The main evidence of a piece of art proper is if one encountering it has difficulties recognizing it immediately as a piece of art, puzzling instead as to whether it is art or not really – this is not my thought, but of the classic Moscow conceptualist Andrey Monastyrsky. This is the first thing. 

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The second is the magical 'King Midas effect' of an artist's hand: everything it touched turns into gold. An apocryphal story about Pablo Picasso tells how he, when ordering furniture for his new house, drew a quick sketch for the cabinet-maker and asked for the price of the piece. The cabinet-maker replied that the cabinet would cost nothing, if Picasso just signed the sketch (this kind of ‘magic’ was, of course, properly 'disenchanted' later by Peter Bürger as a mere function of the 'institution of art’). 

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The third is the short note Marcel Duchamp made in his notebook in 1913, posing the question of whether it is possible to make a piece of art that would not be art. 

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These three controversial premises shaped the idea of this exhibition, for which I’ve been collecting some drawings, objects, or even oral utterances by art people I encountered with here in Helsinki. These occasional ‘objects’, never meant by these artists themselves to be artworks (or recognized by them as such) I decided to turn into artworks proper, rendering them the ‘assisted ready-mades’ status, using the elementary devices of ‘naming’ and ‘framing’. 

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The result of this slightly playful exercise is meant as nothing other than dedication to my colleagues and friends I encountered with during my stay in Helsinki.

Text: Ilya Orlov

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