Dear Claudia, Carolyn, Anna, Aline, Amanda and Chris,
Chris has asked me to compose a press release and essay for your group exhibition later this year at the Blyth Gallery. I am interested in building upon his suggested starting point of T.S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land'. The title ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, which was Eliot’s provisional title (drawn from an episode in Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend where Betty Higden praises her son’s ability to read out the newspaper in a variety of voices) proposes an unusually self-reflexive exhibition. The show’s proposed subject is, in effect, its own curatorial open-endedness and visual polyphony.
And so I have in mind an essay that explores the concepts of translation, fragmentation, and plurality of voices (or heteroglossia) that underpin Eliot’s poem, and the way in which the works in this exhibition might be said to reflect and reinterpret them, both individually and collectively. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Tate Triennial last year proposed the arrival of the ‘Altermodern’ era in art – defined by manifold (and sometimes contradictory) questions of transition, discontinuity, internationalism, a sense of contingency, and experimentalism. Bourriaud's conception of a new artistic epoch arguably reaches back to and reinterprets a number of the key tenets of Modernism. I am interested in the possibility of extending and playing out Bourriaud's approach, by considering your works and the exhibition as a whole in terms of Modernism and its legacy.
This is all so far very provisional; obviously it's vital for me to discover as much as possible about your work before I think further about the direction of this essay. If possible, it would be great to hear about what you intend to show in the exhibition. If you have jpegs that you could email to me this would be very useful. Please also direct me towards any websites that contain examples of your work. I realise that Chris proposed 'The Waste Land' as a theoretical starting point rather than as a prescriptive 'theme'; but I’d be interested to know what you think about using the poem to anchor the essay and the exhibition, and how - if at all - your work relates to it.
Please feel free either to respond via the blog or to contact me directly at james.cahill@hotmail.com
I very much look forward to discussing this with you all further!
James
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Thanks James for this. I really like the idea of using the poem to underpin your essay and how we frame the exhibition.
ReplyDeleteI haven't images of work I intend to show yet, but you can see some fairly recent work here
www.annachapman.co.uk
One line that has stuck in my head is 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'. Pieces of things providing strength and meaning.
Interesting you should mention Bourriaud's 'Altermodern'. It was an exhibition I gave a lot of thought to. I had a few problems with the theory side of it. I figured postcolonial thinkers were still an important force and couldn't be so easily supplanted by this new movement; that there was still marginalisation and that not everybody had the freedom to move about geographically - although daydreaming is still open to everyone. However, it stayed with me and although I hate the term altermodern and realise it won't and could never catch on I think Bourriaud's theories were at the back of my mind while thinking of a curatorial angle for this show.
ReplyDeleteAnna, I absolutely love your sense of space and colour. Your use of what already exists. I 'get' you at a gut level. When I see those street stones covered in brightly coloured chalk - suggesting some childish game or secret code I am not privy to - I feel excited by the open-endedness. There is so much hidden in your work. It seems you have a propensity to communicate but then refuse to connect, refuse to 'say' anything. Even when you do create a phrase that reads grammatically like LOW HUM WITH INTERMITTANT CLICKS it seems we're being directed to something off the radar, beyond comprehension. Your work seems like a slow secretion, seeping through from a forgotten time or perhaps a sign of things to come...and yet, to reiterate, I 'get' it...perhaps in the way I 'get' The Waste Land.
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