Born in 1974 in Thailand (TH)
Lives and works in Bangkok (TH)
2009
Wall painting of a text found on the Internet and realized with disappearing ink
241 cm de diamètre
Year of Purchase: 2009
Without any specifically historic intention or explicit citation, Pratchaya Phinthong’s approach carries out one of the motifs of conceptual art of the sixties: that of speculation. The term should be understood in its intellectual as well as financial sense, since some of Phinthong’s works enact fiscal transactions without exchanging wealth or benefits.[…] But even more often, Phinthong tries to conjure up an absent thing, which is impossible to see or has no physical presence. According to the post-conceptual logic, such a practice based on immateriality, belief, or rumor, evokes Robert Barry’s dissipation in his Inert Gas Series, or a project kept secret by his students during a workshop in Halifax in 1969. […]
2017 follows that logic: it is a mural painted using invisible ink, which vanishes over the course of the exhibition. The text, arranged in the shape of a perfect circle, is an extract copied and pasted from a blog found on the Internet. Its anonymous, alarmist, and paranoid author claims that secret experiments are being conducted at the heart of the CERN particle accelerator located underground at the French-Swiss border. According to the blog’s author, the real purpose of that machine, controlled by the Americans, is teleportation to Mars of a select portion of the population before Earth collides with another planet in 2017. This date provides Pratchaya Phinthong with the title of his work, alluding to futuristic predictions and classical dystopias of apocalyptic science fiction, from Orwell’s 1984 to Roland Emmerich’s 2012. The unlikely scenario, however, culminates here in an unexpected way, namely in the conviction that Buddha is going to save his disciples, the author among them. This final turnaround neutralizes the anxiety of impending doom. Written directly on the wall, the disastrous and gradually fading prediction allows for the renewal of secrets and mystery. Unlike the Internet, where it would be as popular as its message is spectacular, the work 2017 makes the prophecy evanescent, magical, nearly supernatural. Furthermore, the form of this vanishing outline of a sun evokes the cosmic referent of the prediction. Unless, punning on the polysemy of the term, it represents a “speculative” bubble ready to burst.
Guillaume Désanges