kagablog

Influenced by Tacita Dean’s An Aside, a travelling group exhibition curated by the British artist, Julia Rosa Clark’s Sing into my mouth displayed what might be described charitably as a lightness of curatorial touch that was present throughout the entire exhibition. Devoid of accompanying notes, or ‘informative’ panels of text, spectators could meander throughout the WHATIFTHEWORLD GALLERY weaving their own connections between, and frameworks around, the objects of the exhibit. Conversely, the accompanying Initial proposal notes (12 september 2008) provided a compelling narrative of chance and missed encounters that encompassed and exceeded the boundaries of the physical exhibition. In these Initial proposal notes (12 september 2008) Clark writes of her dilettante approach as ‘a kind of mismatch or a failure to correspond: could this be the inability to communicate (even through artworks).’ Thus a web of connections fortuitously encompasses many of the themes of the exhibition — self-portrait, landscape, object and journey, nepotism.

This play of object and intervention found its apotheosis in the most outstanding piece of the show, the transfixing Record (2001) video by Ed Young of a pristinely endless loop, the needle magically lifting and dropping onto the spinning vinyl to play Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror “…I’m starting with the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways…” Part video and part meditation on medium, it was necessarily afforded its own large space in order to accommodate the outmoded equipment which formed not just the apparatus of the work but a constituent aspect of its subject. The visibility of this huge machine, its movement and its integral noise, emphasised the mechanical nature of the subject, the physicality of the machine required to project it and, by extension, explicitly pointed to its complement to complete the experience. That is to say, the whole exhibition could be read as selfportrait or at least an autobiographical retelling of a journey of discovery undertaken by Clark herself, as she points out in her introduction ‘I think of the mental sustenance and reflexivity one gets from viewing artworks, the memory of a work that stays, or the experience of living with artworks and how they change physically and in meaning over time.’ This is an exhibition where the trace of the artist/curator is insistently present in these connections but where there is also an aporia of space for the viewer to insert themselves and their own stories.

“I don’t think hierarchically, I like to think rhizomatically” Clark announced during the walkabout that closed the show and, when pressed by email as to whether she had actually ever read any Deleuze, responded “I have not read A Thousand Plateaus (do want to) but have read around both Deleuze and Guattari, and have been influenced by the trickle down effect of their ideas on other writings, artworks and projects that have interested me over the past seven years or so. So I would say that there is an important but oblique Deleuzian undertow to the way I work, but I am not responding to his work directly.” Indeed.

first published in art south africa vol 8 issue 1 spring 2009