ARCHIVE CABINET – THE LOGIC OF COBWEBS
Curated by Nicola Oxley
‘I am interested in the passage between objects more than in the objects themselves’ writes the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. He refers to what lies in-between things, and, particularly, what things give rise to through a continuous movement and uncertainty.
The Logic of Cobwebs takes the form of a glass vitrine in the exhibition which displays a range of publications, artmatter, and multiples made by artists from the 1960s to the present. These documents, both original editions and facsimilies represent fortuitous finds and chance en¬counters, and are displayed accordingly. The modest proj¬ect does not attempt a history of transformations, passages and slippages; rather it groups the material into a number of categories to be displayed sequentially throughout the duration of the exhibition:
Idea•/•Instruction
Object•/•Display
Space•/•Environment
Action•/•Performance
‘Aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics – these matters of value, Wittgenstein agreed, lay in the realm of the unutterable. But it was natural and inevitable that men should speak of them, and much could be learned from the way in which people went about their foredoomed task of trying to say the unsayable. Moreover, it would not be clear where the boundary of sanctioned speech lay until an attempt had been made to cross it and that attempt had failed.’ (H.Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change) Hughes, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, argues for the necessity of the unutterable as a ‘failed’ project, sensing the need for an enterprise beyond language. The works, publications and other ephemera displayed here all util¬ise language, ranging from the seemingly utilitarian texts of information or instruction, to the concrete and poetic. And yet, these texts can be understood in partaking in the unsayable project of art and literature, suggested in the title borrowed from the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004), ‘The Logic of Cobwebs’. These structures are in¬deed governed by specific procedures and principles, yet for human beings, the term logic would seem misplaced; rather, cobwebs signify chiefly in the realm of metaphor, but as ragged markers of abandonment and temporality, a logic without rationale, an otherness.
Nicola Oxley
