PURSUIT: FAILURE

FAILURE is essential to all greatness, not merely in providing its contrast but as an essential part of the processes of growing, experimenting, learning and living. We cherish the ever failing C. Chaplin or Homer S. for their Sisyphusian predicaments, we quote Beckett, film in obsolete media and yet at the same time hardly any artist dares to embrace the option of artistic practice as failure itself.

For its first project SEVERAL PURSUITS gathered positions and reflections to explore meaning and possible potential of failure in contemporary visual art.

After our CALL FOR REJECTS as a first stage of the project in 2009, many artists have followed the call and submitted images and accounts of works of art that they have rejected themselves yet hung onto. See the full archive of REJECTS.

As a second part of the project a more experimental symposium format took place in Berlin 5-7 November 2010. See the SYMPOSIUM page for more information.

To stay informed please sign up to our mailing list.

MORE WORDS AND IDEAS ON FAILURE

Failure in the Arts / Failure at the Albright-Knox, by Gary Nickard
http://garynickard.com/index.php?/articles/failure-in-the-arts
http://garynickard.com/index.php?/articles/failure-at-the-ak

Try I’ll, and Error – a mechanical meditation on failure, the dance of intention, and the function of direction, by Andrew T. Lyman
http://andrewtlyman.com/projects/code/tryerror/

The Muse of Failure, by Anand Balakrishnan published in Bidoun Magazine
http://bidoun.com/11_museoffailure.php

Failure is the BEST option, by Daryl Joseph Ducharme
http://my.opera.com/darylducharme/blog/2007/09/24/failure-is-the-best-option

The Fable of Failure In Modern Art, by Paul Barolsky
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1997/summer/barolsky-fable