Anthony Discenza Presents A Novel: An Exhibition by Anthony Discenza - Catharine Clark Gallery, February 27 - April 16, 2016
From the press release: For this exhibition, Anthony Discenza explores the history of an unrealized exhibition by Bay Area artist Anthony Discenza. Tentatively entitled A Novel, this project was to have taken place in late winter of 2016, but was ultimately abandoned. By working closely with the artist’s own notes, as well as critical material prepared by writers and curators familiar with his output, Discenza has conceived the current exhibition as an interpretive reimagining of how A Novel might have unfolded, as well as a consideration of Discenza’s creative practice during a personally difficult period.
A Novel was to have been an ambitious undertaking for Discenza, one intended to reorient his practice into more speculative channels. Taking Lane Hobbs’s infamous art-world satire The Disappointments as his point of departure, Discenza had envisioned the exhibition as an exercise in fragmentation, in which a series of seemingly disparate works would serve to implicate some larger, withheld storyline that required interpretive assembly on the part of the viewers. Riffing off several motifs from Hobbs’s book, Discenza planned to use The Disappointments as a kind of invisible scaffolding that would provide associative connections—or possibly dissonances—with the physical works in the exhibition. Unfortunately (and perhaps ironically) this plan was never realized.
For the current exhibition, Anthony Discenza, a longtime confidant of the artist (as well as a noted visual artist himself), explores various aspects of his friend’s practice, using the original plans for A Novel as a staging ground for this investigation. The show combines critical writing on Discenza’s work, the artist’s own notes, and mockups of various projects that Discenza had planned for inclusion in A Novel to create a layered inquiry into the elusive and sometimes unreliable interior regions of artistic production. In a sense, Anthony Discenza Presents A Novel: an Exhibition by Anthony Discenza consists of two separate exhibitions, each superimposed upon and entwined within the other: an exhibition that never existed, and a second which considers the unrealized possibilities of the former.
[a downloadable PDF of "Considering A Novel," a broadsheet-style essay for the exhibition, can be found here]
