Paomaster

In the realm of art, failure has a different currency. Failure, by definition, takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we know. Artists have long turned their attention to the unrealizability of the quest for perfection, or the open-endness of experiment, using both dissatisfaction and error as means to rethink how we understand our place in the world. The inevitable gap between the intention and realization of an artwork makes failure impossible to avoid. This very condition of art-making makes failure central to the complexities of artistic practice and its resonance with the surrounding world. Through failure one has the potential to stumble on the unexpected. When the conventions of representation are no longer fit for purpose, failure can open new possibilities. The judgement involved in naming something a success or a failure is symptomatic of the time and place, and contingent on the critical apparatus one uses to define it. While speculative thought strives for ever-deepening levels of understanding in search for content, irony asks questions, not to receive an answer but to draw out of content and form yet more questions. The ironist deals with the how of something being said rather than the what, paying a distanced attention to the surface of statements so as to identify gaps in knowledge and productive miscommunication. Where we embrace the irony of bad taste, we distance ourselves from the assumed natural order of things.

– FAILURE Documents of contemporary art