Kuras & MacKenzie
Everything You Need
It's everything you need--portable graffiti, not simply photographed in ironic fashion but recreated as a low-budget do-it-yourself companion to the transient architectures of contemporary living.
It's everything you need--Guy Fawkes in a gorilla mask as the new face of anonymous living--identity pushed into a parody of itself. No longer is resistance a phenomenon of the hacker-vigilante but the new face of dislocated romanticism.
It's everything you need--Christmas lights to help celebrate the holiday season.
Everything You Need is an intervention by the collaborative duo Kuras & MacKenzie. Based on the attempt to activate and reanimate found text, the project is a meditation on reduction as an artistic style. In some ways, the work praises reduction: stripped down to the bare essentials, a relatively eclectic mashup without necessary or obvious meaning. At the same time, the piece is also a parody of reduction precisely because art--all art--refuses to be reduced in equal proportion to our insistence on understanding, interpretation and explanation. Like this text--an unnecessary companion to the work of art, also itself both in praise and in parody. No words can make a work more than it already is, and yet words aspire to exactly this objective--adding one more layer to that which is described and in so doing reducing it one step further to satisfy our need to know.
Everything you need, and nothing else, and yet also much more. Everything you need, but not exactly what you need to know. For the more we know the less we need the objects, except perhaps when we don't really know what anything actually means. Which is why Everything You Need can be so resistant to both reduction and to knowledge: it insists on itself as, first and foremost, an eclectic collection of objects that exactly falls short of satisfying the needs it cultivates and in so doing throws everything back in the face of the viewer.
Not a work about needs in the end; this is art about everything.
