Private Dealer
"Private Dealer - EIDIA Is their current environment an installation, an antique shop, or what? Private Dealer--a one-year work in progress that confounds the categories, is a maverick materialization of an eccentric concept. The duo know as EIDIA, whose projects deal with forms of authorship other than art..."
- Kim Levin, the Village Voice April 18, 1995
Private Dealer was situated at 80 East 11
Street in Room 223, New York City, from September 1994
until September 1996. From 1966 to 1968 Marcel Duchamp
had a secret studio in 80 East 11th Street. There he completed
Etant donnés: 1o la chute d’eau 2o Le gaz d’ éclaireage—his last
artwork. Eidia acted in the capacity of proprietors/archivists
of an ‘antique shop’. Private Dealer illustrated the conceptual
ideal of ‘heimat’ (home), an outward manifestation of the inner
attitude toward the place where you are living or the place where
you were bornand, for one reason or another, you have left or
had to leave. Issues of domestic life, habitat and the rituals of
daily routine continue to be the focus of their installations. The
artists employ the ‘antique shop’ framework as a metaphorical
multimedia installation, wherein the multiplicity of the “objets
d’art” on display parody and signify the post-modern aesthetic
preoccupation with multiples and appropriation of the past.
Private Dealer is a place in which there is no separation between
the past and present and its artifice. Salons were hosted weekly
on Friday evenings during the run of the show. (See also Dog
Log, a conversation with the whippet B-Boy, December 14,1994,
Eidia House Archive.)
