‘More Pricks than Kicks’, David Roberts Art Foundation, London

The Negus said: ‘Give me the lion, keep the stele’, 2010, installation view

MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS, DAVID ROBERTS ART FOUNDATION, LONDON, OCTOBER 13 – DECEMBER 18 2010
Curated by Patrizio Di Massimo and Vincent Honoré

With: Paul Chan, George Condo, Keren Cytter, Simon Denny, Patrizio Di Massimo, Simon Fujiwara, Amy Granat/Cinema Zero, Thomas Houseago, Bethan Huws, Nathaniel Mellors, Laure Prouvost, Pietro Roccasalva

The David Roberts Art Foundation is pleased to present More Pricks Than Kicks, an exhibition co-curated by DRAF’s director Vincent Honoré and artist Patrizio Di Massimo. Exploring indexical motifs such as the dissolution of language, the theatricalised body and the “breakdown” of an image, the project questions how a notion such as “exhaustion” can be formally enacted.

Language informs many of the works on view. Abused and manipulated to the point it cannot be conceived even as an imperfect tool for communication, language is characterized by collapses, stammers, fragmentations, collages, ellipses, mixed idioms or unknown tropes. This peculiar manipulation forces language to its dissolution. The same is applied to the body. Choreographed, distorted and fragmented, this “anxious” body manifests the convulsive aspects of the human condition through the burlesque. Body and language can only be overtly theatricalised for them to reflect any intimate existential needs (creativity, History, history of art, decay, religion, eroticism, etc.). “The work of art for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself.” (Felix Guattari in Chaosmosis)

Such (mis)treatments of language and body naturally lead to the image’s breakdown. Because the works “take by force a structure that was on the verge of asserting itself” (as Felix Guattari wrote on George Condo’s paintings in an early text, 1990), they generate disquieted and often humorous images: incongruous, absurd, anachronistic, kitsch, regressive or hybrid works. It is through this methodical and rhizomatic manipulations, borrowing of classical codes in an iconoclastic approach, that the works eventually address a crisis of the standard representative modalities, and of creation itself.

More Pricks Than Kicks borrows its title from the first book published by Samuel Beckett. This collection of short proses, in particular their witty and dry humour together with the formal qualities of Beckett’s style (as analysed by Gilles Deleuze in his essay The Exhausted), confers its tone to the exhibition. More Pricks Than Kicks intends to create a platform to question creation in its more sinister quality, contemporary time in its less graspable entity. The works are not fixed proposals but active processes: exhausted since themselves are necessary failed attempts to exhaust a form, a medium, a system, a notion. Their linked dynamic is formed by a methodical crisis that cultivates accidents, a crisis that accepts exhaustion as the paradoxical core of any creative dynamic.

ABOUT MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
The exhibition is the outcome of a twelve months dialogue and research between curator Vincent Honoré and artist Patrizio Di Massimo about contemporary practices and curatorial projects. Most of the artists invited in the exhibition had been asked to participate in this conversation by either entering into a collective dialogue, sharing references or sources, proposing new works and interventions. The exhibition includes a variety of media (sculptures, paintings, drawings, wall texts, videos, performances) together with a number of works from the David Roberts Collection displayed for the first time in London. Vincent Honoré and Patrizio Di Massimo curated the exhibition in collaboration with Sandra Pusterhofer, Assistant Curator and Annabel Rioux, Intern.

EVENTS AND PERFORMANCES
On Thursday 14 October from 7pm, David Roberts Art Foundation will present an evening of specially commissioned performances and events to coincide with Frieze. Artists and groups participating are Patrizio Di Massimo, Amy Granat/Cinema Zero and Laure Prouvost.

ABOUT THE DAVID ROBERTS ART FOUNDATION LIMITED
The David Roberts Art Foundation: exhibiting, producing, sharing. A platform dedicated to critical dialogues and experiments, programmed by Vincent Honoré. The David Roberts Art Foundation Limited is a registered charity in England and Wales (No. 1119738) and a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (No. 6051439) at 25 Gosfield Street, London, W1W 6HQ. It is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.