apexart presents You can’t get there from here but you can get here from there, a group exhibition curated by Courtenay Finn featuring:

Sophie Calle Patty Chang Rodney Graham Joachim Koester Kris Martin Bruce Nauman Allen Ruppersberg

Borrowing its title from artist Bruce Nauman You can’t get there from here but you can get here from there (YCGTFH) diverts and redirects Nauman’s investigation of the relationship between written language and physical behavior. Nauman’s sixty-minute video Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), 1978, shows the artist walking back and forth in his studio, the pattern of his movements adhering to an obsessive compulsive set of rules influenced by the behavior of a Samuel Beckett protagonist. Nauman uses his physical body to gain insight into the text, rendering his reading into an action. Using Nauman’s video as a starting point YCGTFH investigates the relationship between language and physical action within the context of the reader, emphasizing the corporeal nature of reading in contemporary art while simultaneously invoking a “paraliterary” space; a space in which the book becomes the platform upon which all things rest.

In From the Travel of Jonathan Harker Joachim Koester follows the trail of the protagonist in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, comparing the Transylvania of Stoker’s imagination with the reality of failed suburban sprawl and illegal logging. Patty Chang’s video Shangri-La investigates the mythical location of James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, enabling her to take a real journey to a legendary place. Rodney Graham creates an insert that extends a scene in which a poisonous centipede crawls over James Bond’s naked body, adding his own twist to Ian Fleming’s novel Dr. No, In a different vein Sophie Calle illuminates her intimate relationship with the writer Hervé Guibert, evoking the fusion that can occur between the reader and author. Allen Ruppersberg’s The Gift and the Inheritance (Les Fleurs du Mal) explores his own role as a reader and the importance of his library, while Kris Martin’s Endpoint series poses the question: How does our role as the reader continue when the literary text comes to the end?

YCGTFH transports and extends Nauman’s investigation of language and physical action into the realm of fiction. Narratives become real and readers literally take up residence within the text.