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| Alternative Press, 1992
Art & Strategy '92 - Members of Front 242 exhibit a different medium Inside a sprawling whitewashed loft in lower Manhattan, ponytailed young men struggle with a folding bar table, still photographers hustle their tripods from painting to painting, and a harried gallery staffer roots through an enormous box of papers looking for the guest register - a normal enough scene before a small gallery opening in Soho. Normal, that is, except for the brace of blackclad teenagers squatting outside on the sidewalk, clutching invites, wainting for the press session to be over so they can get in. Take into account that this is the New York opening of Art & Strategy '92, a travelling installation by Patrick Codenys and Daniel B. of Belgian techno-industrial perpetrators Front 242, and picture starts to make more sense. The show, which premiered July 10 in Chicago, features 15 limited-edition serigraphs (prints made by the silk-screen process) and three huge original oils by the Art & Strategy collective, as well as a specially designed ambient musical environment and a multi-screen video bank showing (in dizzying time-stagger) Front 242 videos from throughout the group's ten-year career. The exhibit's cumulative effect is disorienting, engulfing, larger-than-life. Although A&S policy is to avoid "explaining" individual works (essentially, B. and Codenys are the core memebers of this collective, and they direct another artist in the painting of the works), they're friendly, direct, and unpretentious when asked about the philosophical underpinnings of the current exhibit as a whole. "IT is about process more than final objects", says Codenys, "that's one reason it's called Art & Strategy and not just Art. For instance, the actual image there (gesturing to the sleek cybernetic landscape of Integration) doesn't exist in a form you can look at; it's a magnetic pattern on a computer disk. So the painting and the serigraphs are about the process of creating different reflections of the original image, which you can't see". A&S prefer to let viewers work out meanings for the exhibit's components on their own - for the viewer of the picture, as well as its creators, the emphasis is intended to be on process as much as end results. Process, of course, takes various forms. Sometimes the high-tech photo and computer thecniques underlying the paintings have amusingly low-tech beginnings. Of the grimacing, goggled figure in "Tyranny" (who appears in a slightly different version as the cover of Front 242's Tyranny for You), Codenys says "that's me, actually, shot through a transparent bathtub. They kept pouring cold water on me to get that expression." Front 242 fans will no doubt also recognize other images in A&S '92, many of which echo the cover art for Front 242's recent albums and their new series of re-releases. No surprisingly, it's all part of greater design for an integrated aesthetic program of music, art, video - even clothing. Daniel B. explains: "We don't see our artwork as separate from the rest of what we do - we don't see ourselves as belonging to the 'art community'. We're just applying ideas across the spectrum of art forms." A&S designs are also slated to appear on upcoming Front 242 tour shirts. A&S '92 ran through September at Thread Waxing space in New York and will reopen in December at Thomas Solomon's Garage in Los Angeles. Roddy Potter |
