reviews ON VIEW
On view
BC PrOjECt rOOm, BrOOklyN
12 m ay – 30 juNE
Deep in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, overlooking the congested buzz of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, sits the BC Project Room, a nascent
exhibition space run out of the living room of artist Brian Clifton’s apartment. Clifton and his entourage of friends – many of whom are recent graduates
of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and College for Creative Studies, in Detroit – have clearly put in some time in Chelsea. Immaculate white walls,
detailed press releases and tastefully hung exhibitions substitute for the fuck-you unfinish of New York’s last great art gallery/collective, Reena Spaulings,
suggesting that not every generation of upstarts need wear unruliness on its sleeve. Polish, it turns out, is moreover a method of critique: BC Project
Room’s simulated commercial gallery forms the perfect testing-ground for Clifton’s wave of thinkers and practitioners.
On View, an exhibition of works from the space’s permanent collection, offers a refreshing appraisal of art collecting, at a time when the heat of
the market has all but reduced the practice to speculation. By specifying that all exhibited works were acquired by the BC Project Room through non-
monetary exchange, Clifton succeeds in recovering an older, more oblique definition of collecting, originating in Benjamin’s writing, as a passion that
‘borders on the chaos of memories’.
Benjamin’s collector valued an object for its many, variegated histories. Clifton, in like manner, asks that the displayed works be read through
the twin lenses of the aesthetic and the anecdotal. The delicate ink cross-hatching in Jeffrey Tranchell’s Untitled (2004) parasitically spreads from the
drawing’s upper-left corner and ceases soon after, leaving an expanse of blank page in its wake. Conceived as part of a series of drawings in which Tranchell
would stop his mark-making upon interruption, this work was made on the agreement that Clifton himself would interrupt its process.
Other pieces take on more explicit forms of institutional critique. Fia Backström’s Flash animation Linjestörning (2003) and Seth Price’s essay
Dispersion (2002), for example, were both acquired by Clifton via the Internet, where they were made available for download by the respective artists.
Clifton has printed copies of Price’s seminal work for viewers to take away, thereby throwing weight behind the author’s dictum that ‘new strategies are
needed [for art] to keep up with commercial distribution, decentralization, and dispersion’.
Lingering throughout the space are accumulations of Pacifica beer bottles that Clifton and friends drank during their opening night re-performance
of conceptual artist Tom Marioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (1970). Marioni was not without a healthy sense of
irony when he stipulated that there be ‘no art collectors except in disguise’ at his gathering, which he performed countless times throughout his career.
His implicit distinction – between the art collector and the person who gains a shared, proprietary relationship to a work, by virtue of engaging with it –
is a significant antecedent to Clifton’s model of contemporary collecting: one we all would be wise to follow. Tyler Coburn
On View, 2007 (installation view). Courtesy BC Project room, Brooklyn
Artreview 128
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 14 7/8/07 15:50:07
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