NYAB Event - “North of My Brain, South of My Ass: Hats and Shoes by Artists” Exhibition

“North of My Brain, South of My Ass: Hats and Shoes by Artists” Exhibition

Studio 10

This event has ended.

Studio10 presents North of My Brain, South of My Ass: Hats and Shoes by Artists, a group exhibition of work by John Bjerklie, Steven Brower, Nancy Davidson,Greg Drasler, Matt Freedman, Brian Gaman, Jennie Nichols, Niki Singleton, Jude Tallichet, Summer Wheat and Moira Williams.

Hats and shoes, the parentheses of the self –everything else is in between.
(Kierkegaard)

When we asked Moira Williams to explain her “hat” in the show she told us that it was a hat made from bleached newspapers. Newspapers from Bogota Columbia, newspapers that Williams had, while working on her bee-keeping apprenticeship in Columbia, either slept on by night or worn stuffed into her shoes by day. Williams’ specific hope in this was that the words of the newspapers would enter her dreams and she would thus learn Spanish. So, we could try and understand this schematically as, the bees absorb the pollen and make honey while Williams’ body absorbs, in some imprecise way –though perhaps it is a little like the way bees gather pollen– words. Pollen thus becomes honey, while words become knowledge. Words burrow their way –from your dreams, from your feet– into your brain and this is how you come to know something. So in this theory knowledge can be dreamed into a being through bodily contact?

It should be noted that this is better deal than Freud. For Freud, as we all know, the dream was merely a wish fulfillment. The dream satisfied some social, sexual or bodily wish, but only mentally; in the dream. All you woke up with was the wish plus the dream. In Freud the dream is a consolation prize.

Freud is where much of this sorry tale begins. There we were in the studio one day trying to conjure Freud back to life from silicone rubber and cardboard, a few magical incantations were to be added later. We began, naturally enough, with his hat. That’s when we realized that the hat we were making looked much like the ones our fathers wore back in the late 50’s early 60’s. It also looked like the one we remembered Dick Tracey wearing in Warhol’s painting and the one Belmondo wears as tribute to Bogart in Breathless. In short it (they really) were all over the place. The shoes were next. we wanted to recreate the ones Ray Johnson had made and then mailed to Bert Brecht. After we had made a maquette we consulted an image of the real thing in an old Johnson catalogue: he had made them for John Cage.

We decided other artists might be more reliable. A show of other artists making hats and shoes; Freud could wait., being dead a little longer wouldn’t hurt. Richard Hulsenbeck, Sophie Tauber, Joseph Beuys, Hugo Ball all wore great hats. And to come full circle Max Ernst made his 1920 “The hat makes the man” collage, allegedly with a nod to Freud.