‘By accident’

Performance, exhibition and book by Douglas Park

curated by the Kim Kim Gallery, Komplot and Damien Airault

Douglas Park is a London based writer, poet, raconteur whose art practice deals with indexing, fragmentation and cultural mimetic transmission. One of his areas of research is the examination of marginalized elements of contemporary art history through the prism of the "accident". This is the starting point for this exhibition and it takes the form of both a prototypical model for cultural remapping and a hypothetical historical flux density measuring device.



‘By accident’ is the second occurrence of ‘By Accident’ that was conceived by Komplot for Le Commissariat in 2009 in Paris. To facilitate his research, Komplot had invited a group of artists to respond to a privately circulated underground text in which Park created a lexical analysis of accidents that have occurred in contemporary art history (be they personal setbacks; interpersonal, political, legal, media and public adversity and backlash; grievances and disputes; resource and facility shortages; technical hitches; conservation, storage and transit issues; changes of mind etc).

Matthew Burbidge had created a free-wheeling film portrait of Douglas Park, resulting in an over-the-top fast and dangerous ride careening out of control through the landscape of post war contemporary avant-garde. David Evrard, working in tandem with graphic designer David Garchey, acted as iconographer by illustrating the text of Douglas Park. Film-maker & poet Jean-Philippe Convert was the interpreter in French, frantically re-writing the  unorthodox stories created by Douglas Park to enable their smooth passage from London to Paris.

Without detracting from anything, consideration, definition and selection policy struggled with overlap and similarity with other (equally relevant) tendencies and instances not brought about or operating in the same way.  These include: usage of other’s work; “challenges” (attempting to influence other’s decisions); works engaged with important and serious episodes, phases and circumstances in the artist’s own life; the reappearance of imagery from and of other works; retrospectives, surveys and monographs as work; archival and preparatory / working material as work; involvement of other’s input in production; solicited and curated contributions submitted to works and projects akin to collections, archives, publications, programs and exhibitions.