ARCHIVE CABINET – SCHREIBZEIT: WORDS BECOME THINGS WHEN WRITTEN INTO SPACE.

‘What is left to say about a work that seems to describe itself? What can be written about a work which, like almost no other, resists translation from an object of visual art into the medium of writing by making use of the latter itself.’

The second arrangement in the Vitrine series The Logic of Cobwebs focuses on the relationship between text, object and space. The work chosen uses text as a means to establish a marker, a desire to communicate beyond the object; it transcends not by description but through visual notation, leaving the object intact. These books are not only documents of exhibitions, nor solely catalogues of their component parts, but function like displays in their own right. Like exhibitions they are visually seductive, to be unravelled over time, and savoured slowly.
The artists wear the mantle of the writer in adopting various conventions such as poetry and fiction; like second-hand garments, these conventions, once foreign and ill-fitting, take on the wearer’s shape over time. Artists respond to the ability that text can be used as a tool to shape and form the world around us; a world of maps and lists, descriptions and meanderings, filled with twists, turns and references doubling back to the beginning.
‘How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?’ Asks the writer Julian Barnes in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot. The references reverberate between text and object, locating, affirming, and then erasing each in turn. Thus text has a resonance and spatial quality. It stands in relation to another, never quite taking its place. It fills the in-between, the gap between thing and experience and forever falls as a shadow of the visual. These publications provide persuasive evidence that artists who have used text as a pointer, a reference in their work, have not abandoned the object but have used it as a companion, a foil. The text then becomes a thinking along with the artwork itself, neither its reproduction nor illustration, but its equivalent.