Output details

Speech Acts

A series of telephone call centre works presented as Young's first museum solo show in the United States. The museum visitor, upon picking up each phone, becomes both a listener and a performer, in dialogue with live agents scripted and trained by the artist.

Speech Acts, Young’s first solo show in a US museum, centred on a series of telephone-based artworks linked to a local call-centre. Through phone receivers in the gallery, viewers were connected to any of seven works featuring live agents, prerecorded information, call waiting, and menu options. For example, Welcome to the Museum (2009) played on the typical automatic answerphone used by any large museum, with the caller instead connected to live staff working at ‘departments’ in a labyrinthine fictional institution. By contrast, Follow the Protest (2009), used a familiar call-centre menu to offer audio recorded by Young at London’s infamous G20 protests featuring protestors, interviews with bankers and organisers, and the many sounds of the protest. The piece dialectically contrasts the architecture and aural experience of today’s typical ‘commercial’ phone call with a record of the ‘liveness’ of direct action protest.

Young is unique in working with telephone call-centres to create works of art. These works develop the discourse around participation in art, the increasing commodification and globalisation of culture, the relationship between performance and technology, real and virtual space, and the identity of digital art which typically has been viewed as computer-based rather than involving telephonic systems.

Works from Speech Acts were subsequently featured in solo exhibitions at Eastside Projects (Birmingham, 2010 and tour to Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough) and group exhibitions: “Commentary”, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 2009, World as Stage, nbk, Berlin, 2009. Conferences/public lectures include Photoworks, Brighton, 2011; MoMA, New York, 2011, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010. Publications include Carey Young: Subject to Contract, monograph, pub. Migros Museum/JRP Ringier (2013); Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Inside Job: Julia Bryan-Wilson on the art of Carey Young,” Artforum October 2010, pp. 240-247; The World as Stage, Neue Berliner Kunstverein/ Walter Konig. 2010, Katz, Miriam. “Carey Young: 500 Words,” Artforum (online) 1.5.2009