Peter Liversidge (b. 1973, UK)
Proposals, 2018

Bonners Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden / Visited 15/12/2018

I remember, when I first walked into the show on chance, I was rather confused. The guy had been sending weird exhibition proposals to the gallery until they gave in? Can you really mail yourself into the art circuit? I was even considering writing a letter to them myself.

Now, a couple of years of art education and a couple of google searches later, I do realise that he was not just a weirdo from the street, but established artist with proposals being his signature genre. Yet he got registered in my archive as “interesting” even if I was totally clueless about the context and found some of the proposals rather annoying. But there was something about the unlimited flow of ideas, refusal to filter them (at least by the look of it), persistence – and eventually getting some of them realised. There were sufficient measure of humour there, too.

Interestingly, I find myself contemplating similar strategy now. I do have plenty of material and weird ideas, but not sure what to do with them. Thus I have started to structure presentation concepts – exhibition proposals, if you wish – thinking that even if they would not get realised, that could still provide some kind of closure, or even become an artwork in itself, as a conceptual proposal, a bit like Ono’s instruction paintings.