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Lot Essay
Only this signed disc plus the poster accompanying the CD is a saleable artwork by Kelley Walker. The disc and the image it contains can be reproduced and copies disseminated as often as the owner desires. Whoever receives a copy of the disc or image can likewise reproduce/disseminate either as desired. Furthermore, anyone with a disc or reproduction can manipulate the image and reproduce/disseminate it in its altered state. All forms of reproduction/deviation derived from this artwork perpetuates a continuum correlating to this artwork.
'Given that contemporary audiences are likely able to identify (and identify with) brand-name oral hygiene products more easily than they can recall the particular protagonists and context of the image, Walker marks the inevitable distance between the depicted scene and us. Indeed, however familiar the image may seem in the collective unconsciouscollective unconscious, one wonders what specific details about the conflict actually remain available to audiences today. Who is the man? What ultimately happened to these people? We risk viewing the image, again culled from a Time-Life book, as a bit of branded "history"--passively, as watchers--and this conceptual distance is both signaled and even enacted by Walker's evacuated gesture, which renders the overall "schema" deeply resistant to interpretation in its apparent vandalism. Paradoxically, the distance introduced by Walker's "empty" gesture serves to bring the scene of the image closer--if only by making more acute, even chilling, our awareness of what specificity, detail, and identification is potentially lost in the image's circulation and eventual aestheticization' (T. Griffin, "Please Recycle: Tim Griffin on the Art of Kelley Walker", in Artforum, New York, April 2005).
'Given that contemporary audiences are likely able to identify (and identify with) brand-name oral hygiene products more easily than they can recall the particular protagonists and context of the image, Walker marks the inevitable distance between the depicted scene and us. Indeed, however familiar the image may seem in the collective unconsciouscollective unconscious, one wonders what specific details about the conflict actually remain available to audiences today. Who is the man? What ultimately happened to these people? We risk viewing the image, again culled from a Time-Life book, as a bit of branded "history"--passively, as watchers--and this conceptual distance is both signaled and even enacted by Walker's evacuated gesture, which renders the overall "schema" deeply resistant to interpretation in its apparent vandalism. Paradoxically, the distance introduced by Walker's "empty" gesture serves to bring the scene of the image closer--if only by making more acute, even chilling, our awareness of what specificity, detail, and identification is potentially lost in the image's circulation and eventual aestheticization' (T. Griffin, "Please Recycle: Tim Griffin on the Art of Kelley Walker", in Artforum, New York, April 2005).