| It begins with a half-memory of a refrain you could not forget. But then again, you cannot be certain how it came to be lodged within the recesses of your memory. As if you had always known it, despite not knowing where you had come upon it. Or as if someone with whom you have shared the time of day had passed it along, consciously or otherwise, as she sang to herself. (She could never get it out of her head, and sang to herself to fill the gaps or silences.)You have never known its source. In many ways, the precision of reference or origin neither occurs nor matters. |  |
Stay Forever and Ever and Ever- Andrew Renton, Curator,South London Gallery
It begins with a half-memory of a refrain you could not forget. But then again, you cannot be certain how it came to be lodged within the recesses of your memory. As if you had always known it, despite not knowing where you had come upon it. Or as if someone with whom you have shared the time of day had passed it along, consciously or otherwise, as she sang to herself. (She could never get it out of her head, and sang to herself to fill the gaps or silences.)
You have never known its source. In many ways, the precision of reference or origin neither occurs nor matters. The memory is never stable, as you understand that the refrain can never be separated from the first, or the last time you heard it. It gathers these experiences to itself to become like a collective memory that, in turn, redistributes the notion, refrain or fragment.
Never quite out of your head, a collective memory that, in turn, becomes the site of something collectively owned. Or, by the same token, ownerless. Something that cannot be signed or specified. A refrain, theme idea or object that is in constant circulation, pausing only to mark its place, before moving on and gathering histories in its wake. Whose object? In whose name? (The aesthetic, then, as collective responsibility.)
In the end, it will have been your song, in that you make it your own. It becomes available to you, temporarily. Over time, you forget and embellish in equal measure. It would seem to carry with it much of your own stories. An almost intolerable burden. More than you dare to think about. That object can never detach itself from your first encounter and it anticipates a last intervention you cannot imagine, negotiating for itself a form of revival, where it renews itself beyond your control. You can imagine forgetting no longer.
And so, in the end, we come to the object with a precondition of longing, defined in terms of where we are not—what or whom we miss.
The object exudes the semblance of repetition, but this is a deceptive illusion born from tricks played in a flawed will to remember. A discrepancy between a reconstituted past and the touch of the present. There is rarely repetition these days, but rather you mark the near miss through observing fractional difference and discrepancy.
This discrepancy only occurs through a formal simultaneity. The configuration of objects is open, unencumbered, without separation. The sightlines of the configuration will always suggest a blurring in the eye, and your instinct is to draw distinctions through touch and the passage from one object to another. But even here, where one object begins and where another achieves formal closure is kept inconclusive. Objects on their way, temporarily at rest, where eye and the idea of touch, would seek to give the illusion of their staying put forever. Or might this always be the fanciful wish when you bring such disparate objects together?
It has to have something to do with touch, even if you are admonished in these circumstances to keep your distance. You assess the object’s capacity to speak to or for you through the eye’s ability to gauge mass and substance. You can get a feel of the thing, without touching. That is, you know the object through the idea of touch that is confirmed to you through a distant if intense gaze. And, in turn, you are touched by the object.
(Perhaps it touches the eyes, you think to yourself.)
The eye and hand engage to define the object before you. The touch of an object signals, for you, the way you might read for its histories. But the touch is always what is lacking in your evaluation. The object literally untouchable; your hand touching nothing but itself.
Nevertheless, you grow aware, from your detached perspective, of a return of the hand, or of its residual effects, within the work itself. This is not so much manual application or working through of the materiality of the object, but the hand’s engagement with its presence, here, now. The hand arranges, rearranges. With some hesitation, the hand places, replaces. The object is not so much concerned with its own transparency of making (although that is a dominant feature) but rather its ability to retain objecthood, almost despite the unforeseen circumstances in which it finds itself.
The object is always somehow familiar. You recognize it, but in some peculiar inversion it knows you also. As if it had anticipated you long before it found its place here. A familiarity of form that you cannot place. The when or where of that first/last encounter.
Instead the object comes to you as some sort of revision or supplement or synecdoche. Your imperfect memory will always suggest an act of removal, so too it will embellish and rework the original, if such a term might still be applied in relation to it, to the point of eradicating all trace.
(You realize, in the end, to your relief, that there is no original, but always a series of sources that revisit each other to such a degree of circularity that you cannot mark where this all began. Not one moment or object. Nothing you might single out for formal contemplation.)
A transformation, then, to such a degree that, despite overt familiarity, you could not rely on your description of how it might have been or might have appeared at any other time than at this instant.
And a gaze that craves touch for verification that has you constantly readjusting to the light.
You are driven by this desire for the object, even as it comes to represent a sense of loss. You position yourself in relation to the object in terms of a desire or drive towards it. Desire would appear to consolidate the object, temporarily, into an object worthy of contemplation. And while this desiring gaze is effective in its assessment of the materiality of the object, it cannot stabilize your take on it.
Because the object is never stable enough. Such an object would become somehow passive and invisible, too burdened by its mass. The object you crave forces you to reassess it in phenomenological terms. (Responsibility through an embodied gaze.) You move your body in and out of the light.
“Stay Forever and Ever and Ever,” then, configures the object within its own histories and those of other objects. It begins and ends with an uncertainty in relation to the status of that object. You do not know where or how to look. The very object you seek is obstructed by another that stands in its path. No whole take on the scene, your eye tries to absorb it all, but it is a gaze destined to be interrupted. You move your body in and out of its way.
The elusive object, then, always on the verge of disappearing before your eyes, is the one you think you remember. Always a muted form of memory, signaling a lack or loss. You come to realize that the object of contemplation, the one before you, here, now, is always an object of nostalgia. It is one you remember or mourn, even as you gaze upon it.
Nostalgia, here, should not be understood only in terms of retrospection, but should be seen almost at the moment of encounter. Nostalgia imprints upon the retina (that “touched” eye) with only a fractional delay from an instantaneous present. You sense something resembling nostalgia even at a first encounter. By the time you realize just what it is you are gazing upon, it has lodged itself within a past. Even as you gaze upon it, here, now, the act of contemplation is simultaneously one of recollection.
