Breuk Iversen ( a l t e r n a t i v e - c o m m u n i c a t o r )
E X O
offal
beehive *
New *
resume *
wburg *
I N T O
Tai Chi *
Taoism *
* links another site.
101 Words on the Offal project
by Kay Divant
An address to the problem of our garbage is at the forefront of a city¹s concerns. Regular removal from sight and smell could be regarded as the most intimate signifier of the funda- ment¹ underlying the sophistication of any given neighborhood.
As a capital of high art and finance, New York City¹s sanitation is paramount. Its infrastructure is highly regulated to standards, schedules, backup plans and the literal physical mappings of a ter- rain of collection points and depots, and a hundred and one other things.
But the Number-One thing is the removal of and disposal of content. The way this constant preoccupation has spilled over into and influenced the course of art & life in the once city of art¹ began to attract our interest a few years ago. We wanted to see what was there, what was the content¹ issuing from the assortment of occupancies packed together into the borough of Manhattan, a geographically small self- contained area forming the linked contrasts of temperature¹ and rhythm we call neighborhood¹.
We were not interested in fashion,¹ style¹ or the occupants themselves, only in their effluents. We wanted to collect and curate this matter to see if the unique variety and side-by-side play of difference¹ on the surface is carried out underneath.
Questions: Are we all just disposal sites for the same products and our dif- ferences slowly disappearing as we con- form to using only what is designed for us? And how much difference is there in what is designed for us? The offal (what is sloughed off) is one way to look at this. We adopted the proportions of the golden rectangle¹ as a highly rational form for containing and displaying the irrational organic offshoots of the mat- ter that would go into and make up the output of each site collected.
My personal view is that these first four Offal works are the result of the four different directions in which we each tended to go, being four very dif- ferent people, in our efforts to arrive at a base set of four complete pieces, each containing our separate contributions. In a way, these first four pieces stand as the seed subjects¹ of the rambling fugues to follow. All we can know at the outset about the completed length of this fugal¹ matter (ie, how many more offal pieces it will result in) is that the pieces following the initial four will be dictated by the accidental themes¹ which arose from our various and sometimes conflicting notions about what to do, the rules that we came up with that we could all agree on, and our general aleatoric will to continue with a subject as long as it possessed something that could lead us into argument and difference of view. Once there is total agreement, there is no more life to the work and we have to start a new base set.
That is, fundamentally, how we founded this project and this base set of four pieces. After they are exhausted, we will throw out their rules and generate a new base set of four. Thus, you could say that the overall form is, for practical purposes, infinite, but that it will probably arrive at the number 36 (four Volumes¹ of 9 four- part seed subjects generating an unknown flight of offal pieces across the borough of Manhattan). Ultimately, I think all collaborative work (including society and govern- ment) comes down to being the offal of shared arguments, efforts and rules adopted to continue them towards a constructive or interesting end.
Breuk Iversen • 302 Bedford Avenue, 353 • Williamsburg | Brooklyn 11211 • 718 . 578 . 6613