Video Instruction For The Last Sculpture

Video Instruction for the Last Sculpture | Over the past year I have been following a fitness program and repairing my computer through online instruction videos, but can video instructions make something that we call art and what is the art capable of? | Dadaist Tristran Tzara offered advice in constructing a poem: To make a Dadaist poem/Take a newspaper./Take a pair of scissors./Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem./Cut out the article./Then cut out each of the words that make up the article and put them in a bag./Shake it gently./Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag./Copy conscientiously. | This set of instructions may produce a wonderfully chaotic phrase, but cannot achieve the intensity of Tzara without starting from the point where he also left off, a point of insistence, heroism and absolute risk. The power in Tzara’s advice is not that it should be necessarily followed, but that it is stated in the first place. The creation is not in the following, but the stating. This can be said for the imperatives of conceptual art practice too. | So what can an instruction for the creation of an artwork be? What is missing from most pieces of advice and instruction is an account of struggle, of the shift taking place in the artist, managing the material to move from awkward, abject, base, toward something capable of flight, of poetic presence. Maurice Blanchot talks about this in relation to the German romantic poet, Hölderlin, “How can anything finite and determined bear a true relation with the undetermined?”. | So taking all this into account The Video Instruction for the Last Sculpture sets up a meditation on the shift in the artist and in the artist’s relation to this action-shift, the moments of bringing the work back from the brink of catastrophe, towards what Hölderlin, or Louis Ferdinand Céline as much do with muck, dirt, to give it insubordination, to push it to positions of levity that could be said to be restricted from. | So this being said, the so-called instructions aren’t included. What I abandon to you is a document of my shift in action, a simple para-cinematic apparatus and some potential cast for you to activate here by your own volition. | Mark Aerial Waller 2015 |