On Tuesday, February 23, 2016 at 6:00 pm, Quartz Studio is pleased to present the exhibition Cool Your Jets, a collaboration between New York based Liam Gillick (Aylesbury, UK, 1964) and Berlin based Jonathan Monk (Leicester, UK, 1969). The exhibition physically and semantically plays with the idea of “slippage.” The two artists’ work converses at a distance, working on two horizontal planes. The first plane is the floor, which Jonathan Monk altered with a pile of fifty soccer balls, whose leather hexagons echo the colors of space’s cement floor. The second one is by Liam Gillick, a phrase on the wall in his preferred black font, “Cool your jets,” with a meaning somewhere between a piece of advice and a warning. The artists exchanged a series of emails about how balls and jets might interact, to which both Monk’s installation and Gillick’s phrase allude quite specifically. Some questions emerged extrapolated from different web sites about the French-Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato. Neither Monk nor Gillick have come up with answers, as they are already in a way contained in the questions themselves.
When it comes to production and activity within the community, work as such deserves certain scrutiny: to what purpose, for whom?
Life, health and love are precarious – why should work be an exception?
How does one approach a system so coded and at the same time loaded with meaning?
Something changed in the life and society that interrogates subjectivity: what happens, what’s happened, what will happen?
The event returns the world to us as a ‘matter of choice’, and subjectivity as a ‘crossroad of praxis’. What is happening to me(us) there?
In the long-distance conversation between Gillick and Monk, these socio-economic questions are in counterpoint to quotes from Johan Cruijff, a renowned retired Dutch player and coach.
There’s only one moment in which you can arrive in time. If you’re not there, you’re either too early or too late.
There is only one ball, so you need to have it.
If you have the ball you must make the field as big as possible, and if you don’t have the ball you must make it as small as possible.
The series of quotes on the topic end with a disarming declaration by Andrea Pirlo, a retired midfielder for Juventus and the Italian national team, now in the States with New York City: I don’t feel pressure… I don’t give a shit. I spent the afternoon of Sunday, July 9, 2006 in Berlin, sleeping and playing PlayStation. That evening I went and won the World Cup.
Quartz Studio kindly thanks Giulia Mainetti and Altofragile, Milan for the support to the project.
