Pour the Line

$3899 is a high sum to charge for a donut. A natural response may be “Is this the correct price?”

The answer depends: Is it the real thing, or a thing of art?

This line of questioning is the key concern of re.riddle’s Pour the Line, a site-store-happening-anything, that takes place at AR et al. this September through October in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood. 

A ‘revisit' to The Store (1960) by Claes Oldenburg, where the artist occupied an abandoned shop in New York with “products” for sale, is what inspired this “thing” we’re creating. The provocation then was that its offerings—an inventory of banal, everyday objects such as a dress, ice cream sundae, iron, pistol, slice of cake—were all made of papier mâché. Hence, their referential presentations in the context of conventional commercial consumption echoed the contemporary debates about an existing, tenuous relationship between art and life, reality and non-reality.

Indeed, this postmodern theme has been thoroughly unpacked by art historians. It’s not our intention to re-analyze it. Rather, Pour the Line is hinged on the persistence and relevance of its ideas as they relate to us today. Ambiguity. Spontaneity. Irony. What role do the paradoxical and dialectical play in our current human experience?

A concerted effort made by creators, artists and thinkers from multidisciplinary backgrounds has been led by re.riddle to explore these concepts and questions. Pour the Line’s program will entail design and art objects for sale, artists talks, performances, manifestations and anything else it feels compelled to do. In addition to operating during regular business hours, experimental programs that comment on the theme of art and life will take place on random days and at “off” times such as after midnight or before dawn. Details will likewise be shared by alternative means and methods.

At stake is the risk that modern commercialism and over-consciousness might eclipse the spotlight directed at the sliver of space between art and life. This is where various freedoms—and monsters—may be born. Such a liminal experience is not always paradisiacal, however; eventually one must land somewhere. Perhaps, and we hope, it is occasionally on the line.

~L. Lui, Creative Director