Procrastination

ANNE LANGGAARD

ProcrastinationFormat ArtspaceJanuary 17th - February 22nd, 2020 A laundry basket, blister packs and bubble wrap in bronze. Ceramic floor cloths, crumpled paper with personal notes, a beach toy and a BIG razor in ceramics. Floor cloths embroidered with statements about life and death. With the exhibition Procrastination, Anne Langgaard turns our attention to the objects we are surrounded by in our everyday lives and usually don’t see or give a thought. By translating the objects from their original material such as plastic into materials that we value higher and associate with the art world, Langgaard turns the state of things upside down. Suddenly we become aware of things we usually overlook. What stories are hidden in the used cloths? Who swallowed the pills from the blister packs and to fight which headache or illness? Which child played with the beach toy? With humor and poetry and an interest in the imperfect, Langgaard transforms the everyday objects into a sort of still images of lived life. It is an attempt to maintain the otherwise so volatile moments of life. With an awareness of the impossibility of doing that. The works can be understood as part of the procrastination, which the title of the exhibition refers to; procrastinating the thought of death – a way to keep death anxiety at bay. The exhibition seems to say: Look, here is life! Here is the everyday with its banal beauty, it exists and keeps on existing until death. But there is a gravity alongside the humour and the effect of surprise that the transformation of everyday objects into art works creates. The works are simultaneously life-images and reminders of the volatility of life – death. Memento mori – remember you must die. In Buddhism it is said that to be truly happy, you must think of death five times a day. The embroidered floor cloths contain, like the exhibition as a hole, exactly this span between the banal everyday and existential reflections. With Procrastination, Anne Langgaard breaks with familiar categories and hierarchies of value to change our view on things. Also in the large graphic work Art after Art after Philosophy, in which she has taken every page from the American concept artist Joseph Kosuth’s manifest-like text Art after Philosophy (1969) and crumpled them, smoothed them again and used them as printing plates. Langgaard deconstructs Kosuth’s ideas on art and criticizes the power of the written word as she lets the text exist as both materiality and idea. Theory is transformed into a colourful, tactile and aesthetic work of art.