Antek Walczak, Mexico City

Artist:ANTEK WALCZAK
Exhibition: g/r/o/w/l/s/_/a/n/d/_s/c/re/am/s, / _sc/ra/wl/s_/an/d_/gr/ap/h/e/m/es/
Gallery: Galería Gaga, Durango 204,Colonia Roma. Mexico City
Thursday November 27th, 2008/ 5 pm


"Some recent solo work from Antek Walczak of Bernadette Corporation.

One of my friends regards me skeptically when I try to stammer out a statement that has something to do with “art as information.” “Ok, so what?” he says, “So and so and so and so and so and so have been dealing with contemporary art in this way for years.” “They have inspired me, in this, my new direction,” I cheerfully add. But my friend won’t let me get away with it. “And over in England, whatshisname stands alone in a crusade against the communications and knowledge management of the art market producer.” “You mean like, ‘how to win a career and influence people?’” I whine, “but I’m more interested in Shannon’s theory of information, cybernetics, compression, patterns and probabilities, sorting through the cultural apparatus, trying to know quickly what I don’t need to know.” “I could care less about all that science-techno fetish stuff,” he says finally, ending the conversation.

Imagine you are at a party and are talking to someone who is kind of hot but really outside of your realm of possibility. You endure unbearable questions. What do you do? Do you make money at that? How old are you? What kind of art do you do make?

I transcribe online news headlines about Somali pirates onto sheets of parchment paper, using a fountain pen and unpracticed calligraphy.

I copy the album cover graphics from a culture industry pop-girl-punk band and modify it in the direction of a word search game.

I redraw the fan art submitted to a Christian metalcore band’s myspace, and by leaving out one letter in my transcription, transform it into an emo eulogy for the financial markets.

I faithfully draw from a photo source a robotic hand holding a pencil.

I stick together pre-printed labels made for high school science projects…

This I read recently and it cracked me up: “In evolution, the environment processes the information presented to it in the form of organisms and produces output – some dead organisms, some live organisms.”

I also came across a press release for a group show that might have been called “Bad to the Bone.” The starting point was hardcore, the musical offshoot of punk, but I found its reasoning all wrong. It spoke of rebellion, “fuck you” art that needs to be nailed to the wall or else the kids will steal it, tattooed boys enthralling blue haired dowagers, in short, it reared the ugly head of the figure of the hipster with all it’s messy post avant-gardisms and bohemiousness.

I, too, am interested in hardcore, but as a historical institution, not as a badge or posture. Like church music in the middle ages, it is a fixed form, and those who choose to practice this form, teenagers mostly, treat it as a calling. It is a decidedly suburban form, and as we all know, hipsters abhor the suburbs while they idolize New York. The notion of whatevercore (a better word to take in all the permutations of hardcore since the 80s) is a structural deployment of information antithetical to the advanced information expertise of the hipster. ‘Advanced’ is meant here like it would in a hospital, i.e., “the illness is in an advanced or terminal stage.”

In the mid-19th century, Lord Kelvin postulated the heat death of the universe, a final or ultimate state of maximum entropy, a system “running out of steam,” based on a universal application of the second law of thermodynamics. Culturally, from Oswald Spengler to Robert Smithson, a lot of mileage has been hammered out of this concept. Something similar can be done with the notion of entropy in information theory, which evaluates the degree of unexpectedness and predictability of information in measurable terms. Rather than existential pessimism or cultural gloominess, this use of the concept of entropy spoils everyone’s expectations of the new, pushes noise and chaos back into the metaphysical; it spoils the surprise party implicit in the production of communication.

Antek Walczak
Mexico City.
November 2008."

House of Gaga