Beulah Kruger

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST AUDIO CATALOGUE

In my understanding, the requirement of producing a catalogue of one’s work, in this course, is motivated by the belief that, amongst other things, it is something that could aid us in our stepping into the art world outside of the institution. Producing this catalogue, would teach us of “the essential skills of catalogue design and layout for the modern artist”. 

I note here the importance of access within its function. Specifically, allowing the access to happen more immediately and more definitively. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word ‘catalogue’ can be described as “a book with a list of all goods that you can buy from a shop”. I think it seems fitting to describe the word within a capitalist register, for it lays out your art on a spread, categorising every part of it, like sliced meat, and concretises – scoops it onto one plate- for the receiver to consume. Yes, when entering the art market, having work that is accessible is useful, it is a market where you are selling your goods after all, but is it essential for everyone graduating Michaelis? Does graduating Michaelis or being an Artist mean you are required to enter this art market?

Beyond my diversion for the conceptual presence of a catalogue in constituting the Institutional Artist, producing a catalogue of my work before the examination would not synthesize the work for what it is either. Since I am doing an installation that requires a live ‘performance’, the most momentous part of the work will only be made available to me after the catalogue needs to be presented. I use the word momentous, because the work consists of different moments, collectively constituting what the work is. This is not just conceptual nonsense, the literal meaning of the work is comprised of performances that describe different things that seem disparate from each other and only start to connect when all of them sit next to each other or is read through each other. The practical and theoretical manifestation of the work won’t make sense if you look at each performance in their singularity. Asking me to produce a catalogue explaining only part of the work, would describe a different work entirely. Working from performance to performance also means the conceptualisation of it can only be realised after production, not before. The theory comes after the practice for me, not before (with regards to translating what it is). So, producing a catalogue that does not translate my work would not be beneficial for me now, nor any time in the future. 

The course also believes that theory and practice are intertwined. With this I agree but feel the requirement of producing a book or a separate entity from the work itself, creates a divide once again. Since different forms, like magazines and even CD’s etc, are allowed, I turned to audio. There is still, oddly enough, required of me to have the “physical wording” of the audio, which I then transcribed with the help of AI (to stay away as far as I can from creating it myself). I used recordings I made of conversations I had with different people throughout the year that assisted and guided me in developing my work for what it is now. My catalogue consists therefore out of everything everyone else has defined it as. It not only frames my performances in a way that allows access to its conceptual underpinnings as you hear the concepts build on each other as my project changes over time but refrains from any authentic singular expression of ownership over the work (which is something I am translating in the performances themselves). Lastly, it allows for the work not to be defined, for these are mere speculations and suggestions from other people about the work. What I want it to be, or what it is for me, is different to what it will be for those examining it or accessing it. Because I understand that there is power or control in providing access, and how much access one can give, I try and relinquish as much of that power as I can, without the work losing its integrity. 

For these reasons, I have submitted the audio and transcription as my catalogue and hope you support my motives to do so. I believe this to be the most beneficial and honest extension of my work that I can provide at this time. 

Transcription of Audio

(00:07) I've noticed that whenever I meet a lot of people that used to study at Michaelis, and they always say that your work is deemed as successful when you're constantly producing. And I feel like everyone has known you, since first year, to always be like… like you're always at labour. You're just always doing something… and always doing a lot. So, when I saw you doing this, I was like, this is so you-coded. For you to not even fully have your concept standing, but you're just doing, in some way just speaks to the traditions of being in an art school, where you just do and figure it out after. 

(00:46) And we've had a lot of discussion about what does that mean as a creative practice, that reiterating, thinking it's all about the practice of putting things up, taking it down again. What does that mean to be an artist? That's what you're talking about, right, that is the project. So in some ways it's about, it becomes like a trace, it becomes less and less and less evident you reiterate what's left, what's left, what's left. That is to say, it is not about nothingness… in some ways it is, but in some ways it's not. It's about that rigorous practice. 

(01:14) You know, a lot of what we do in art is make product, right? So you churn out a product which you then fucking destroy, and then there's this endless iteration and reiteration of churning out a product, which is not even a product. 

(01:26) The occurrence of the working materiality is not the work, making and the unmaking is the work… Time, labour, working, to some degree, with absurdity and futility…

(01:41) It's quite nihilistic… like there's nothing that goes up and there's nothing that comes down and at the end there's nothing. And then Fabian had a very different point of view and said that the installation, the point of the installation is to create, to make and remove… This thing of the obsession with the recording and the ephemeral moment, and this idea of wanting to grasp it before it slips through… and it could, in a way, be a comment on mortality.

(02:06) I mean, at the end of it, there's nothing here, right? You've got the Red Bull, the kettle, the computers, the fucking cables everywhere, you know, tripod, the whole set up. And it's like this huge amount of stuff to do this really meaningless task. And then someone mentioned that, you know, that maybe because, you know, you work all the time, that there's a kind of level of dissatisfaction with labour or your work situation. I think also there's something about the public, you know, this is a very public thing, this lashing that you do - this self-flagellation that you do - has to be very public. How you curate yourself on social media, so there's a kind of self-surveillance there, but there's also a self-surveillance in what you do, how you set up all these cameras and things. 

(02:55) The durational thing is part of the process, that you actually have this 12-hour video, and fine, we might have to scrub through it in order to see it, but to me that's… that’s part of it.

(03:10) There is something incredibly performative about your work, in a strange way connected to endurance, but not in a physical endurance like we think of like Marina Abramovic where she would kind of... 

