DAVID HAMMONS: GLOBAL FAX FESTIVAL
Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2000, First edition, 12" X 8 1/2", Loose contents in container
As New
Plastic folder containing approx. 500 sheets of A4 size paper being a selection of faxes received, plus 60pp booklet (mainly large b/w photos of the event), large folded poster for the event, double sided leaflet for the Butch Morris performance, folded promotional leaflet and silvered stiff card with CD. All contents complete as issued.
The exhibition took place at the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia (AKA the Crystal Palace), in Madrid, Spain from June 1st through November 6th, 2000. In the exhibition, held in what is colloquially known as the Palacio de Cristal, the artist provided the public with nine fax numbers corresponding to nine fax machines Hammons suspended from the ceiling of the Crystal Palace. During the event, faxes were sent by various artists and people from all over the world and they rained down from the sky to paper the floor. The multi-layered structure of Global Fax Festival was designed by Hammons to draw on the parallel between the surroundings, where the leaves of the trees in the Retiro park follow the same path. Another intention for the exhibition, which was created especially for the Palacio de Cristal, was to involve the building’s architecture, which Hammons defined as being like “a sacred cathedral”. This sacrosanct dimension does not only belong to the space, but also to the materials and objects, and is a constant in his work.
Among the thousands of faxes received over the five months of the exhibition, there are newspaper stories, adverts, drawings, artist dossiers, obituaries, letters, declarations of love, collages, social statements, messages for David Hammons, instructions on origami techniques, famous phrases and proclamations, graphic humor, poems, short stories and book excerpts, music scores, photos of people, puzzles, slogans, etc., all of which demonstrate the boundless diversity of possible expression through paper. The sounds inside of the Palacio de Cristal, the trill of the birds in the park, the noise of the fax machine, and the falling paper, are equally part of the installation and fulfill the artist’s intentions. Thus the resulting box set embodies more than just the documentation of the event but is actually a part of it, a globally assembled artists’ book formed within an elegant interactive installation. Perhaps it could best be described as a ‘crowdsourced’ artwork.