WORDS FOR IRENE BRIANT

OPENING REMARKS AT IRENE BRIANT'S COLLECTED PIECES, BETT GALLERY, HOBART, 19 APRIL 2013

A series of moments:
In Fullers Bookshop, the Hobart one, the day before I am to meet Irene Briant and view the work in progress for this exhibition;
Bookshelves - books shelved under 'Art', 'Architecture', 'Design'. I notice a number of books dealing with objects, collecting, finding, assembling - clearly a trend, perhaps 'post-archive;;
I pick up Orhan Pamuk's The innocence of objects. As an object it is, itself, beautiful. But I must resist the purchase ... it is impossible to own every book with'object' (noun, singular or plural) in the title.
I leave the shop.
Irene's dining room, the next day. We speculate, somewhat ruefully, on keep ahead, rather than simply abreast, of trends such as 'objects'. I mention Pamuk's book.
In the short essay I have written to accompany this exhibition I start with the next 'moment'Bett Gallery
Irene produces, not a rabbit from a hat but within the same applomb, a copy of Pamuk's The innocence of objects, and puts it on the table.

With that gesture, when I look at these works, these Collected pieces, I can now only do so through some reference to Pamuk's earlier, related, novel, The Museum of Innocence. [I may need to explain here that Orhan Pamuk has created, in Istanbul, the Museum of Innocence, which makes material the narrative of a novel of the same name, which tells of the collecting of pieces for this museum, those which are catalogued in a second book, The innocence of objects. This complexity of dealing with the parallel realms of the museum and its external realities, the fictions that can be established in the assembling of objects from everyday life is something I find often here, in these collected pieces]

Each object, each assemblage, is a series of moments. What I want to do now is present a few extracts from Pamuk's novel (short extracts, given the book is over 700 pages!). What I require [from the listener/reader] is that you consider Pamuk's words in their relationship to Irene Briant's own beautiful narratives.

So, to begin again, another series of moments:
My life has taught me that remembering Time -- that line connecting all the moments that Aristotle called the present -- is for most of us a rather painful business. When  we try to conjure up the line connecting these moments ... the line connecting all the objects that carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes to an end, and to contemplate death. As we get older and come to the painful realisation that this line per se has no real meaning -- a snese that comes to us cumulatively in intimations we struggle to ignore -- we are brought to sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the"present" can bring us enough happiness to last a century.  (Pamuk, p.397)

In the light of the moon, each and every thing tucked into the shadows, as if part of the empty space, seemed to point to an indivisible moment, akin to Aristotle's indivisible atoms. I realised then that just as the line joining together Aristotle's moments was Time, so, too the line joining together these objects would be a storyu. In other words, a writer might undertake to write the catalog in the same form he might write a novel. (Pamuk pp.704-5)

After all, isn't the purpose of a novel, or a museum, for that  matter, to relate our memories with such sincerityas to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?  (Pamuk p.463)

 It is difficult not to reduce this consideration of objects into textual moments or aphorisms: thus eah element must be taken in, with care. Pamuk again:
The past is preserved within objects as souls are kept in their earthen bodies, and in that awareness I found a consolding beauty that bound me to life. (Pamuk p.686)

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory ... (Pamuk p.445)

And just when you are lulled into the pre-transcendent warmth of museumification, you get this:
Everything that was expressed, everything that was to be understood, though, was deeply rooted in an ambiguity we found entrancing. (Pamuk p.477)

All of a sudden, it's obsessive, addictive, perhaps (given the content of the novel) sexually intriguing. And then an expression almost melancholic:
I realised that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.  (Pamuk p.415)

A little moment of self-indulgence, perhaps: Pamuk - or his protagonist, Kemal- are capable of that.

I think again about the place of the artist for How do we move from the individual object to the collection as a totality? Indeed, Pamuk requests that:
All the objects in my museum -- and with them, my entire story -- can be seen a the same time from any perspective, [so] visitors will lose all sense of Time. This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time. (Pamuk pp.712-13)

A final moment, the conclusion of these words, and of the catalog essay:
'Irene Briant's Collected pieces is about objects rather than illusions. Each moment is caught in an arrangement that obeys a temporal rule, where a concern for placement precedes an intuitive sequencing of each narrative. Like time, each piece has its own texture, dimensions, extraordinariness .. and we want to hold it in our hands.'

TROVE

I've been playing around in Trove, the National Library on-line document "place",  a site of books and newspapers and images, from all over Australia, now delightfully accessible without having to battle brittle microfilm in creaky machines in the library itself. It is an addictive site, an archaeology dig in which you can assemble lists and tags. Totally engrossing for the researcher/editor, particularly so for a proscrastinator, it is possible to spend hours correcting transcriptions from blurred and wrinkled newspapers from across the country. As you correct, you are lulled into the language of the time and place and the idiom of the press: early 20th century  court reports from Cairns and coastal shipping from Cooktown, the "social pages" of post WW2 Sydney.
Today I found in Trove a site I had been looking for in other, more traditional, places (the dreaded microfilm, bound copies of newspapers, card indexes, people's memories and so on) for some time. I had been told that I had the wrong city: all I knew was that the place was named "Eltham" and most of those I spoke too pointed me gently towards Melbourne. But there it was, on the web, a guest house in Hobart, Tasmania, c.1910, run by a woman who once gave a gun to a gentleman astronomer on his way to Port Davey... but that's another story. For me, this place is now real, even though Google Street View has proved its 41 rooms, tennis courts and extensive gardens have given way to a parking lot and a block of offices.
Trove can be found at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/

MAPS WITH A MEMORY (OR TWO)

Maps both topographic and cadastral have always held a fascination for their layering of representations of physical forms with the immateriality of social and political experience. Rather than stemming the flow of memory, or correcting its creative excesses, maps open up longer histories, alternative narratives, secret files.  Parish maps and first grants, road alienations, accretions and erosions, rights of way, subdivisions that existed only on paper, streets that ignored the boggy or precipitous nature of the landscape they appeared to cross, were the things of cadastre. Combined with aerial photography, the satellite data from SPOT and Landsat, and now the voyeuristic probing of Google, mapping generates pasts and futures for otherwise familiar –and sometimes familial – places. As Jay Arthur has written:

A map marks a relationship between the cartographic and a landscape that includes intention, memory, experience, imagination, emotion and the influence of other relationships. To map a place is to be able to hold the place in the mind.

Here naming commemorates past ownerships, formalises old relationships, signifies influence and community standing. Cadastre - the overlaying law of word, line and symbol provides '...an intersection of language and place'.

It is, of course, possible to read the landscape itself (or, as happens here, the landscape as imaged) - in which case each reader extracts the communicating language of their own discourse from what stretches in front of them or lies beneath them: the body of the land: 

Arthur, Jay 2003, The default country: a lexical cartography of twentieth century Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2