Hey Hrefna and Philip,
Hope you both are doing well. We had a nice day screen printing this weekend with the help of Philipp Gufler (many thanks), and can’t wait for you to see the results.
Because The Tail always has two person shows, we wanted to deal with doubles and doubling, and also make a collaborative work from our two practices. In fact, we are writing this together as we speak.
Becket has been looking at moments when an actor plays twins in films, because it seems to him that it replicates the logic of film’s reproducibility, but within the narrative itself: you see the celebrity not only in multiple cinemas across America, but also twice within a single frame. At some point they become something like an effect, rather than a person.
As you know, the show is based on a diagram we saw in the recent Cady Noland publication, but it was originally presented in a handbook for aspiring corporate executives called Power! The diagrams demonstrate different arrangements of office furniture that give different results for communicating power relations. When thinking about The Tail, we thought the three rooms in the diagram went well with your apartment layout.
Marina has arranged for us to borrow the office furniture on Monday the 27th. I hope that works out for you in terms of moving stuff. It was difficult, but we managed to find three identical sets of furniture. Also, we’d rather not include where we got the furniture from in any public text, but we think it’s interesting nonetheless.
We are really excited about the wine tasting. I think it goes really well with the installation, and is based on this essay in The New Yorker about “the test” given at UC Davis in a course for training wine experts, which suggested that they couldn’t tell the difference between whites and reds in a double blind comparison at room temperature. There’s something about the language of power, or taste, that I think provides an interesting link. Marina arranged the black wine glasses and the experts, and I think it will be really nice in the backyard.
There’s also going to be a reader to accompany the exhibition – we bought a little binding machine at a second hand store near the printing workshop where we made the silkscreens for the desk calendars. It has the texts mentioned above, but also others about wine, an interview with Jeremy Irons and the cinematographer of Dead Ringers, an excerpt from an unmade Napoleon biopic by Stanley Kubrick, among other things.
The press images Marina sent earlier, and we thought for the text you could use this email verbatim.
Yours,
Becket and Marina
