G.B.M.F.
26 October 2018

2012      Souterrain, Berlin

G.B.M.F.

(collaboration with Cara Benedetto)

2012
Two rooms, text, posters, bookmarks, 2-channels audio, sound-proofing fabric, binder, exhibition and studio furniture
Dimensions variable

+ + + Towards a poetics and ethics of collaboration and collectivity

Poster 1

Poster 2

A multiplicity of choices for the option of

G.B.M.F.

Good Body Mediocre Face

a. What is the score?
b. What will we serve?
c. How much can they charge?
d. Where does Thing sit?

Good Body Mediocre Face as a linguistic form symbolizes the particular while privileging the abstract or suggestive via abbreviation and naming. This particular acronym is aimed at dismantling the culturally dominant prospect of expression via the face of mediocrity and giving new life to a good body.

The acronym used as a method of mining knowledge suggests that we may choose, that one may choose from many possibilities at any given moment in time. Time as one considers it is a unit or measurement for death. Death is one way to think of naming material. A show may constitute several deaths or just one. This show is not about the body. This show is about finding an example of possibility.

One question might be How many trays of nachos are necessary to colonize a house in Germany. Another question might be Is the refrigerator really broken or is the light burnt out? One possible answer could be The traces of the work that Equals the work is anything in the show. That cannot be a sentence. Another answer could be A portrait will due. It’s unfinished.

What is a good body? Obtaining and/or maintaining a good body results from body building. Body could also be Community. B.C. (building community). What is a mediocre face? It is a face that is not as good as it’s underlying body. It is a façade. It is a neoliberal opportunity and/or head case. It is the sadist’s overhead. It is without question. It yields to the option of setting several choices before one to choose from, thus naming the answer as freedom (freedom has no name) but in truth the mediocre face is without a multiplicity of choices. It is without facet.

So what is the difference between multiple choice and a multiplicity of choice? One might characterize multiple choice as the potential to choose from several choices whereas one would characterize multiplicity of choice as a choice that multiplies itself via the impossibility of one answer. It is the difference between the hysteric and the sadist. The hysteric exists within the space of a question that has no answer. The sadist exists in order to give the same answer again and again.

One example for good face mediocre body is someone who is willing to tell you that they do not in fact know who they are but they will in fact tell you who you are in relation to them. A second example, the only example of good face mediocre body is someone who is willing to tell you that they do not in fact know who they are but they will in fact tell you who you are in relation to them.

A Good Body can be remembered and imagined. This social is not specific. This war is imagined. The war is being waged against Face in order to remind the Body as to how one must consider oneself in order to respond.

 

Bookmark 1

Bookmark 2

+ + + In a first stage, participants, many of whom work collaboratively, were invited to a gathering hosted by the artists, where they were recorded reading texts, either that they prepared or that they chose from a selection provided by the artists.

The artists (Boatwright/Benedetto) then recorded audio of their own work sessions and process as they discussed these recorded prompts, determined what shape the project should take, and prepared the elements of the exhibition.

A third stage took place at the residency/exhibition space, with a series of texts, minimal interventions into the space, refreshments parallel to those provided at the initial gathering/project stage, and two parallel soundtracks: one incorporating the recordings of the work sessions, and the other with the original recordings acquired from the participants in stage 1.