres-interview
http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=461
-Joanna Sheridan
