THE ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS

25 September 2010

Gareth Long & Derek Sullivan's performance illustrating Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas

In an ongoing project (2009-10), Gareth Long & Derek Sullivan sit at variations of Long's sculpture Bouvard and Pecuchet's Invented Desk for Copying, illustrating and translating Flaubert's satirical Dictionary of Received Ideas (collected and published in 1911-3 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s). During this iteration in the UK, Long will be accompanied in his enterprise by curator Frances Loeffler.

The Dictionary, poking fun of the mores of French society during the Second French Empire, is believed to have been intended as an appendix to Flaubert's unfinished novel Bouvard et Pecuchet (published 1881) which recounts the fruitless quest for intellectual fulfillment of two Parisian copy-clerks. 

Long and Sullivan compile their collected illustrations in the bookwork, The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas.

(THE ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS 1)

Long's Bouvard and Pecuchet's Invented Desk For Copying (2007-2010) is a series of sculptures pulled from the unfinished pages of Flaubert's last novel and is described by the artist as "a modest monument to bourgeois cliche, friendship, amateurism and potential; the failures of total knowledge, authority, and books as a site of learning."

Following the performance, the desk will be used to display documents from the John Latham Archive as part of the exhibition 'Nights of Skoob Sadness' (25 Sept - 24 October 2010), along with modular seating and book-display units from the artist's A Place to Sit, A Place to Read, A Place to Sit and Read, first made for the exhibition 'Learn To Read Art: A History of Printed Matter' at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.

(THE ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS 3)
(THE ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS 4)
(THE ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS 5)
(THE ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS 6)

BIOGRAPHY

Gareth Long was born in Toronto, Canada. He is a conceptual artist who uses diverse media to explore translation, narrative, and medium-specificity. He holds a BA in visual studies and classical civilizations from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Yale University. He has had several solo exhibitions in Canada, at Oakville Galleries and Leo Kamen Gallery, and has shown at a variety of institutions including the Badischer Kunstverein, the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal, Artists Space, MoMA P.S. 1, Smack Mellon, and Kate Werble Gallery, NY.