Group Show
17.02.2022 - 20.03.2022
Text by Kirsty Cockerill
Draft Title is a curatorial intervention that playfully explores notions of ownership and value, it experiments with the pageantry of presentation, questions the singularity of an authentic experience, and invites viewers to experience which stories are lost, and which stories are shared, when the original artwork – with all its body, resonance, and fallibility - is withheld.
Draft Title’s Conceptual Framework is as follows;
A certificate of authenticity (COA) is a tool towards determining an artwork’s provenance; a certificate declaring that the artwork was indeed created by the artist in question. As Henry Lydiate articulates in his article published in 2012 on Artquest.
‘Ideally, certificates should be signed and dated by the artist and given to the first collector of the work – operating as a ‘passport’ to travel with the work as its ownership changes and obviating the need for any adjacent written sale contract/s or deed/s of gift to be passed on’
But in reality, in 50 years from now, who authenticates the COA? Perhaps an NFT has become the new COA? Conceptually, when one puts financial market dynamics aside, how does it convey value?
What does a COA really share about an artwork’s materially and story- telling potential. Can a viewer experiences an artwork through its COA? Does imagination allow a viewer to experience materiality, distil texture, colour, form, light or narrative from a piece of paper? Does imagination allow one to read a COA like a book?
Draft Title is an intervention in process.
To date participants; Collection managers/collectors/ a representative of the collection/ artist or artist representative, as the case may be, have made a copy/s of an original COA for artworks in their collections. These copies have been commissioned, certified, stamped (In the representative’s presence) ‘true copy of original’ by a legal practitioner, hired by Church, or alternatively, should you wish to participate, at a post office, police station, spaces legally mandated to authorize certified copies, stamping them ‘True Copy of the Original ‘. Artists participated with certified copies of COA’s, not just for works they have made but works they may never made, works they have discarded or dreamt of making in the future. The focus was on the COA and what makes an experience of an artwork, an idea, genuine.
These certified true copies of original certificates of authenticity have formed part of the intervention at Church Projects. As certified copies arrived they were added to the intervention that ran from 17 February – 20 March 2022.