Christopher Campbell, Artist's Statement, 1997.01.09
Exhibition: “By-work”
By-work. Buy work? (By all means!) Bi-work. (Open to everything.) By-work: the term comes from Derrida, when he is writing about Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.
A parergon is against, beside, and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished, the accomplishment of the work. But it is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from the outside. [1]
“By-work” is the translation of Nebengeschäfte: secondary business or busyness, activity or operation from the sidelines or nearby. The parergon inscribes something extra, exterior to the specific field . . . but whose transcendent exteriority touches, plays with, brushes, rubs, or presses against the limit and intervenes internally only insofar as the inside is missing. Missing something and is itself missing. Since reason is “conscious of her inability to satisfy her moral need,” she has recourse to the parergon, to grace, mysteries, miracles. She requires a supplementary “by-work.” Certainly the adjunct is a threat. Its function is critical. It entails a risk and enjoys itself at the expense of transforming the theory. [2]
If I do the usual thing, and show only “work” as we usually define it, i.e. a series of discrete works up here on the wall, nicely domesticated with little numbers, titles, etc. we have the ordinary “business” of art, replete with the false autonomy of the object. In fact, within the first five minutes of making arrangements for this exhibition I was asked to leave a price-list. (No friction.) But if I reject the ordinary expectations, and refuse to show any of the “work accomplished” at all, and show only by-work, then I can expect only repetitions of the first reaction this installation received, that all this stuff — art supplies, pieces of my working environment, drawing boards with the drawings just plucked off — just “studio residue.” (Whispering: “He can’t paint, so he shows all this instead . . .”) I love studios and art supplies (I grew up in a studio), but if that were all I were to show, then I would only recreate the comfortable frisson (ooooh!) of the collector who risks getting shoes dirty by slumming briefly in Bohemia and making a visit to my studio. (Gutter chic, no friction.)
People like paintings, sometimes, surprisingly, for better reasons than their fit with the new decor. Much more rarely do people who are interested in paintings wish to contemplate the fact that the paintings are literally and only the by-product of a way of living. Being an artist requires a way of thinking which is critical, subversive, disruptive, often angry. Thus paintings are not “the work accomplished.” The work to be accomplished is to think clearly, act decisively, and change everything — starting again, now. But unable to see precisely where I am, and uncertain when planning a course of action for the future, I must be content with an activity which tends towards the patient accumulation of nearly infinitesimal shifts in perception, thought and feeling. Something as apparently trivial as a changed handling of materials may reveal a new world, a literal alteration of perceived reality. No action is so small that it doesn’t make a difference — painting on the floor or on the wall, moving my hand at the scale of 6 x 8 inches or 6 x 8 yards, marking with brushes made of pig bristle or of dried marsh grasses, learning to glue up a stretcher so that it forms a platonically perfect and undisturbed plane. Some friction, then: rough exteriority impinging on contemplative space, some trace of the body brushing against the beyond of the work — the necessary supplements and conditions of practice.
[1] Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” trans. Craig Owens, October, No. 9 (1979), p. 20.
[2] Ibid., p. 21.