INSTALL QUINN BY COCKCROW

Quinn’s ^{1 2} hijacking of a brief and honest moment of reality constitutes at best a self-aggrandising and offensive act of opportunistic careerism but at its least this gormless approach shows up certain presumptions widely accepted within arthood. Quinn’s presumption is just the louder, more visible dick waving version of the norm. {0:26}

Quinn’s intervention is a widespread problem, not exclusive to him but to a significant degree is representative of current art practice. {0:35}

Two central presumptions function in Quinn’s intervention. {0:38}

The first, in its simplest form manifests itself as: some art is always preferable to none. The presumption that art is always worthwhile is perpetrated widely within arthood and society generally [Ha]. Art is a system that is defined by its lack of interest in holding itself in any way to task. The word ‘critical’ is prolific, but criticism seems always precluded by an abundant but apathetic self-description. {1:05}

Quinn’s intervention successfully demonstrates that: sometimes no art is preferable to some art. What distinguishes Quinn’s trite foray into reality, from that of innumerable other contemporary artworks is only the conspicuousness of its intervention; it may be crass but structurally it constitutes an identical programme with the majority of current art production generally. [Ha] {1:29}

The second presumption sequestered not too far beneath the surface of Quinn’s grandiloquent gesture is that art can harness or somehow engender meaning beyond the boundaries of its own self-describing system; that there exists some ineffable correlation between the stuff Quinn produces and the significant instances of reality he aligns his products with. In actual fact, the presumed correlation is not ineffable but merely one system that is defined by its self-description, referencing some significant instance of reality and expecting the significance to be immutably transferred directly to the artwork. Quinn’s intervention constitutes nothing more than the acquisitive, grasping nature of the artist himself, cosseted in his insulated environment casually accumulating symbolic capital in the form of superficial references of significant things.³ {2:23}

The transferred significance is only perpetuated by those who accept the ineffable and immutable status of art. In practice what the reality-referencing artwork engenders is the wholesale preclusion of all significance beyond the boundaries of the art system itself. {2:41}

Whatever might be appreciated as a significant instance of reality, is reduced to the homogeneous level of all artworks subsumed into )Arthood(. The distinction between Quinn’s Colston intervention and his 1991 self-portrait is just anecdotal. This is the nature of self-describing systems such as )Arthood(: it cannot operate beyond the point of its own parameters... anything it engages with is consumed in that autopoietic⁴ system. {3:09}

These accepted assumptions, conventions and established standards of value are rarely called into question because to question them within the system might be to necessitate a revision of the system itself. The dependent participant dizzied, addicted to production and potentially in receipt of the system's drip-down contingent opportunity structures would find this difficult to contemplate. {3:31}

Art, in its current manifestation, can in no way help to sustain or preserve reality. Quinn states that he wants his intervention to be “an energy conductor”. He also announces that his sculpture makes “the possibility of a greater change feel more real than it was before”. Quinn seems to suggest, without irony or any self-effacing humility that he has, with the help of his energy conductor the ability to make reality more real. {4:00}

The brief moment of reality itself didn’t look twice at Quinn’s flacid conductor but was rapidly subsumed into the broader image-world; flamed by the proliferation of social media and its blithe relations of distribution. Subsequently )arthood( could not help but get itself involved in obtrusively announcing its solidarity and bestowing its “intellectual weight”. On hearing the word ‘plinth’ Quinn’s asinine ears must have pricked, this being his particular realm. One imagines, for Quinn in his delusional state of artist as a self-confirming centre of truth, that it was purely an issue of moral responsibility. Subsequently, in one vacuous gesture Quinn proceeded to blight what was actually useful about this brief reality - of real people engaged in real and meaningful expressions of disgust - turning an awakening cultural moment into a defunct one and accelerating its inevitable function as a dead one. {5:01}

How do we get the continuation of Quinn’s career operating alongside a wholesale improvement in its output, functioning ideally at the level of practice obviating career? {5:10}

Before even attempting to formulate a criterion for distinguishing a good artwork from a bad one, we should first consider an attempt to formulate a criterion for establishing a distinction between what constitutes art and what does not. What is Quinn’s intervention? Does it constitute an example of ‘something that should contain within itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise’?⁵ Is it distinct as art? {5:38}

What distinguishes Quinn’s object/event from the protesters’ own object/event in the form of their placards? Both share a comparable physical temporality while maintaining some continuation through the image world. What special property does Quinn’s object/event possess that is lacking in the placards? Would their substantive, explicit and accessible messages be more effective by being made more otiose? {6:07}

What was Quinn’s intervention intended to circumvent that the protesters’ placards were hamstrung by? What progress is made towards equality by reproducing one protester materially, distributed in images and fused irrevocably to the autonomous artist: the Quinn ‘Experience’ in all its innovatively managed, entrepreneurial relations of distribution? {6:30}

The protesters were there and their messages were functioning before Quinn arrived on the scene. The failure of Quinn’s intervention and the justification for declaring it a bad example of art (an example of )arthood( in fact) is that it contains nothing within itself that substantiates or justifies itself as it is and not otherwise; such as a placard. It is nothing more than a capital rich version of a placard, albeit lacking the honesty. {6:57}

These questions would not necessarily arise if Quinn had restricted himself to the institution of art. The imposition of his work in the middle of a context defined by protest only more conspicuously declares his laissez-faire approach to referencing real life to be meaningless. {7:13}

