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The idea for New Acquisition had been sitting in my filing cabinet for some time, since my last year of college. Though the idea was far from complete and had a very different scope than what the thing has become, but it was the seed that was important. And the name, New Acquisition. I took the name, a common phrase in art museums, from the notes posted on the wall of the Tate Modern next to Susan Hiller’s piece From the Freud Museum, which interested me at the time, both because I was a big fan of the Freud Museum in London and because I liked the piece.

It wasn’t until the summer of last year, 2006, when I was considering what project I might propose for the Puffin Foundation Artists Grant that I began to conceive of the thing in it’s entirety: the pamphlet with original literary and artistic content, printed cheaply and distributed for free. In my original application to the Puffin Foundation I didn’t include the installation and performance, only the online aspects of the project. The performance piece came later, in discussions with friends and when I started to think about the problem of distributing the pamphlets and when I was thinking about how I might make use of one of the Chashama spaces. From there it grew to incorporate the distribution of the material as a key part of the project—i.e. how could I best exploit the distribution as a means of really getting people to interact with the pamphlets, rather than just chuck them.

NOTE: A lot of people ask about the fact that so many of the pamphlets will be thrown away, but for me, that’s a big part of the project. Each iteration of the project will involve the printing and distributing of thousands of these flyers, recipients will not pay for these flyers and the vast majority of people receiving them will not have intended to get them. The life of the pamphlets in many ways represents the open nature of the work. People are free to interpret, do with, pass on and discard the pamphlets as they please, in the same way that people who approach a work of art hanging on a wall or a film go through essentially the process without having a physical thing to take away with them. The physical thing extends the life of the piece in interesting ways. A woman working in a building nearby to our first series of performances found one discarded on the floor of her elevator, took it back to her office read it and put it in her purse to take home. Later in the day, upon leaving the office, she encountered the actors on the street, made the connection and came in to see the performance. Other people notice the pamphlets in other people’s hands, notice them in a trash can down the block, wonder what the meaning is—is it religious? is it political? is it selling something? is it art? is it a joke? The interactive nature of the performance allows them to tease out a variety of different meanings and ideas about the piece and the variety of associations that we all make about people on the street who hand out pamphlets all come into play.

Posted on November 26th, 2007 by Alexis
Filed under: About the Project