If at first you don’t succeed…
Brian Grison
Usually, artists destroy work they feel has failed— rarely would they think of showing it to anyone, let alone encouraging a gallery to display it.
“We tend, as a culture, to anaesthetize our failures as quickly as possible, which I think does an injustice to [new] possibilities and perspectives,” says Ted Hiebert, the co-curator with Doug Jarvis of a failure-themed art show that will open in Victoria in December.
Distributed widely via the internet, the call for submissions for Dowsing for Failure was unusual, namely because it expressed mostly what wouldn’t be accepted, which included happy accidents, pieces about failure and works intended to fail.
“It is much less interesting when the work fails and the artist nevertheless attempts to ‘turn’ the work into a success of some sort,” says Hiebert, explaining the non-inclusion of happy accidents. With regard to intentional failure, he says: “To set oneself up for failure would be ... a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts—in which one gets what one wants, even if that is not what one thought one wanted.”
So when the show opens at Victoria’s Open Space gallery, just what will be on display? At press time, Hiebert and Jarvis had a short list of diverse artists they felt had avoided using failure as a gesture of success and whose submitted pieces were still interesting. However, to explain the dowsing part of the exhibit’s name, they were planning to use a paranormal method akin to using a Ouija board to make the final selection. Which is part of the conceit.
“We have opted to compile a shortlist to ensure the integrity of the exhibition [but] we have opted for dowsing to ensure that our own curatorial integrity will be compromised,” says Hiebert. Regardless of what ends up on display, the exhibition will still shed new light on how failure is viewed, which can only be considered a success.
