In November, a pair of exhibition spaces in Lincoln Nebraska, DRIFT STATION & Parallax Space, hosted a show called Instructions for Initial Conditions. The international open call invited fluxus-like scores, which were printed in black and white on letter-size paper and displayed en masse.
“Initial condition” is a term used in Chaos Theory referring to a simple starting point that, when the system is set into motion, is radically transformed into an unpredictable result. The works in this exhibition describe an initial condition by which an artwork can be made or enacted, taking on the form of instructions that are exhibited as artworks in and of themselves. They run across traditions and disciplines: some act as a catalyst for acts meant to be carried out immediately, while others are purely poetic calling for no action, or are conceptual or impossible to be realized and can only be completed mentally.
An exhibition catalog is now available for download (warning: large pdf file). I think it is well worth the large download: there are some wonderful, poetic works in the collection.
Those of you who know me will not be surprised that my entry was somewhere between tongue-in-cheek and contrarian.