(03:22) Sometimes you're in the screen, sometimes you maybe walk out of it, but it's not like you are...performing for the audience…It is this expanded notion of performance… So this notion of performance expanding into time and space in an open-ended way, that then engages things like; the dematerialization of the art project, post production space, absurdity, notions of how we surveil our bodies… Your work sits in between all of those things. It's not explicitly just one of those things. It's about how they all come together. That's what you're trying to do when you're taking these videos. You're giving us a trace of this performance, a translation of this performance. 

(04:04) How do you de-abstract that labour from the… generated online, to something that people can physically deal with in space.

(04:21) You have these very broad ideas that you are interested in and want to explore, and you are frustrated that you don’t know how to explore them in the language of Michaelis, and Michaelis doesn’t understand your language of exploring them…But, I think I agree with George, in that, what you just need to figure out is how you explore that thing you want to explore, but then synthesize that into something that qualifies here… and it speaks to this language of materialness... 

(04:46) So it becomes a question of, okay, cool, you've got a project, and you're interested in data and how that data is managed. You're interested in politics of, you know, the personal as it plays out on social media… you will not be the first. 

(05:06) Like a… subliminal psyche, you know, like, as an online space, there's a lot of like, kind of, publicly suppressed things, as like this pseudo public space that is circulating, that is like, very formative and becoming more and more formative. But like, there's stuff that happens online that doesn't happen… Right. So there's this movement from like something that is very intriguing, very accessible, very legible, into this realm that is so abstract and meaningless, where you're like, oh, if they're using my data, and it's one of billions of points of data, that doesn't feel meaningful. And there's this fear of being exposed as an individual, but then there's also this fear of being lost in this sea of anonymity… There's all these surveillance agencies - they don't care. Like, they don't care about you as an individual. And I think when people, like, want to kind of retain some sort of privacy, like, they're thinking about themselves as an individual. And they think that they care about them as, like, an individual. Right, right, right, right. But it is also one of the issues, I think, at Michaelis, there's, like, this, you know, like, panopticon - there's this abstracted sense of what you're supposed to do as an artist. Right, right. And this fear that then, like, paralyzes people in their creativity. So you have this very tactile thing that's coming forward, of like dust, right, of disintegration… which I think has a lot of very heavy conceptual resonance when you speak about emotion, like the state that you have, but then also this, I mean, ideas of archive are definitely like running through your work, like immediately I was like – archives. 

(06:57) Your pull to working with the archive, your pull to multiples, your dilemma between… I don't know, this like, this obsessive way of recording life and needing to have a…to kind of make… to fix everything and make it pause. Which is very interesting in relation to photography because photography is always a pause. 

(07:26) This idea of retention of memory. How do you remember? Because memory is a question of the future. It's a function of the future. You are constantly extrapolating from past experiences to be like, what do I do next? Why do I do something next? So you have this necessary dynamism, everything is within this flow. But at the same time, you have this feeling of death, essentially. So there's something textural there. There's something in the disintegration of things. That maybe on one end is dust, on another is pulp. That, I think, is really interesting. In computers, nothing ever goes away. Even if you delete stuff, you're obscuring access to the data still there, and it can often still be retrieved. 

(08:24) And then someone mentioned the thing of data scraping, which I thought was really interesting in terms of social mediaYou’re physically scraping, but you're also data scraping, taking that data away. But you know the third year who put that stuff on here, it was all very decolonial. And you fucking scraped it off and you put this other thing on it. Anyway, I don't know if we need to mention that to anyone. Jane and I call this the decolonial war, because in 2016 when this was a hot subject in student politics, this wall was full of stuff. So, it's quite interesting to me that there's a politics of papering over it, I don't know, anyway… The fact that you're doing it outside was thought to be quite interesting, so it's not just the gallery space, you're exposing yourself to unsolicited audience. And that is also like social media, where you open yourself up to unsolicited audiences, like where they are trolling you… and that sort of thing. 

(09:21) And I think that there's interesting parallels with like the digital space, where a lot of things that aren't feasible here kind of come out, like they want to consume that kind of thing, you know, and it's interesting to think about like what is suppressed and then what is actualized in this imaginary space… 

(09:41) And then you also said something about so much to say… and you say you had so much to say… I definitely, that's the first thing I got when I saw you putting up, I thought yo this girl's got a lot of say. You have a lot to say, and you say it, and it's loud, it's on buildings. There's something also very interesting about that, having a lot to say, but then where you say it? And there's something about that where something of yours has gone out. I think we've all had that experience. I'd be interested to know if other people outside of you had that experience. So I've been interested in the things that we all have hidden, but they've somehow come out and never want to share ever again. What are these secrets that have come out? Or the things that are personal to us, but we post them anyway. But then two minutes later, we're like, sjoh, I shouldn't have done that. But it's too late. The world has seen it. So I think the residue is really important. What do you do with these secrets that have been hidden, put in the bin, now dragged out again? What do they look like? 

(10:47) But the elephant in the room is the post, because we're all talking about the post. These guys know what the post is, and you and me don't know what the post is… Because I think that's this huge thing that we're dealing with, that you've been dealing with for four years, apparently.

(11:02) there was like an assignment and an online tab, so we had to submit something like…like it was a dare, you had to submit something you like dared to say. So we had to like, I guess, say something that we're not, we wouldn't really say, we're other people would kind of find, you know, questionable… You know how when you start with this, this – screenshots and stuff – I don’t know what to call it – right – At some point you didn't know why you were doing it but you were doing it. And I feel like now the why is starting to like let it show itself. So like, the process is bringing it out… It's also like you, in first year versus you now, feel like two entirely different people. I feel like the whole year, like, knows that. 

(11:49) I think you are very different person that you were in first year.

(11:54) So then the residue is really important, because the residue is you. The residue is all that you come from. The residue is… the residue might not necessarily be about the material, but it's also about the self – hm – the transformation of the self.