MEDITATING UNDER A PICTURE OF LUANG PHO DEANG

November 25, 2008, 9 Am. SteinslandBerliner, Bondegatan 70, Stockholm, Sweden

What is the gallery space today except a set of agreements descendent from Brian O´Doherty’s legendary Artforum essays? One might ask if it is the same complex and sophisticated relationships between politics, economics, social context and aesthetics as in 1976 that constitutes the conditions of everything that takes place Inside the White Cube today?

Is there not a backdoor, a way to slip in without knocking at the same door as Marcel Duchamp once did? What if the space neither is a commercial or a museum gallery but something else? Assume it’s a storefront in Stockholm that neither has signs or website, their agenda seems liberated from interpretive prerogatives and their economic reality in terms of demands is far from standard criterions. This assumption about the space is important but actually secondary to the fact that no one was informed in advance of the subject matter, Meditating Under a Picture of Luang Pho Daeng. No announcements was sent, no press releases tried to explain, no communication gave notice, you where uninformed and therefore unaware.

If you by chance had passed outside the windows of this storefront on the morning of November 25th despite the wind and the sleet and then turned your eyes into the room, you would have witnessed Andreas Gavell-Mohlin performing Meditating Under a Picture of Luang Pho Daeng together with Buddhist monk Boonsee. The decision to keep it closed but opened, personal but public, accessible but un-announced was based on aesthetic autonomy. The moment of meditation was a moment of conception and a moment of truth. It was an act of personal relevance in resistance to the dictatorship of consensus.

Linus Elmes