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'Doing Nothing' for Payment
legal agreement for self-activation of live performance,
black & white print, A4
2022
artist edition: unlimited
Courtesy of the artist & private collections ph Katya Ev
HOW TO USE THE CONTRACT
Fill out and counter-sign the Contract
Make sure you fill it out legibly.
Write your initials on all pages, including appendices.
Fill out the NOTICE attached to the Contract
Prior to 'doing nothing', fill out the date and starting time.
Once you 'did nothing', complete the end time.
Sign the NOTICE.
Make at least one photograph of the setup in which you 'did nothing'.
Photograph(s) should give a large view of the space and clearly demonstrate the seat on which you 'did nothing'.
Transfer the copy of the Contract, the copy of the NOTICE and your photograph(s) to the artist.
Make a digital or printed copy of the Contract and of the NOTICE. Keep the original for yourself.
Digital copies should be hi-resolution (min 300 dpi), or scanned. Mobile phone photographs will not be accepted.
Make the transfer either to the email address katya.ev.rhyn@gmail.com OR to Ekaterina Vasilyeva - 15 rue Haute - Performing Art Forum , 15 Rue Haute, 02820 Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France.
In return, the payment will be made within 10 working days upon receipt. The artist will send you back the proof of payment via the same transfer method that you used.
The edition is a performative tool that allows to its owner to 'do nothing' and get paid. The edition consists of a legal agreement pre-signed by the artist. It spells out conditions that ‘doing nothing’ for payment will be both subject to and enabled by. The countersignature makes the agreement effective: it allows to the owner of the edition to realise the performance. They can 'do nothing' for payment at the place and on the time of their choosing. The maximum duration of 'doing nothing' foreseen by the contract is one hour. It is possible to 'do nothing' within the period of one year since the effective date of the agreement. Katya Ev, 2022
‘" [...] Here, a look at the contract and the paratext accompanying the work is in order. Consider, for instance, this particularly glorious mobilization of the perverse poeticpotential of legal-administrative language, on the webpage that explains the premises of the work: “In whichever way ‘doing nothing’ is enacted concretely, the contract signed by participants formally recognizes that what they are doing is what ‘nothing’ is.”
The pragmatic solipsism of contractual and legal circumscription here substitutes for rather more lofty meditations on the ontology of ‘nothingness’. The performativity of legislative utterances is what makes the impossibility of ‘doing nothing’ appear as available and renders it practically realizable—but not really, as participants in Visitors will naturally experience first hand. In this context, it is worth recalling the example of the perception or experience of the absence of a friend in a café, which philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre uses in Being and Nothingness to demonstrate the dialectical entwinement of appearance and non-appearance, and ultimately of being and nothingness. Somewhat like Sartre's absent friend, the contract and the discursive framing affords a kind of perception of nothing(ness), and sets off a series of reflexions on a paradoxal nature of such perception." Steyn Bergs, "Nothing/Doing: On Visitors of an Exhibition Space are Suggested to ‘Do Nothing’", TIM Magazine #2, 2021 full text here
Related artworks & performance documentation
live performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space, 2021
film based on live performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space, 2021
6P1.jpg)
contract for live performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space, 2021
photographs based on live performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space, 2021/2022
Performance activations
