| Pat Long | Trace Revealed |
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Trace Revealed | Catalogue Text for Exhibition by Pat Long. Written by Adrienne Ranson. a personal trace I know I have already recognised the unmistakable shape and form of a school desk, reacting instinctively to how warm and gold is the wood, how curious are the arcs, jags and stains buried in its flesh. Yet it is the arousal of memories of sitting at a desk such as this that require the greatest attention. Nothing specific, just the familiarity with inconsequential activities such as the addition of my initials beside or over others' in moments of boredom, or the absent mindedly running my pen along grooves and slashes in the wood, a form of doodling I engaged in sometimes, while paying attention to the teaching and other times not, and a whole host of other diffuse memories ad sensations that heretofore were of no consequence. Eventually I find it is the memory triggered by the over sweet smell, over ripe and all but eaten apple core that is most insistent. That smell together with those of old lunches seemed to infect my school books, my school bag, as well as the desk, and continued to linger long after they had been thrown in the rubbish. It is the most intimate and strangely profound of experiences I encounter upon engaging with Pat Long's reconfiguration of the insides and outsides of a child's school desk. Especially when I cannot, in its present resin-encased form, actually smell anything remotely resembling an apple core. Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas would call this special territory of remembering a psychic state akin to dreaming, what he terms self experience (cited by Woodward 1997 p.13). This process of self experience encountered in the trace of memory as well as the material trace of the absent voices of school children is integral to reading the current work by Long. the present and absent trace That Long surrounds herself here with the detritus of bygone classrooms and subsequently transforms these objects, clearly serves to indicate an artist who is not only dwelling on where she has been by reconfiguring past reminiscence into a present space, but one for whom the process of transformation is the heart and life-blood of her art making. Long's choice of objects are negotiated through their conditions and descriptions. They are aesthetically compelling in their presence and a commemoration to the traces of ordinary and unremarkable acts in the classroom. By giving information without instruction Long thrusts the viewer back upon their own experience of the commonplace. Thus anonymous children and classroom activities signified by the unidentified mark are then transformed into art objects for present consumption. Effectively these objects become the trace of absent voices given precedence in the present. At the same time theirs is an aesthetic that evokes both the private and shared experiences of all those of us who have sat and doodled, wrote messages, spilt ink or simply wantonly embedded our boredom and frustration, our desires and aversions into the all too sympathetic surface of a wooden desk. Our past experiences recalled into the present are not only commemorative affects and relations for the self, but also generative acts of memory that integrate the opposing forces of presence and absence into one contiguous experience. tracing the banal with the sublime By reconfiguring the trace Long leaves her dialogues open to continual thought and response. Reconfiguring objects, in this instance retracing the trace in new and different manners, imbues the ensuing object with what art critic Rosalind Krauss calls an "expanded field" of meaning (cited in Postiglione, 2002, online). Like the artist Doris Salcedo's evocative recontextualising of objects (cited in Barson, 2004, p.2), Long's work is not a meaning tied to story-telling and metaphor. Nor meaning bound by a symbolic economy of art historical models gleaned from art movements of the West. Rather the metamorphosis created by Long takes these objects elsewhere. The object reconfigured is a transformation of thought and material aligned with the infinitely malleable and diverse practices currently arising from the new and different technologies available to art makers today. Long accesses those multitudes of children whose presence was recorded in the scrapings, rubbings, stainings and leavings within and upon the school desk as the base material for her transformations. She transforms and elevates this detritus into an affective and commemorative event. Like the treasured findings on an archaeological dig proudly displayed in a museum, the utter banality of the commonplace schoolroom artefact are made precious and exalted in the gallery space. And thus, like the alchemist, Long recreates the base into the sublime. To compound this experience further is the sudden discovery that the elevation of this refuse is in actuality not what we think it is. An authenticated history embedded in the everyday artefact resonates with a palpable truth. However if that materiality is exposed as counterfeit, how does that affect our memories as aroused through supposed recognition and generative consciousness? By hanging a school desk lid on a wall the everyday is exalted, made more precious. The authorless marks and leavings, as well as the affects and relations to the diffuse yet intimate encounters with memory are revisited in a manner that turns rubbish into treasure. Yet, if these real artefacts are simulated the mind is surprised out of its habitual movement from past to present, from base to sublime, and propelled onto a trajectory that intensifies the movement elsewhere. It is a manner in which the trace is once again transformed in a twist of experience articulating a space of ambiguity, uncertainty; a manner in which the re-activated trace of self experience can be re-experienced indefinitely in new and different ways. References: Barson, Tanya. Curator. (2004). 'Unland'. The Place of Testimony. Tate Papers Spring. Available:www.tate.org.uk/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/unland_pap Krauss, Rosalind. Reprinted. (1983). Sculpture in the Expanded Field. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Bay Press; Seattle Woodward, Kathleen. (1997). Telling Stories: Aging, Reminiscence, and the Life Review. Occasional Papers of the Doreen B. Townsend Centre for the Humanities, no 9. Berkeley: Hunza Graphics. |