Gorge, 2016
Baking tins, copper coated steel rings, projected video (dimensions variable)
190cm x 110cm x 110cm and 35cm x 235cm x 85cm
It is worth Michelle considering how much is too much
Andrew Bracey (Artist and Head of Masters in Fine Art). Assessment feedback, Nov 2016.
In the article ‘Dying with nothing to say’, American writer and journalist Katie Roiphe reflects upon the sudden death of her father, recounting how, there ‘was no preparation’ and ‘no last conversations’, which led to her creating a ‘longing for a last conversation’, though she was unsure what was left for either of them to say.
Roiphe describes the sense of being unable to translate or impart the inexpressible something longed for, as being driven by wanting to ‘make a proper ending out of pointless loss’. Defining ‘lingering questions’ that longing brings, as being ‘too big for answers’, she describes this loss as being left ‘messy, unresolved, dangling’, with ‘no answer that will satisfy or salve’.[1]
Reflecting on the abrupt ending to Roiphe’s relationship with her father as an unfinished story that has been denied the chance of an acceptable ending, could the process of writing and re-writing support, if not perpetuate an inescapable and unsettled place for thought, so that the unobtainable story can live-on? In ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’, Susan Stewart describes objects of longing as ‘souvenirs of mortality’ that authenticate longing through visually exteriorizing interior narratives. Defining an incessant consumption to collect objects as an ‘open-ended’ narrative that can be ‘reframed’ by rearranging collections, Stewart describes the ‘interplay’ between the control of ‘organization and the chaos of infinity’, as staging ‘anticipation’, which temporarily fills the emptiness caused by longing.[2]
Stewart relates to the American-Italian Deconstructionist, Literary Critic, and Philosophical Critic, Eugenio Donato’s ‘The Museums Furnace’, in which, he refers to the spatial juxtapositions that are staged between objects as having the ability to speak to the ‘non-linguistic’ universe experienced by the emptiness of longing. playout a fantasy, alongside the reality of objects as things in themselves, as representational by ‘ of fragments’ to form a fictional whole, as the drive to create ‘a representational understanding of the world’. Defending the productive nature of a collector as being driven by ‘self-motivation’ and ‘self-realization’, through the reinvention of objects and their significant relationships, Stewart refers to Marx’s account of the fetish to describe the collector as ‘a producer of meaning’ and presenting ‘a metaphor for production not as the earned but as the captured’, where by, the object and the collection form a ‘magic[al] cycle of self-referential exchange’, through the authors ‘mode of its production’, achieved through ‘arrangement’, which forms a ‘collective identity’.[3]
Stewart relates to the Lacanian theory of ‘jouissance’ and his reference to this term as ‘the sense in which the body experiences itself’, defining this term as capturing ‘the nature of tension’, she recounts how Lacan related to this ‘force’ as being driven beyond pleasure, through the ‘impossibility of satisfaction’, where desire is ‘exclusive[ly] but intimately connected’ through a form of ‘confession’ and ‘pursuit’, which could be considered as a mental antagonism that lay between the poles of expectation and actualization of fulfilling a desire or fantasy.[4]
[1] Katie Roiphe. Dying with nothing to say. Online Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/opinion/sunday/dying-with-nothing-to-say.html?_r=0. 2016. Source cited: 5th May 2016
[2] Susan Stewart. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N.C. London: Duke University Press. 1993. p147-157
[3] IBID., p151-161
[4] IBID., p162-167