Flip Statement

The Flip installation evolved out of a response to the Projekt 0047 Berlin gallery space, which contains two exhibition rooms, the floor plans of which are near perfect mirror images of one another. I imagined these spaces as an architectural palindrome, and as the works for the installation evolved they too took on a palindrome-like quality. Within this basic framework other relationships emerged between the various individual works in the installation.

The figure of the Ur-conceptualist Lawrence Weiner appears in a (twice) drawn portrait, and again in the loopy, psychedelic text works titled Lawrence Weiner’s Beard. Weiner’s site-specific text works are also loosely recalled in the two wall paintings/texts, titled Double Your Pleasure. However these works’ tone is far from the tone of a typical Weiner work. They are visually complex and decorative, while the phrases evoke the language of lovers, presenting a different concept of repetition: namely repetition as pleasure.

The two Speaker Wrap sculptures present both repetition and splitting. Regarding repetition, the speakers run a play list of songs selected on the basis of their titles, which contain the words “return”, “back” or “again”, and continuously repeat this play list. The speakers are also split up, in that they sit in different rooms. In wrapping the speakers I present them as objects first, with the element of sound emerging as a secondary aspect. Their misshapen, aluminum foil reflective surfaces, bearing puncture marks, also engage in a dialectic of concealing/ revealing and primitive/cultured, underscoring similar relations at work in the various pop and rock songs which emanate from their primordial sound holes.

Lastly, I chose to include a hot pink neon light in the hallway connecting the two rooms. One enters the hallway through the door, flanked by either of the Double Your Pleasure wall texts. The colour pink is, like the texts, similarly connotative of pleasure. Furthermore the diffusely coloured light lends the space behind the wall (glimpsed through the doorways) a physical quality, highlighting the hallway’s status as point of contact between the two nearly identical spaces. 

Mark Neufeld 2006