User:Idssf/Eidia

EIDIA (pronounced idea) the artist team of Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf. The word EIDIA, invented by Lamarre (see EIDIA Manifesto, 1978) is derived from the ancient Greek word for idea (edios). The multivalent term EIDA is a hybrid, as it is intended to be an acronym, a hyperbole, and a manifesto as Lamarre and Wolf ascribe to the theory that Everything I Do Is Art. EIDIA finds art in literally everything—although the hyperbolic context of EIDIA cannot be understated.

In general EIDIA's art is conceived as "aesthetic research." They work privately and publicly on interdisciplinary / intermedia projects exploring the dynamics of art politics, social spaces, and the environment. Their "art" production presents its form through multimedia installations, photography, sculpture, video, and painting. "Finished" productions are not fully accomplished in the studio or gallery white cube, but rather in correlation with the society at large. The collaborative aspect of EIDIA's work utilizes a multiplicity of approaches—working on many different projects using broadly differing materials simultaneously.

Major Works
In 1983 Lamarre and Wolf began their collaboration with the video series The Chelsea Tapes while Lamarre was living at the Chelsea Hotel. Their next video FOOD SEX ART The Starving Artists' Cookbook (1986 - 1991) chronicled approximately 150 artists cooking, with an accompanying book of the same name that is in numerous museum collections. Their art documentary, the nea tapes (1995-2001), which is about the threatened dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts, is in the library collections of over 200 universities and colleges in the US. The film is based on the nea tapes archive,” as Lamarre and Wolf interviewed over 300 artists, curators, art professionals, politicians, and religious persons on their views on the status of American art in the late 1990s.

Lamarre and Wolf are co-executive directors of EIDIA House, a meeting place and forum for artists, scholars, poets, writers, architects and others interested in "idée force" as defined by Pierre Bourdieu—the arts as a instrument for positive social change. EIDIA's most recent project Plato's Cave (2009 to present), is based on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and inspired by Art & Project. Acting in a curatorial capacity EIDIA collaborates with invited artists to create an installation and limited edition for Plato’s Cave—a vaulted exhibition space inside the EIDIA House studio, which is located in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York.

From 2001 to 2007 EIDIA presented a performance / installation DECONSUMPTION, that modeled the idea of "more production of less." They performed the "sale" of a numerous and ever changing collection of found objects reclaimed as art for some 6,000 visitors at EIDIA House. With this piece their production of artistic matter shifted from creating works using new materials, to instead re-introducing, re-considering, re-shaping, recycling pre-existing items. DECONSUMPTION came to fruition just after completing WE APOLOGIZE (2001-2004), a limited edition artists book created to encapsulate all the previous “questionable” art projects by the EIDIA collaborative since its inception. A version of DECONSUMPTION was also presented in New Mexico at the Santa Fe Art Institute during an artist residency in 2006.

THE DECONSUMPTIONISTS is a roaming installation consisting of a 48-foot trailer that serves as a platform for EIDIA’s current dialogue and aesthetic research. The trailer houses 171 boxes of art production, including thirty years of collective works, ephemera, and correspondence.

EIDIA has intentionally worked for years outside the marketplace of art and the ubiquitous white cube gallery system.

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