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
