Tymon Nogalski
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Seriousness
16 July 2014
Project „Seriousness” is a one – day exhibition. It is a site – specific project, which means that context of the space is very important. It took place in the building of Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw in my initial studio in faculty of Studio of Spatial Activities. The project consists of:
1. “You know what I mean” – installation. Photograph, self- portrait, 3,5x2,5 cm, duct tape, googly eyes, A4 sheet of paper, chewing gum, piece of hand writing.
Googled eyes were staring at the text “You know what I mean”. It was written on the A4 piece of paper and glued to the floor with a chewing gum. The paper was folded twice and looked shabby after being kept in my pocket.
2. “Asked my how I think” – object – mixer without blades, water, duckweed, driverless switch
A mixer due to the lack of blades could generate only the whirl. It was and off irregularly. Duckweed was visible when the water stopped to whirl. It was disturbed again later.
3. “Mixtures” – installation – Wi-Fi router, yellow self- adhesive paper, handwriting
Top of the paper had a word written: “password” and below it had a spiral text written: “whatsaucebalmyorhot”. The WI-FI was called “Mixed”
The fourth part of the project was a lecture “The world I am living in”. It was about a subjective perception of the world and significance of attention when it comes to understanding the reality.
The key factor here is an every-day situations and trivial things. It is a combination of the statement “Here and now” and “wherever you are, you are still somewhere”, which was supposed to point out that interesting things happen all the time wherever we are and the only thing to do is to start noticing them more carefully.
Important element here is graphical representation of the relation between three major aspect of the project: Reality – Imagination – Absurd. These are the most important categories, which affect creation and how we perceive the world. Talking about that relation and creating subcategories I tried to come up with visual examples.
During the lecture several things happened, which distracted the audience and me:
1. Mixer was on and off irregularly (3 to 45 seconds) creating a noise, which made speaking and listening very difficult.
2. After a few minutes, through one of the opened windows a tennis balls were coming in after being shot by a Spinfire Pro II machine. They were bouncing around behind me.
3. After I mentioned a word “Process” a metal spoon was intentionally dropped on the floor by someone from the audience, who I asked to do this before the lecture. The sound it made were getting the attention.
The lecture was ended after the audience asked questions to which I briefly responded.
Few examples of the questions raised: “Are you happy?” “How old would Beuys be if he had lived now?” “What is the longest word you know?”
Once the lecture was finished and questions answered I threw a coil of computer power cables out of the window, which I used to climb down to the yard.
There were three sprinklers, which were drawing a shape I drew before on the white school board – three partially overlapped circles. I stood in the middle and asked what time it was. I heard a response: 2:37 pm. After that I did 2 and a half squat jumps and said “thank you”.