The Staff was really just a big stick…Anyway, it was capped by an elaborate headpiece with a carving of the sun at the top. What you had to do was take the Staff to a special map room in Tanis--it had the whole city laid out in miniature on the floor. When you placed the Staff in a certain spot in this room, at a certain time of day, the sun would shine through a hole here in the headpiece and then send a beam of light down here—to the map--giving you the location of the Well of the Souls...
Even though Stingel's work does not always involve paint on canvas, it continually reflects upon the fundamental questions concerning painting today -- authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context.
2 comments:
It has long seemed to me that the sort of art criticism you quote is not about the artwork so much as it is a form of inner-circle signaling: "We get this, and they don't."
So, relax. You're meant to be confused.
I actually ended up going to this exhibition yesterday. My reaction was very much in line with what the commenter suggests: the `comments' and `questions' of Stingel's work are almost exclusively directed at the art community. The only thing I really liked were a series of self-portraits, huge squares around 16 feet on a side, based on photographs.
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