Dalibor Polivka

“Just to Name a Few” is a long print on premium luster paper, folded into a portfolio betweenboards. In the photo documenting the installation, the long print has been folded down to the floor. It is a list of California artists. What does it mean to be an artist and what is the process of individuation? How many artists are living in a given area? How significant is it to see oneself as part of a larger unit? Bernard Stiegler writes in Culture and Technology, “The I, as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to we, which is a collective individual. The I is constituted in adopting a collective tradition, which it inherits and in which a plurality of I’s acknowledge each other’s existence.” On a map of Southern California, red pins indicate where the art galleries are clustered. For Polivka this represents a bird’s eye view of the art scene, more a wish fulfillment of solidarity than a sociological inquiry. However, the clarity, economy and precision of the presentation, its simplicity and portability, make it a classic of conceptual art and institutional critique. “Mapping Art Galleries: The Trail to Absolute Merchandise” is a lovely diagram of an impossible ideal. Art collectors, after all, believe they are buying a piece of the myth of art, and that art is something ontologically superior to soup tureens.