The Index (after J.G. Ballard)

2008. Text insertion into book.

The Index (after J.G. Ballard) is a text work which is inserted into the end of a book. The piece indexes that book, but also offers an extra index, as if an unseen extra part of the book extends the book’s physical pages. Young’s ‘index’ invokes a story of a forgotten art historical movement - the Chronodynamicists - whose work and exploits weave together many infamous 20th and 21st century celebrities, events and intrigues, artworks and paranoid conspiracies.

From the artist’s statement on the work:

“The ‘Index’ charts the rise (and subsequent fall from critical favour) of a forgotten artistic movement, Chronodynamicism. Chronodynamicism seems worth recalling as an alternative trajectory within Modernism, an offshoot of Constructivism that linked Soviet ideals of the alliance of art and technological progress with concepts of non-linear time travel taken from ancient Mayan culture. That this movement has effectively been deleted from the annals of so-called ‘art history’, and even from the pages of the very book hosting this index, could be seen as a strange inversion of the movement’s manifesto, that an escape from time should be the utopian aim of art.”

To date, The Index has appeared within two publications: Has Man a Function in Universe? (curatorial/artist book by Gavin Wade, Bookworks, 2008, and Subject to Contract, Carey Young’s monograph, published by JRP Ringier (2013.)