Gorge: An unmountain, 2016 and Moving Mountains: 447 x consciously uncoupled, 2018
Baking tins, copper coated steel rings and projected video
190cm x 110cm x 110cm, 35cm x 235cm x 85cm, and 2min 30sec video
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 states 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 exteriorising interior narratives. Defining an incessant consumption to collect objects as an ‘open-ended’ narrative that can be ‘reframed’ through collections that are rearranged, Stewart describes the ‘interplay’ between the control of ‘organisation and the chaos of infinity’, as staging ‘anticipation’, which temporarily fills the emptiness caused by longing.[2]
Stewart makes reference to the following three sources to delve deeper into the drive and perseverance behind the relentless pursuit of longing:
- Eugenio Donato’s ‘The Museums Furnace’, in which, she refers to the experience of emptiness as being explored through spatial juxtapositions that are staged between objects, which have the ability to speak to the ‘non-linguistic’ universe.[3]
- Karl Marx’s philosophy on the fetish, wherein, she refers to the collector as ‘a producer of meaning’ who presents ‘a metaphor for production not as the earned but as the captured’, through a ‘magic cycle of self-referential exchange’ achieved through ‘arrangement’ and ‘collective identity’.[4]
- Jacques Lacan’s theory of ‘jouissance’, in which, she refers to a ‘force’ that is being driven beyond pleasure, through the ‘impossibility of satisfaction’ and an antagonistic ‘pursuit’ of a ‘confession’, that lay between the poles of expectation and the actualisation of fulfilling a desire or fantasy.[5]
Ultimately, Stewart acknowledges the ‘self-motivation’ of collectors who are driven by a need to fulfil a fantasy through the reinvention of fragments into a fictional whole, defining how significant relationships can be played-out and an understanding of the world can be observed through such forms of representation.
[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. p147-167
[3] IBID.
[4] IBID.
[5] IBID.