Past Exhibition

The Hawthorne Experiment is a anonymous collective of artists who are interested in performing an idea centered on identity, control and power. Based on a psychological experiment by the same name (carried out to test morale in the work place, 1952), the work is literally constructed by completing a series of repetitious tasks. The tasks will be explained by official directives published in the gallery for visitors to follow. The Hathorne Experiment thinks that the mass of repetitions will begin to build momentum and create an effect that is both sinister and absurd.

All of the actions that make up this work are inflicted on the humblest of urban source materials, the domestic Telephone Directory. There is something very soothing about directory lists, alphabetised columns of signifiers. The telephone listings are social maps too, it’s the sum of a community. Of course it's a fairly arbitrary way of grouping people, alphabetically by surname, but has the major benefit of being completely unambiguous. It's a structuralists particular delight, an unambiguous system. What The Hawthorne Experiment will do, among other things, is literally section the directory list and reorder it to five different classification systems that are also pretty arbitrary, but much more ambiguous. As the gallery visitor encounters the directives there is the possibility to reinforce, redirect, subvert or rebel, the choice is always individual. The project is a process, highlighting and suggesting that identity is a process and that so is community.

Presented alongside Kurt Adams