ABOUT X-PRZ
X-PRZ was a biracial "art band." Originally it consisted of four principal
artists.
Since 1998 two members remain functioning as X-PrZ and SWIPE.
The group was founded in 1991 and is dedicated to the
production of engaging, hybridized, and humorous cultural actions. Our working
process which we call "the art band" has been likened to a conversation, a
multiple personality disorder, or a group musical improvisation. Our practice
emphasizes the exchange and deformation of ideas over formal hierarchies,
authorship roles, or specific media. Think of a form of play in which ideas
riff off each other, where each member sometimes leads and other times
supports, where the production process shifts and undercuts our own
expectations. The work is never totalized, it is a constant rehearsal, a
mixture of positions.
We tend to manipulate cultural readings, desires and effects rather than
attempt to address the social in documentary or realist styles. We explore the
mental processes behind the artifact, we emphasize the collisions of desire and
fear that produce the social fact, the subjective feeling. The work relies on
vernacular material (found images, texts) which are recontextualized to provoke
questioning, instabilities. We see our work as a willful misreading and
perverse misapplication of the histories of various cultural practices from
critical theory to pop music. A process of innovation through misrecognition,
our practice posits unsuccessful imitation as the motor for ironic developments
and useful confusions. Failure masquerades as success, success conceals
failure. Misappropriation and miscegenation is the way that culture evolves.
Our mission is to undermine certain overdetermined forms and contents.
We work in
installation, photography, painting, sculpture and video forms.
Since 1992 our
media installation, video, photographic and other works have been exhibited
internationally at venues including: the Whitney Museum of American Art,
7th Berlin Videofest (Mediopolis), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, World Wide Video Festival (The Hague, NL), The Photographer's
Gallery (London, UK), I.C.A. Boston, Rotterdam International Film Festival
(NL), ZKM Media Arts Center (Karlsruhe, Germany), and The Guggenheim Museum
(NYC). Currently the group consists of two principals, Mark Pierson and
Tony Cokes, but usually expands to include other artists and scholars on a
project basis.
The name X-PRZ is a multi-leveled pun on the queasy relationship between
production and consumption ("Express Yourself? Creative expression serves a
commercial goal"); Baudrillard's "Transfatal Express" (a fictional
disinformation agency); Express (the name of a clothing store chain) and a
reference to the film "Point Break," a work by Kathryn Bigelow which features a
gang of four bank robbers who commit their crimes masked as U.S. presidents
(ex-presidents Reagan, Nixon, Johnson and Carter).
Current Principals:
TONY COKES
MARK PIERSON
Inactive Members (1991 - 1998):
DOUG ANDERSON
KENSETH ARMSTEAD