Prep Materials at Art in General: Carla Herrera-Prats

With the exception of a small group of economists currently evaluating the cultural worth of art objects by the number of times they’ve been reproduced in text books, most people will agree standardized methods of evaluation in the field of fine art have little merit. Not only does art use a different set of problem solving skills to determine value, but it doesn’t really lend itself to non-ironic multiple choice questionnaires.

That said, it’s not much of a surprise that Carla Herrera-Prats’s exhibition Prep Materials at Art in General questions the SATs and the technology that reads and scores the all-important college placement test (ETS). Using crude technology for her show, while providing a 14-page SAT-style pamphlet with no answer key, goes a long way in establishing that criticality.

As far as exhibitions go, Prep Materials isn’t the most aesthetically exciting collection of objects I’ve seen, but then documentation of scoring machine proposals, equipment and library storage facilities never promised that anyway. Along side these photographs, a large black-and-white wall drawing of chairs is situated at the back end of the gallery, and a slide show, mostly displaying decorated SAT tests, runs at the front, with adjacent red text reading the empty homily, “Everything measured is everything done”.

Johnson, Paddy. “Prep Materials at Art in General” Carla Herrera-Pratts" The L Magazine: January 7-21, 2009