ENDLESS KISS 01-04-12 to 13-05-12

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-up, the main character is casually taking photographs of a distant couple arguing in a park. Unknowingly he is witnessing a crime taking place and the murder of the male is captured on film. On realising this, he attempts to enlarge a section of one of the photographs: an image of bushes where a gunman appears to be hiding. Despite numerous attempts, the greater he enlarges the image the more the resolution breaks down and the use of photography to present visual facts or evidence is called into question.

For Endless Kiss the first presentation the Goat Major Projects space, GMP co-founder and artist Richard Higlett has recreated El Lissitzky’s seminal installation piece of 1923 Proun Room using an image from the internet with a file size of 70kb. The creation is an exercise in guesswork with dimensions estimated. The piece has been made mostly using scraps of wood from around his studio, while a subsequent photograph of the interpretation suggests the work of a more objective maker. As in Blow-up, the source used to make the work is open to interpretation as details cannot be reproduced with a level of certainty. The exercise becomes an echo of the 1923 original while it conceptually exists in its own right and no other research, other than viewing a single image from the internet has taken place.

Endless Kiss has been created as a starting point for a number of dialogues about the ways in which we experience life through different medias and use them as false substitutes for evidence of the original. The piece is intentionally theatrical and lacking the creative rigour. An accompanying work Endless Kiss 2.0, is a low quality print of the Wikipedia page for El Lissitzky. Wikipedia is considered a contemporary signifier of factual information. A small black circle on the first wall indicates the point the artist returned to when estimating the position of objects in the space, compensating for the distortion by the camera lens, as he attempted to return the image to existing in three dimensions.

Artist’s Talk: Sunday 6^th May 11am.

Richard Higlett will be discussing Endless Kiss and the history of Proun Room along with other examples of 20th century artworks that have been remade. He will be showing a small film that documents a recreation of a second Proun Room made in 1969 from the artists notes.  Until the talk Higlett has deliberately avoided seeing any other documentation of the work, other than the low resolution on-line image.