Original woodcut of
Monsieur Ubu by Alfred Jarry, 1896. |
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 In 1896, a nasally-voiced character in a cheaply-made costume appeared on a stage before a bewildered bourgeois audience and uttered the word Merdre! The crowd went into a rage, a mob fight ensued and it was fifteen minutes before the play could resume. The character’s name was Ubu, an invention of the mind of Alfred Jarry when he 15 years old. Crude, juvenile, and scatological, this “low-comedy” theatre piece has left a permanent mark on modern art from the Dadaists and onward. The word "MERDRE" comes from the French word “merde” meaning shit. The extra “r” is an invention of Jarry’s adding a personal touch to the vulgarity and making the word nonsensical and absurd. Ubu is a grotesque creation that makes us laugh and simultaneously comments on a bourgeois, hypocritical and inhuman society. In this exhibition we can hear the shrill voice of Ubu resonating today.
Merdre! is a curated exhibition of drawings, video, and animated GIFs expressing the anarchic, democratic, anyone-can-do-it spirit of low-tech art. This international group of artists taking cues from graffiti, comic books, illustration, outsider art, folk art, video games, pop culture, and their own imagination create an art of resistance to an impersonal high-tech, high-gloss culture.
What is low-tech art? Low-tech implies handcrafted works of art created without the use of expensive technological resources. Kitchen-sink art, ad hoc art. For this exhibition, the term applies more specifically to artists who in a high-tech world deliberately choose the unrefined over the polished. This is low-tech connoting a playful, irreverent, whimsical and deliberately amateurish approach to art. It’s making art with whatever materials are at hand and making it cheaply. It’s about humor, irony, expression, and the personal.
Merdre! launched in March of 2007 and will remain online as a permanent collection and archive. Additionally, a limited edition catalog of 2 drawings each by 25 artists from this exhibition will be printed in November 2007.
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Dav Guedin
