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D’étant donnés—evenₙ Good lucks get givenₙ₊₁ . Chinning Liu, Danica Ribi, Matthew McGaughey, Catherine Menard, 80. July 11 - August 08, 2026. Summer. Group Exhibition.

*Open Wednesday - Saturday, Noon - 6pm.

603 N Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90004.

[Press Release]

{Gallery Structure (603): Construction Manual for given approximations of any possible demolition (after Bankrupts and Cuckolds)}

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ₙ

Given: what’s been given, over and over again, from being given before we ever really get to see just what we have here. “There,” a fit that starts by tracing, hearing, saying, ciphering, trusting a word (before seeing any of its views), disorienting rather the listener. Whinnying with all the marks made of howls, hollows {}. {Here} any view or any viewer—the voyeur—has already been cast-out, pushed too-far-in…. Too somewhere, built like looking at Duchamp’s Étant donnés from ‘both sides,’ without access to any side unless it’s all of them at once—or without using either of the peepholes [correctly]. Or, without eyes. A looking curved towards a blindspot so it can only be heard. Or else I’m only seeing spots. (Curved without balling-up or becoming flattened, paneled, or windowed.) Or, maybe the peepholes are replaced by letters whose cuts are still holes that open into drains, plumbing. So there’s nothing to see except the lack of lighting inside the pipes, what presents itself as the surface of some letter, some kind of writing. Maybe they can be read, maybe you can’t see shit. Like building a toilet while you try to use it: either move quickly or retain your excretion—either way, for sake of any remaining humanity, just don’t look! Or, maybe, if we are in the bathroom already, the peepholes, in all their glory, got submerged below the equator of sex. It’s difficult to say since I don’t know if I’m sitting or standing. (That’s why it’s important to study height differences among Higher apes.) For now it’s all peachy at face-value: money and fuzzy cleavage. A front entirely interstitial and with no sides so no shapes, no geometry—no fixed context besides a place in time that’s already elsewhere. But also no nothing. So—not a readymade but an unreadymade. After all, a readymade is all conditions with no premises, no givens, all takens(-in but not takens-away). Anyway, what’s been Given has been Taken-away—or at least given (back) more than once, without enumeration, all at once. (Surely, you can still start counting gas but you won’t know when to stop: given0, given1, given2, …. Given, Étant donnés, From Being Given: D’étant donnés—evenₙ Good lucks get givenₙ₊₁. No chance I can(‘t) look, but I’m (not) going to have to listen at the same time. Time spent well wasted. Wasted and lost like any primal scene—any flesh-toned artifact—I only started to look because I heard something, and now I don’t know exactly what I can’t see: “who’s making all that noise?”

ₙ₊₁

(Now that you’ve been given a number as Reference I might start making Sense, even.) 

(2° Sense.) Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage…. It sounds like the opening of a logical or mathematical proposition: “Given: 1. the waterfall, 2. the illuminating gas…”. This formulation seems to establish conditions from which something else should follow. But in this state, the expected consequence is missing. The phrase gives premises without an explicit theorem. [The ellipsis is our starting-point….]

(1° Reference.) Given Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946 – 1966) as an unavoidable but unresolved premise, the exhibition considers looking as a compromised, or maybe even impossible, act. This tableau is Duchamp’s final artwork, and the first work he made after The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), also called The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre) (1915 – 1923). (It was assumed that Duchamp had given-up his artists practice in the gap spanning these works, while he had turned his attention to playing chess professionally.) Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage gives the viewer a scene only by obstructing access to it: a closed door, two peepholes, a hidden chamber, a body exposed but unreachable, a title that offers premises without conclusion. The work’s “given” puts a body and a gaze on the brink of action as someone is forced to approach the work perversely, pressing themselves against the door and peering through the peepholes at a scene that flickers between violence, pornography, and adoration. Any observer is forced to remain at their thresholds. Something is already given, but always inaccessible (even if it’s approached). It asks what must be staged, hidden, lit, blocked, or assumed before anything can be seen. There is something extraordinarily precise, and something exceedingly vague. Duchamp called the work an “approximation démontable”—an approximation that can be taken apart or disassembled. And he allowed for a margin of “ad libitum” in its assembly and disassembly, per the Manual of Instructions (1966). With this contingency or agency in mind, we have taken-up this mode of assembly-disassembly “ad libitum” as a kind of gas filling the room of the exhibition. (A gas that will either get you high or kill you, or both—but you won’t know until it’s too late.) So, it’s an ether of the exhibition, not its content or form. And by now we’ve passed the door by coming from the 'other side’ of the tableau: that point-at-infinity placed at the intersecting limits of perspective. And from the ‘other side’ of the title: the ellipsis at the end of the numbered sequence of the phrase. Instead of being left waiting we are moving through any obstructions with demolitions of doors, walls, punctuations, perforations that hold and fixate the plucked gaze of Étant donnés. There’s a shift in perspective: from “…” to “—” (from distant intimacy to intimate distance).

[…to be continued—]

….

Premises, Places, Precursors (Phase 0):

+ Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage [Marcel Duchamp, 1945 - 1966]. 

}} “Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas”

+ La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre) [Marcel Duchamp, 1915 - 1923].

}} “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)”

+ The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy [Charles Fourier, 1808 - 1822].

{{ See: Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (1808); Hiérarchie du cocuage (1841); Traité de l’Association domestique-agricole (1822, later published as “Théorie de l’unité universelle”) }}

+ Historias de cronopios y de famas [Julio Cortázar, 1962].

+ The Hills of Hebron [Sylvia Wynter, 1958 - 1984].

+ 海島算經 (‘Hǎidǎo Suànjīng’) [Liu Hui, 220 - 280]

}} “The Sea Island Mathematical Manual”

+ Le Bleu du Ciel [Georges Bataille, 1935 - 1957]

}} “The Blue of Noon”

+ Lumpérica [Diamela Eltit, 1983].

+ Евгений Онегин, роман в стихах [Alexander Pushkin, 1825 - 1833].

}} “Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse”

+  Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose [Sigmund Freud, 1918].

}} “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (aka, the “Wolf Man case”)

+ “Ein Kind wird geschlagen”: Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Entstehung sexueller Perversionen [Sigmund Freud, 1919].

}} “A Child Is Being Beaten”

+ L’Étourdit [Jacques Lacan, 1972].

}} ‘’’Good lucks (saying this otherwise than) already’’’