Performance as Publishing

Ben Cain’s Objects That Do, and Objects That Don’t features sandcastles in different shapes, a platform, and corresponding posters. As with much of his work, where there is an interplay of saying and doing, the objects are animated through the phrases on the poster. They are ‘performing’ speech, where speech is synonymous with the live-ness and present-ness of perpetual making, and where this making exists in, or produces a repeating present in which the only outcome of making is making.

Ben Cain is interested in how artworks, of whatever type, might question us about what we think they’re doing and, by implication, what ‘work’ we think we’re doing when we’re paying attention to them.