DO SOMETHING

28th June - 27th August 2004

The starting point for DO SOMETHING is one of the most referenced bits of art
historical polemic of the last 30-odd years. It is Sol LeWitt’s tenth entry in 
his Sentences on Conceptual Art: Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain 
of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made 
physical.

floating ip gallery has sent out an open invitation to participate in an 
exhibition consisting entirely of proposals and documentation of work rather than 
objects themselves. In addition to this formal criterion, DO SOMETHING returns 
the realm of ideas into the real world, not as a collection of objects but as a 
network of actions; the proposals and documents in DO SOMETHING demand 
deeds. They are requests, invitations, instructions, plans; or they are records, 
archives, glimpses, hints.

The submissions, direct responses to the injunction “do something”, do not include 
art objects. All submissions are in the form of proposals or documentation (text, 
video, photographs, 35mm slide, sound etc), which may resemble artworks, but are 
always proxies and substitutes. For DO SOMETHING, then, LeWitt’s guarded and 
negatively stated declaration “all ideas need not be made physical” is turned into 
an assured position: making things happen is more important than making things. 
And any implied dematerialisation in the conceptualist dictum is cancelled by a 
revived commitment to real events.

Submissions will be kept open for the duration of the exhibition, leading to an 
ever-changing and always-flexible occupation of the gallery. The absence at the 
heart of the works is therefore matched by the provisional shape of the exhibition. 
At the outset the gallery is in a state of preparation, stacked with tables, video 
and dvd facilities, a slide projector room and so on; maybe not all of this will be 
needed, but the gallery is ready nonetheless, as if waiting for something to be done 
is a form of proposal of what might be done.

DO SOMETHING is floating ip’s first open submission exhibition. Click here for the
invitiation. Click here for a list of exhibiting artists.