Christopher Dean: Simon Barney

Reply to Christopher Dean's review in HR.2 The review of 'No Ideas' by Christopher Dean makes some pertinent points about 'critical stupidity'. However, while matters of interpretation are for reviewers to decide, the article goes further and makes claims about my statements and intentions for which there is no basis. I have never made a statement containing the words 'I have no ideas of my own' or even words to that effect. This is therefore not the reason for my asking other artists for instructions for paintings. The show was not, as claimed, an attempt to demonstrate any points about 'curatorial concepts'. I have, through the Briefcase and other activities, sought structures for art outside the museum, but it is a mere commonplace for artists to complain that curators are devoid of ideas. I wouldn't waste my time making a show about that issue and have nowhere suggested such an intention. My intention in working with other artists was to explore the non-identity of artist and work, recasting identity (an idea usually so crucial for art) as a kind of dispersal. The resulting paintings rely on 'unbelonging' not attribution for their understanding. This approach is closer to collaboration than appropriation - a historicizing and often distancing method that maintains for the quoted work its status as original. I displayed each set of instructions with the work. While there would obviously be other ways of following each instruction I am in debt to the inventiveness and generosity of the other participants for the shared result of each painting. So failure to list these artists is not as the review suggested 'in the spirit of this exhibition'. They were Mikala Dwyer, Sadie Chandler, Elizabeth Pulie, Chris Fortescue, Stephen Birch and Adrienne Doig. The review concluded with a complaint about curators subsuming the work of artists in their own 'concepts'. Likewise for reviewers, I guess. Simon Barney