The point of departure for this work is a singular historical story, concerning the enigma that surrounds the UCC Statue of Queen Victoria and it’s entanglement with figures and events, both public and private. The collection attacks the metaphors, symbols, and representations that make up this relationship, replacing them with new meanings and protocols: bureaucracy becomes a form of comedy, silence becomes a type of knowledge, domesticity becomes a place of pathology, inefficiency becomes a necessary vocation, and delinquency becomes an everyday routine. This archive shows a history that is more a tangential tumour, one of an everyday transient writing that never acquires the status of an oeuvre, or is immediately lost: an analysis of sub-literatures, reviews and newspapers, temporary successes, anonymous authors - reducing art to documentation, if not just pure idea. It does not imply the search for a beginning nor relate analysis to a geological excavation, but rather designates the general theme of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its existence. It is nothing more than a rewriting: that is, in the preserved form of exteriority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written.
Studio, Elbana House, Dublin.
Photographs courtesy of the Artist and UCC Archives
18/12/14
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