Article for Winter, 2008, Brooklyn Arts Council newsletter

 

As curator of “The LACK of desire”, I thought the notions I brought to viewing the works on this theme set.  Nothing was further from the truth (a delusion).  The submitted artifacts of Lack elicited in me other, alternative responses.  I realized I, too, was a new viewer to the work, as you will be.  My constructs did not stand, as they shouldn’t. 

 

I submit these humble notes, somewhat indicating my response, in anticipation of yours.

 

 

I yearn to be in Place.

 

There is an Eden-like (post apple) naive essence to this yearning.  I want to look at the world with eyes that glance knowingly over our silly desires, our silly desires of romance, determined by a culture seething with sales of artifacts pulling us to want more, desire more and fill ourselves.  The sex we are sold, emboldened within the name of freedom.  I want it simple.  I doctor my appearance with stories, beguiling those around me while I wait for a moment of aloneness to view the easily remembered safe’s code in the locked drawer.  I demand the riches stored for my own use, to feed my self-sufficiency. I want to sneak my determinacy, revel in it off to the side.

 

I also repeatedly visit my mother after my father’s death. I want to share my riches, I believe, to feel some closeness, but wonder if that is it.  In any case, she continues to manifest the hysteria of her floating symptoms of disease and hunger for.  Does she miss him?  She misses his attention to her symptoms and this is her loneliness.  I end up taking her to more doctors.  I find myself as one of her symptoms.

 

So I look to images of art, artifacts produced by others that pull me in to the idea of Lack as a palpable entity.  Perhaps this is the drawer.  But there is an insidious side to this.  As curator I now want to interpret, feed my desire to denude others of their fantasies, be the interpellator of their frenzy.  I will be the arbiter of Lack.  I will monitor the safe. 

 

In the end I want to both be Marnie and Mark.

 

But this is not Place.  Our sense of Lack seems to be directly related to our developed disjunction with Place through the production of signs.  Artifacts are that remnant, but it is the object as sign that matters; our constant interpretation, our increasing generation of meaning.  As an example from the the exhibition, I suggest two revealers: Jill Magi and Heather Willems.  Jill takes the signage of “book” and its entire personal and historic backwash, and renders the pages out.  I feel the possibility, the palpable, unveiled absurdity of the filled page.  Heather Willems approaches from the other end.  She fills the page with “I love you” again and again and again, like the ads for sweaters and boots or the merchandising of religion and green.  What we figure is just lust is actually the signage of fetish in overload.

 

That is what I see this The Lack of Desire doing: helping to de-fetishize the constructed defective matrix around us.  But why do I feel the need to say “us”?  And what do I think is really there?  I guess I really just want to gaze with simplicity at my own fallibility, my silliness, my mortality and with ease accept that Place is just another fetish, seemingly there to take me from this.