Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Das Institut, Steven Baldi, Nina Beier, Ann Craven, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Nikolas Gambaroff, Tony Huang, Jacob Kassay, Ajay Kurian, Lisa Oppenheim, Peter Piller, Michael S. Riedel, Matt Sheridan Smith, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jordan Wolfson

Organized by Matt Sheridan Smith

...what moves [them], what inspires their work is not ‘new’ ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said has still not been said enough. Eugene Delacroix

Harris Lieberman is thrilled to present And so on, and so on, and so on…, an exhibition that focuses on the potential of a stutter, of repeating one’s self, on stammering, states of fixation, reflux, redundancies, feedback loops…on taking, redoing, remaking, repeating, re-saying…on having something stuck in one’s head or one’s throat…all in all a simple set of questions: when is enough enough? How many times must something be said before it has truly been said?

The works in And so on, and so on, and so on…represent a tendency wherein artists, in resistance to conventional notions of progress, absolute newness, original expression, decide instead to repeat themselves (the stammer), or themselves repeat something of another (the magpie). The question then revolves around the utterance, the refrain, the difference between origin and originality when (near-)identical thoughts (or images) are repeated or else picked up and voiced by another. The distinctions born in context and cadence…on the fine lines between quotation, paraphrasing and plagiarism, between the echo of a parrot and the cumulative tonality of a chorus.

In focusing on the nature of the repeated utterance rather than the original source of the content or the objects themselves, the show becomes about what’s been said (however many times) and how that changes and bears repeating (or not), rather than what’s been done, or “what’s already done.” How repeated utterances accumulate and harmonize and generate new meanings. Ultimately, or at least by extension, the show becomes an exanimation of the conception of artist as an observant and responsive figure, the tabula rasa, a miner of archives, a quoter, a rearranger…a stammerer.

Points of departure include: Monet’s haystacks, Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece,” Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, Sturtevant, Daniel Buren, jokes, folktales, classical music (the performance and the score), 19th Century studio practice and/vs. contemporary notions of “keeping busy,” recordings, Brecht’s kopien, reproductions, Gaddis’s catalog, the archive, sampling, authoring Wikipedia, open source collaborations, the readymade…and so on and so on.