Title, to be announced with Frank Wasser

About

‘Versioning is a way of creating incompleteness and ongoingness at the same time. The idea of a finished artwork is a fiction. The claim of “being done” is wishful thinking and a bit impatient’ – Pope.L

‘What the example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits itself’ - Agamben, G. 

‘Come’ere and I tell ya’ - Overheard Dubliner. 

Title, to be announced is a new exhibition by Irish artist Frank Wasser. Frank Wasser’s PhD exhibition asks pertinent questions about the unstated conventions and regulations of art education, exhibition making and what constitutes artistic research through a durational performance which takes the form of an exhibition. Wasser will inhabit and be present in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition, engaging directly with the visitor. 

The exhibition takes the form of a thesis. This thesis consists of an entangled array of different working and broken parts, examples, namely  a body, and fragments of objects, published books, sound and images, some static and some moving. The exhibition proposes an unfinished, incomplete object which in turn might critique the institutions of contemporary art practice and academia. Annotation is used as a tool to necessarily question, undermine and develop the production of the research, making visible aspects of the making of a body of work often erased or not visible in a traditional academic thesis. This research accumulates within an inhabitation of the stressed neoliberal structures of contemporary art education, the university and contemporary art institutions. 

This research might determine a rationale for unfinished work or an incomplete object. The research has previously been conducted across an array of institutions, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Goldsmiths, University of London, London Metropolitan University, Tate Modern, and the Ruskin Wing of Kings College Hospital, London.

In doing all this, this exhibition considers the implications of a set of particular historical precedents on contemporary art practice in Britain and Ireland. Subjects and objects both historical and contemporary are analysed and appropriated in order to explicate this thesis. These subjects and objects can be partially identified as the advent of Conceptual Art, the 1960 Coldstream Report, the histories of Performance Art, the histories of the lecture and lecturing as a form, frame analysis, the histories of exhibition making, the invention of PowerPoint and Microsoft Word, and the labour conditions that underlie the distribution of ideas and forms within contemporary art practice.

The form of exhibition is (and may continue to be) determined by the shifting parameters of the research conducted. 

Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer from Dublin, living and working in London. He has exhibited and lectured nationally and internationally, including Pallas Project Space, Dublin, Ireland, Tate Modern, Jerwood Arts, London, The Bluecoat, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and the University of Oxford. Wasser currently teaches Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, and London Metropolitan University. His writing has been published in Flash Art, The Posthumanist, Art Monthly, and Frieze. Wasser recently published SPLIT (Zero-Hour Fragments) with the imprint MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. Upcoming projects include a performance at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (July 2024) and Pot-Holes an exhibition as part of the Revisoning Ruskin commission  at the University of Oxford (Spring/Summer 2024)  

Wassers work unfolds through a variety of materials, forms, and encounters, both discrete and explicit, in the form of the body of an artist, as lecture-performances, teaching, lies, sculpture, publications, images, and slips of the tongue. He follows an investigative preoccupation with class, colonialism, contemporary and historical governing structures in the workplace, the art institution, and the university.