The question Quinn should ask himself is the same question all artist’s should ask themselves having produced a work or perhaps conceived of one: is the production/distribution of this work in some form of public context required or beneficial?⁶ A productive model of art practice is one that accepts the necessity of making errors and is not irrevocable. It is true that some errors may only be identified in the context of the work’s distribution but nevertheless it is okay to abandon ideas, to put things on the back burner or cock them up. If nothing gets distributed something is still learnt. {7:51}

If artists asked themselves the above question, out of a sense of interest in the potential answer; to be genuinely curious to know, the result might manifest itself as an improvement in the output of current art. By directing the question at itself, practice could oppose arthood’s default position of blinkered self-celebration: it’s good because it’s art; it’s art because artists and their attendant managers say so. {8:16}

Perhaps in the idealised critical public sphere described, we might render the likes of artists in the mould of Quinn less successful. A demotion. {8:25}

Problematically even if artists answered ‘no’ in response to the above question, the difficulty would be resisting the temptation to disregard the answer in light of some potential opportunity for exposing their work by some form of public display. Presumably for artists in the mould of Quinn, to forgo an opportunity to produce and distribute some work, particularly a work imbued with so much moral imperative, would constitute a wilful waste of art. {8:54}

The honorific nature of art reproduces the superficial appearance of the significant instance of its referred to reality. The presumption that the work is reciprocally imbued, mediated through the affirmation of authorship and notion of the artist as a self-confirming centre of truth, produces an equally erroneous corresponding [in]significance. Over the next eleven months we shall be identifying other erroneous corresponding significances. {9:19}

Incidentally, look how easy it is to conceive of a sculpture à la mode, en vogue, à la Quinn!: {9:25}

With the same black resin, using whatever profligate [Ha] technologies Quinn used for his sculpture: Willard Van Orman Quine giving Marc Quinn’s melting Blood Head with a donkey’s carcass⁷ a shoulder ride. Quinn’s physiognomy [pre-thawing] suggests celebration, something like Bobby Moore raised on the shoulders of Ray Wilson & Geoff Hurst following their World Cup victory. However, Quine’s⁸ constipated strain is visible in his whole physiognomy, the look in his eyes just telling the world that what he really needs is a shit.⁹ {10:02}

1/ The Base Ballbag Shaved
A 57 year old man, Marc Quinn wearing a black baseball cap, the peaks underside green and edged in red. This is teamed with black polo shirt, hoodie and leather jacket combination. This layering has something of Steve Bannon’s double-shirting. He smiles to the camera.

2/ The Knitted Foreskin Revealing Spotted Glans
A younger but somehow older Marc Quinn [27]. What has time done to him? Ontological questions such as this may have to wait but we have an inkling that the transformation can’t just be down to the conservative green woollen polo neck jumper he’s sporting. This unsmiling Quinn, adolescent pimple below lower labial, premature bald patch shining to top frontal lobe, strikes a darker note in comparison to our own contemporary child dressed clown.

1 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CCuMORnAppb/?hl=en
Description of Images: 1/ A black and white photograph of Jenny Bastet [surrounded by scanning equipment on tripods, the 201 cameras mentioned in the Guardian article/ the reporter was arranged/ invited to be at the installation?] presumably taken by Marc Quinn or one of his assistants. To the right of the image on desktops, or below on mobile devices, is Jenny Bastet’s reply to Marc Quinn’s words in a Daily Mail article.
2/ An image of a text, “This is not about money…” from Marc Quinn to Jenny Bastet, her phone is on airplane mode, the message was received 19/01/2017.
3/ a continuation of the text message above. 4/ A text message conversation between Bastet and Quinn dated the 07/02/2017. Quinn, “You can trust me”

https://twitter.com/thewhitepube/status/1284428835686146048?lang=en
Description of Image: A tweet from the White Pube, a functioning critical multi-platform, directing readers/audience to a text [made in Notes] by former Quinn assistants in solidarity with Jenny Bastet. Quinn quotes Desmond Tutu.

2 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zdGJBFMM5Q
Description of Video: A video produced by the Guardian newspaper showing the removal of Quinn’s sculpture by Council workers, cutting to footage produced by Quinn of the installation of his sculpture upon the Colston plinth. No voice over just the sound of lorries and lifting gear, Quinn’s footage is silent. Was the footage forwarded by the artist himself or some hired third party?
The following text accompanies the video. “The sculpture of a Black Lives Matter protester, Jen Reid, which replaced a toppled statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, has been removed. The artist Marc Quinn installed the work on the empty plinth, left when a statue of Colston was torn down during protests in June. The statue of Reid with a raised fist, installed in a clandestine operation, was removed about 24 hours after it went up.”

3 As matched by the self-promoting Gormley and his Bohm connection… [JCHP Internal Document 195a Tony G: Quality Control and Studio Production Post Lockdown: From the Workbench.

4In their 1972 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela described how they invented the word autopoiesis.[2]:89:16
"It was in these circumstances ... in which he analyzed Don Quixote's dilemma of whether to follow the path of arms (praxis, action) or the path of letters (poiesis, creation, production), I understood for the first time the power of the word "poiesis" and invented the word that we needed: autopoiesis. This was a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems."
They explained that,[2]:78
"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network."
They described the "space defined by an autopoietic system" as "self-contained", a space that "cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection."

5 F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (1962)



6 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1muSMJQTre16J0JQLaYiOnDTWR2gQYnDsTOa5pyD6_lI/edit?usp=sharing


7

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/370575 "Tu que no puedes" (You who cannot)


8
*NB a lookalike of W.V.O. Quine will be required for the casting/scanning process, as he’s dead.


9

https://twitter.com/MarvinJRees/status/1283392832569475074?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1283392832569475074%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fuk-england-bristol-53414463
Description of Image: Tweet from the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees.