Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, The Beatles in My Life, 16 April 2005
The Nickel Tour
‘Tour guides will ask for attention and a certain degree of docility, but they also allow for passivity, graciously leaving one to rest easy in the security of a predetermined course. Given the opportunity to indulge in abstraction, one might drift off to find the personification of one’s interests and motivations in such a guide. Certainly the idea of this figure – a version of which one is more or less discreetly following at all times in one’s life, otherwise nothing would get done at all – becomes more distinct at times; yet it never becomes so concrete that it stops being an apparition. One isn’t being so much led as projecting something ahead of oneself to follow. Who does it resemble? How and in which direction does it move?
At the outset, nothing, apathy. But ambivalence should be taken as a blessing; with nothing to resist against anything, one is free to plunge whole-heartedly into whatever might come one’s way, substituting a benign good-naturedness for anomie. So we propose a tour with no information, something that could be filled with … something that would play out the continual exchange of one interest for another, perhaps even evince a faint delight in interest per se. Who would be leading such a tour, and why would one be taking it?’
Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda
Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda’s tour took place on Monday 24 October at 4pm.
Jay Chung (b.1976) was born in America; Q Takeki Maeda (b.1977) was born in Japan. Both artists currently live and work in Berlin. Chung & Maeda have recently shown in the first Moscow Biennale (2005). They also participated in ‘Utopia Station’, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2004) and ‘The Object Sculpture’, at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2002).
