The Coming Community
The Coming Community is a documented exchange between the artist and two object-oriented fetish communities. For each work, objects are borrowed from community members, employed in an artistic context, and returned to the community.
Performance by Justin Francis Kennedy
Filmed by Julian Brinkmann and edited by Sam Hancocks and Andrew Chaplin
The first work is a performance incorporating a customised puffer jacket. The jacket was commissioned by a member of DownClub.net to be oversized and overfilled to his specifications. The performance was based on the amateur videos uploaded by users of the site.
The performance first took place at Future Gallery for Post Internet Survival Guide, curated by Katja Novitskova and Mike Ruiz, where patrons were encouraged to wear the jacket as they viewed the exhibition.
In the second work, members of GearFetish.com were asked to submit flatbed scans of objects of their choosing and arrangement to the artist. The scans were reinterpreted as digital collages, rendered as c-prints and emailed back to the member.
Rendering by Yannic Joray
The works will be uploaded to the websites of their derivation at the same time they are uploaded to State.
The Coming Community will be displayed at BUS Projects Gallery, Melbourne, in May 2011.
Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such—this is the lover’s particular fetishism. Thus, whatever singularity (the Lovable) is never the intelligence of some thing, of this or that quality or essence, but only the intelligence of an intelligibility. The movement Plato describes as erotic anamnesis is the movement that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but toward its own taking-place—toward the Idea.
- Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1993)
