Dec 7, 2011- Jan 16, 2012
AH401 student works
The human species is doubtless the only one to have invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Nature’s law. Perhaps even an art of disappearance.

The current exhibition started out as a creative critical writing project, in which students of AH 401/The Idea of Art were asked to address theorist Jean Baudrillard’s text, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2007) and thesis on the vanishing of reality through the transmutation of the real into the virtual (blurb). True to the spirit of the classical dialectic of thesis and anti-thesis what you behold is less a synthesis than it is a deconstruction – a deconstruction of a deconstruction. Thus, address Jean Baudrillard’s question: Why hasn’t everything already disappeared? This is indeed a slippery question. On the one hand it implies disappearance, or, at the very least, it implies the possibility of disappearance – that disappearance is imminent (as in pending, forthcoming) and immanent, within, inherent, inevitable. On the other, it posits astonishment: Why hasn’t everything already disappeared? The astonishment resides in Baudrillard’s use of the adverb already. It is the author’s choice of this word precisely that makes the noun disappearance inevitable. Thus his query is a statement of surprise perhaps even disbelief, shocking as it is. We should have disappeared – already! Yet here we are – disappearing?