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The Hancock Project

the hancock project. A film by Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson (London Fieldworks)
Institvtvm Pataphysicvm Londiniense
Department of Reconstructive Archaeology, dora 4
DVD. For distribution only to members and friends of the Institute. 33 signed copies (I to XXXIII), and 99 copies numbered 1 to 99.

Anthony Hancock, Paintings & Sculpture: A Retrospective Exhibition ran for 14 days in September 2002 at The Foundry, London. It allowed "for a complete re-assessment of Hancock's contribution to the art of his time" as the Department recreated "the entirety of Hancock's known pictorial output, as well as his most important sculpture (the magnificent and imposing Aphrodite at the Waterhole)." Magnus Irvin, gave a practical demonstration — by reconstructing Hancock's only known "action painting" Aphrodite at the Waterhole (on the Horizontal) — on the exhibition's opening night, 7 September 2002 vulg. (in reality New Year's Eve 129 EP by the 'Pataphysical calendar).

Compared to Hancock, Gainsborough comes across as a rank amateur, while Paul Cézanne is frankly contemptible. … Hancock craftily demonstrates that it is more socially valuable for artists to manifest the contradictions of their calling as specialist non-specialists, than to buttress the spectacle without even realising that art is irredeemably reactionary. Hancock intuitively understands that those capitalism condemns to be artists must simultaneously and by necessity join with the proletariat in allowing the real anti-art to begin. Our task is to create a new world, and all of anarchism can be found in the ridiculous idea that bohemians may live groovy lives while the rest of us are oppressed by the tyrannies of exchange.
Stewart Home, Tony Hancock as "The Rebel": Warhol before Warhol, or From The Art of Commerce to the Business of Art, Encomia for Anthony Hancock (Eds. Alastair Brotchie & Magnus Irvin) (London Institute of 'Pataphysics, 2002)

Links
Anthony Hancock, Paintings & Sculpture: A Retrospective Exhibition
The London Institute of 'Pataphysics
Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock at Wikipedia
The Rebel (1961) at The Internet Movie Database
Magnus Irvin
Stewart Home
Alfred Jarry at Wikipedia
George Melly at Wikipedia
Simon Watson Taylor at Wikipedia
Henry Snowstorm
Collège de ´Pataphysique
London Fieldworks

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 12:06 and is filed under 'Pataphysics.
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