Gone Fishing (2003) collaborative construction of myth in a fantastic age of realism

Gone Fishing, installed in a Marshall Blvd residence on Chicago's west side

GONE FISHING, Eric Ehmert, Meg Duguid, Diego Bobby (2003) Latex Paint, Wood, Wire, and Nails with accompanying Text*

This work is boring. It includes boring with its white paint and its singular neutral observation. Its ironically misplaced sense of optimism is intended as humorous. While its efforts are too narrow by far and its gestures seem labored or boring rather than shrewd or concise. The degree to which candles were necessary has also never been examined at length. It's generally agreed that EE did exercise restraint during his graduate exhibition, instead of installing his own work he contracted his allotted space to MD and DB. Rather than reinforce EE's initial gesture this resulted in a puerile charm school prank that infantilized the striking tensions that persist within an institutional structure that is further and further displaced from its cultural/visual arts context. Furthermore the innuendo of the object's model text careen into the descriptive fantasy provided in the pieces explanatory text. The resulting gesture acquires an omnidirectional, unfiltered, and nostalgic presence. If EE, MD, and DB did it again then it would also have been repetitive. Despite these questionable deflections the work can generally be considered absorptive rather than variable in its treatment. The didactic text as it would have appeared in the installation during the 2003 Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibition at School of The Art Institute of Chicago gallery space at 847 W. Jackson St:

This work is an action and actions are not inherently artistic. Although some actions, like pouring cups of coffee, masturbating or watching the television have been explored for underlying artistic content. If artistic content can be found in them, it soon reveals itself to be derived of intention and thereby neutering it of any innate artistic sublimity. Making that action suspect and its motivations antithetical to critical analysis. Taking into account that analysis can be a subjective social construct employed by history to determine itself, one soon deduces that this piece is not art. Gone Fishing is Philistine in it's intent, it acts to circumvent the nature of institutional aesthetic and in turn the societal tendency to establish such an aesthetic by not participating in it. To this end the "Artist" has employed others to "decorate" this space resulting in a content that cannot be judged.
*This text has been altered from the original. It has been compiled from multiple original digital files which have undergone a variety of format, and platform changes since the original writing. Two primary files were used to reconstruct this text as the most accurate presentation of the original.

fig.73) A contextual image of a SAIC's Gallery 2, a video installation (2005) artist unknown

The installation contains a single marvelous object that's been constructed by MD. She's employed a hyperkleen lead free house paint on a long plank of repurposed wood. The text of the object asserts plainly, Gone Fishing. At the beginning of the essay a photograph of this object was included to help provide a sense of its scale. Nothing is known about the lights they used during its brief installation.
But afterwards, everyone went back to Pilsen and they drank cold beer fridge while sitting in the sun. Then at midnight MD went home and DB stayed up to listen to Billie Holiday records. He fell asleep in the window underneath the moon seeming swirl high above. DB would smoke very long and slender cigarettes while counting the stars in the deep dark of the nighttime sky. Puff... Puff... Puff, he'd say from inside of his tall house with its fat library and the bed where he dreamt of sheep still counting their way...