AVA Gallery Announces Visit By A Man Who Is Technically Just Passing Through
MONOCHROM's Grenzfurthner May Be Welcomed
Lebanon, NH — AVA Gallery and Art Center, a local institution of uncertain and earnest purposes will briefly contain Johannes Grenzfurthner on Wednesday, August 12, from 7:00PM until the event exhausts itself. This is not a tour stop, it's a leak.
Grenzfurthner — Austrian artist, founder of the alt-art-tech collective MONOCHROM, the man who coined the term “context hacking” and who lives it across social art, film, and the wondrous realm of emotional machines — is en route from somewhere in the Western United States to New York City. AVA is not the destination; we’re the layover. We’re the lukewarm half-glass and airport pretzel of his itinerary. And we could not be more proud.
"We didn't book him,” said AVA’s director of test art. "He’s passing near us, the way a cloud scrapes over a mountain. We happened to be here and the conditions were just right."
For thirty-plus years, Grenzfurthner has made inquiries. Intervened. He has discovered and invented stories at intersections most people don't recognize as an intersection without a crosswalk. Then, suddenly, he’s standing in the middle of it, redirecting mental traffic with a camera and a theory. MONOCHROM, the collective he founded, has been variously described as an art group, a technology group, a philosophy group, and by at least one uncorroborated source as, “a weather system with opinions.”
What will happen on August 12 is unknown, neither to AVA nor to Grenzfurthner. There may be talking. There may be an object. “We might try a PowerPoint if the ‘vibe’ is right,” said Grenzfurthner. The purpose is to get the argument to argue with itself. What is known is that the room will be small, the night will be singular, and the gifts in question are, by Grenzfurthner's own design, unruly.
Doors, in the strict sense, will open at 6:30 PM; Grenzfurthner has promised to start something at 7:00PM unless he has already begun. The event will end when it ends — a detail AVA is treating as a curatorial choice.
AVA Gallery and Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization serving 61 communities across the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire and Vermont, through exhibitions, education, membership, and a building where people learn to make things with their hands and occasionally set off the smoke alarm. This is, as far as we can tell, the first time it has hosted a rest stop.
