DOCUMENTATION

Documentation of art works has historically served first as a referent to the work itself, and then as a secondary artwork itself, reified by the white cubes of the gallery system and absorbed and laundered by the art market. The careful anti-aesthetic of Conceptual Art documentation, formulated to undermine artistic consideration and valuation of the stand-in for the actual artwork (idea, event, action, etc.) has become a recognizable anti-aesthetic aesthetic, contributing to the mythological aura of a particular point in art/cultural history.  

When the stand-in and the work itself sit in competition for primary and secondary conceptual value and the roles of importance/unimportance are conflated, when an anti-aesthetic is emulated, the Work of Art is continually deferred, and we are left, unsatisfied, between the documents and the document, floating around in a pool of images, stand-ins, artifacts, references, actions, images, and objects, all pointing back at one another in a soup of roles and values. 

​<  >