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Hernandez + Dayna Offenbacher, UABDS 2021STORE contemporary, Reimagined as Play Station, 2024April Ball as Maya Pearlman, Monaco 2014Jeff Wall, reimaged 2024Spatial Rhythm And Other Situations, 2024
#0000FF. Blue. Not just any blue. The blue. If you’ve never encountered this hex code, then I ask: do you even exist? Is there meaning without blue? Are you merely a simulacrum of your former self, adrift in the endless sea of RGB values, yearning for the sharp clarity of a single hexadecimal existence? Perhaps, perhaps not. But consider this: Felix González-Torres would have had thoughts on #0000FF, that much we know. Blue—his blue, your blue, our blue—speaks in a tongue we cannot comprehend, yet we try. Always, we try.Let us begin with the most basic observation: blue is a color, yes, but not just any color. #0000FF is the purity of blue, stripped of all narrative baggage. It is not melancholy, nor is it serene. It’s just… there. It sits, a static representation of non-being in a world desperate for meaning. Felix González-Torres might say it’s a mirror—reflecting only what you bring to it, the fragmented remnants of your own sense of self. But is that what blue is? Or does it ask us to question the very notion of self in the first placeWhen you look at #0000FF, you are confronted by the nothingness of its saturation, a void that refuses to acknowledge the subjective experience of the viewer. This is not blue in the way we think of blue. This is the blue that Felix González-Torres sought to create in his work—an infinite, open-ended process that evokes presence and absence simultaneously. His iconic candy spills were not just about the candies themselves; they were about the process of engagement, the act of taking and leaving. They existed not in isolation, but as an ongoing exchange between the object and the viewer, between presence and disappearance. In this sense, #0000FF is not simply a color. It is an ongoing dance, a ritual where the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, dissolve in the digBeer Can Still Life, 2022ital ether.BUT! let's not pretend that #0000FF is some kind of singular, transcendent truth. No. To engage with it is to confront a language that defies interpretation. When we place it in the context of postmodern theory, we find that it resists semiotic closure. Roland Barthes would scoff at the idea that #0000FF could have any definitive meaning. "The death of the author" indeed. What meaning could there possibly be in a hex code, a mere string of characters? Is it possible to attach a cultural or political weight to this pure shade of blue, this unmediated representation of color? Perhaps it is, but to do so would be to lose sight of the fact that #0000FF cannot be owned or contained—not in the same way Félix González-Torres’ candy or his stacks of paper could be owned. And yet, here we are, assigning it value, meaning, significance, as though it were a commodity in the marketplace of ideas. Blue, in this case, becomes both commodity and nothing.
Content/Content THE MUSICAL!
Societaetstheater Dresden / Festspielhaus Hellerau / Caroline Beach
Library
ContentContent is a performance piece born out of millennial terror and decades of friendship. Musicals, talk shows, TedTalks, memes and cartoons come together in a celebration and elegy of unavoidable media.
Joseph Hernandez and Caroline Beach are the 90s kids, the experts and victims of this cultural circus. They follow a clown through the post 2008 financial collapse through a maze of suburbian nostalgia, dead malls, and formal tomfoolery. They invite us all to play the jester in order to reverse engineer our own humanity.
Co-produced by Societaetstheater DresdenSupported by Prozessförderung Fonds Darstellende Künste
thanks to Go Plastic Company for the additional support
concept, choreography, performance, Music: Caroline Beach and Joseph Hernandez
Stage and Costume: Amelie Sabbagh and Jinx Rüger
video art: Lucie Freynhagen, with contributions from Eva Jaekel, Clemens Reinicke, Nelli Lorenson, Markus Stein, and others
Project Manager: Ana Dordevic