Frank Wasser is an Irish artist, writer and curator based in London.
Wasser is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. This website is under construction. This website will re-launch in May 2024
Current: Title, to be announced. - Steam Works (London) March 2024 (Solo Exhibition)
Upcoming: Pot Hole - University of Oxford (Oxford) March 2024 (Solo Exhibition)
SPLIT - Launch in Dublin and Vienna (Spring 2024)
Latest Criticism:
Visual Artsist Newsheet: December 2023
Latest Curation:
The Virtual Lectures (November 2023)
Wasser is Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, London Metropolitan University and a D.Phil candidate at University of Oxford.
SPLIT (ZER0-HOUR FRAGMENTS) - A book by Frank Wasser
Available September 19th 2023 from https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site/THE-CONSTELLATIONS
Slowly turning the first page of a book stolen from the museum gift shop, I read this quotation from Marina Vishmidt set in italics in the centre of the page: ‘Anything that is not work can be art’. The opportunity to fully consider the devastatingly appropriate nature of this short sentence is immediately withdrawn by my line manager rumbling to me sharply through my walkie-talkie earphone that ‘reading is not permitted while guarding the work.’
This series of distractions collates the sparse written fragments of a zero-hour contractor and associate lecturer seeking agency through the acts of writing and making. Initially it was written on a smart phone between 2013 and 2018, while the writer (the worker) worked zero-hour contract jobs in universities, museums, and art institutions in London. The nameless protagonist is only named by the many name badges he is obliged to wear. SPLIT is a tapestry of observations, fictions, and confabulations from inside the institutions sustaining, controlling, and propagating the flow of capital and culture through living bodies. Each fragment charts the deterioration of the worker through industrial action, toward illness, debt, and inevitable death.
‘Like with a game of Exquisite Corpse, the further you get into the narrative sequence the more its subject disassembles. Chopped up by standard ugly work relations at every art institution going, our Fraser/Zero hero temp ricochets between description and seismographic pathos. Do you, or I, remember the worldlessness of this constant scramble from your/my days on the circuit? Maybe reading this will feel like a sleep paralysis, like being precarised into literal pieces.’
- Marina Vishmidt
Loading Bay is a webpage for writing by artists, an online dock – a space of exchange. Curated by Frank Wasser, the commissions collectively convey the materiality of language by teasing out a deft register of content and forms.
The title of this project positions an online analogue of the National Sculpture Factory’s loading bay. Loading bays are commonly encountered in factories, commercial units and industrial structures. Functioning as integral parts of a facility, they serve the purpose of providing entry points to staging areas, sites of production, storage rooms, and in this instance, art works.
These commissions offer artists the space to consider and act upon the implications of writing as a sculptural form. The inaugural artists Joseph Noonan-Ganley and Francis Whorrall-Campbell are followed by commissions by Oisín Byrne, Kelly Lloyd and Frank Wasser in June 2023.
Loading Bay is accompanied by an exhibition and live event running at the National Sculpture Factory from June 23rd – June 24th 2023. Opening reception: June 23rd 18:00, followed by live performances and launch party at 21:30.
You can view/download the commissions by clicking here.
Scene 93 OMITTED
Exhibition open:
18.10.14 – 9.11.14
SCENE 94 INT RESTAURANT NIGHT
ELLIE comes into the darkened restaurant, following the source of the flickering light. A candle burns at a table in the corner.
JOHN HAMMOND sits at the table, alone. There is a bucket of ice cream in the middle, and he's eating a dish of it, staring down morosely.
Ellie draws up to the table and Hammond looks up at her. His eyes are puffy, his hair is messed up - - for the first time we've seen him, the fire is gone from his eyes.
(Taken from the original script for Jurassic Park)
Taking this 5 second camera panning as a point of departure 'Scene 93 Omitted' is a review, reconfiguration and reevaluation of the year 1993 as remembered by Wasser, then 5 years old.
Jurassic Park and its exclusive branding haunt lucid memories of that year: a small neurotic child runs up and down a living room in Jurassic Park PJs spelling out in the air the title credits of the movie accompanied by the humming of the soundtrack; he insists on green jelly for dessert on Sundays because that's what Tim eats in the film; Santa brings a plethora of dinosaur themed toys that Christmas, but anything without the film's trademarked logo on it is rejected as ‘extinct’. [1]
The promise of merchandise is a tactile relationship with a fictional world. In Scene 94 Jurassic Park approaches the edge of self-reflexivity as the camera pans across the gift shop, showing kids' pajamas, lunch boxes and toy dinosaurs all emblazoned with the theme park’s logo. But these branded objects fall short of the slick design characteristic of actual merchandise surrounding a film. The ersatz aura of these things then prefigures, exploits and undermines the possibility of entering Jurassic Park. SCENE 93 OMITTED unearths the problems that these types of material remnants pose for experiences of nostalgia and cultural memory, and exploits the discrepancies between their various appearances.
[1] In the description box of videoSTORK's YouTube clip JURASSIC PARK & pity for UNSOLD PRODUCTS, videoSTORK describes the camera panning that opens scene 94 of the screenplay: Dr. Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) and John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) debate the psychology of consumption and product seduction. In Jurassic Park, Speilberg's pathos extends to this emotional scene in lamentation of unsold products beginning with a heartbreaking pan across the shelves (93 omitted). The products won't be sold in the fictional story, but luckily for these orphaned t-shirts and sports bottles the consumer guilt worked its movie magic and a mint was made on Jurassic Park merch anyhow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2OxVzleaE[accessed 22/09/2014]
