You Know
Part of Points & Lines
Olivier Babin
You Know, 2009
Bronze with black patina
5 1/2” x 1/2”
Courtesy of the artist
…As a kind of synthesis between the two modes of the "points" and the "lines," sits Olivier Babin’s (b. 1975; lives and works in New York, NY) You Know. Unlike the other artworks in the exhibition, which are all unique objects, You Know is a cast artist’s edition “nail”, and as such is only one of many like copies. Instead of creating a true facsimile of a steel carpenter’s nail, You Know is recast in bronze, the classical material of art statuary. By using this softer material, which is too weak to withstand the pressure of a hammer, the work functions as a kind of reverse readymade wherein a banal object is made into a rare art object, but is mass produced to then negate its preciousness. Adding a greater layer of complexity, this “nail” is placed at a key spot within the park so that its placement and use in the exhibition differentiates it from its absent siblings. For this shadow narrative to unfold, You Know was inserted into LentSpace’s existing Plane Tree without harming the tree. Considering the title of the artwork, a visitor might expect to implicitly “know” something, yet he or she is only approached by an empty “nail” sitting in a tree without a sign hanging from it. Although some proclamation or advertisement could have been hung here, what the viewer doesn’t know is that this tree sits within the property line of LentSpace and as such, is a private tree. The tree is obviously not aware of this boundary and simply grows to and beyond. And it is at this moment, wherein a line intersects a point that You Know rests like a symbolic gold spike ceremoniously placed to signal the end of a building project…
