‘Organizers on Tuesday’, that was the name for the artist collective, or so I thought reading the news-wire item. That was the name of the artist collective who were one of the four nominations announced today for this year’s Turner Prize, all four nominees being praised by the announcers for all the usual reasons, their authenticity, originality and so on, but especially their relevance, the judges making very clear the lack of sensationalist pretensions among all four nominees in attempt perhaps to restore the Prize’s tarnished reputation with the general public, which appeared to mean, reading the comments of certain art critics who were also quoted on the news-wire, that all four nominees worked with hybridity; sculpture / painting, art object / commonplace object, work of art / work of science, continental zone / subduction zone…
…Absent / presence, and Present / absence. As for ‘Organizers on Tuesday’, I turned to the Journal of Invisible Culture to investigate the work of this artist collective who the judges might have imaginatively said walk between past and present in an effort to unearth traces and fragments, but the generally unbeatable search facility of this polymathic journal drew a complete blank. Of course for the term ‘Hybridity’ on the search facility there were pages and pages of hits, in fact so many I did not have time to look at more than the first few, but it would miss the point to see this exploration of the art collective's name or hybridity as some kind of weak or eccentric joke, or simply a mistake.
ak has been having problems with his hard drive, but will be returning to the conversations here shortly.