NEW YORK.- Flux Factory presents Response to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International Conceived in the Mood of Ambivalence, on view through December 22, 2006. Why Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International? Well, it’s quite a monument. Of course, it isn’t a monument at all, having never been built. But it is a striking and impressive idea for a monument. The model for it alone is unforgettable in pictures and drawings. It is a bold piece of work. Lacking any definitive function, it is the testament to a need, a desire, a concept. Pushing the very boundaries of human technological capacity at the time, it could only have been built using the newest methods in metal engineering and construction. It is an optimistic monument. You cannot look at the monument without thinking of the future and of human possibility. It is solid and dynamic at the same time. It portrays movement with purpose. It is beautiful.

Why ‘conceived in the mood of ambivalence’? It is all form and no content. It is the idea of human possibility without any articulation of what human possibility actually looks and feels like. With so much life, it is dead. It is an ideal monument in the good sense, but in the bad sense as well. There’s no debate in it, no place for the contested milieu of civil society. It can’t be amended or changed, it just is. It would have to exist outside the boundaries of day to day urban life; alone, infinite, empty.

What do we mean by ‘response’? Our monument will be Tatlin’s monument plus all the mess of lived experience. It’s the ‘hands-on’ approach to utopia. It will change and transform during its lifetime according to the fights and discussions and ideas of the people who interact with it. And so, it will have a beginning and an end. It will be finite. To put it simply, our tower will be the kind of place you’d actually want to spend some time in. It will have a café. It will have a room for napping. And still, it will gesture to something beyond what we are now, to a better version of ourselves that we still hope to attain, whether or not we know how.

Artists: Briony Barr is English and Australian but has called New York home for the past 6 years. The daughter of a painter and a picture-framer, a life in art was on always on the cards and indeed, she has made a lot of drawings and other things in her time. Recent work has ranged from plotting the movements of a waiter on the floor of a restaurant with tape to making time-lapse drawings of people moving through customs at the airport. Most recently she worked with fellow friend of Flux Martina Mrongovius to create a line structure, grown over several weeks on a fence in Queens. Briony’s work can be seen as part of the viewing program at The Drawing Center and in Pierogi 2000’s Flat Files. She is currently having a solo drawing show in Mexico City.

Mikey Barringer studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany. There he learned how to act, make films, and speak German. All three skills have turned out to be quite useful for life at Flux Factory, and you’d think it was somehow meant to be that way. This is his first show.

Ranjit Bhatnagar has been exhibiting sound sculpture and alternative musical instruments since 1995, such as the Silence Organ and the MIDI Ironing Board. Recently, Ranjit has taught students at Parsons School of Design to make their own instruments and play in a band, contributed robotic musical instruments to Flux Factory’s Fluxbox show, and to Artbots NYC at the Location One gallery in SOHO. A selection of his photos are currently on exhibit at the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.