archives Tell me the truth

Tell me the truth - am I still in the game ?

Matt Sheridan Smith

11.11 - 23.12.2011

The works in ‘‘Tell me the truth - am I still in the game?’’ oscillate between readymade kits, the wreckage of an elementary syntax, and visual alphabet. Objects collect injuries, accidents and cuts, producing narrative snags in which the outlines of four characters appear: Douglas Bader, celebrated Royal Air Force pilot and lower limb amputee; Ottavio Bottecchia, a Tour de France winning cyclist who died mysteriously by the roadside in Italy; Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, a figure of a widow at work, decapitating bottles of champagne; and a young American woman referred to only as “Katie”.

Together, the works attempt a sort of experimental portraiture. These portraits present themselves as so many still lifes, on hold, waiting for a performance that does not come. Playing on its perceptual and rhetorical limits, the exhibition, instead of combining signs, accumulates residues: textures, patterns frozen in repetition, solid and liquid elements that depict presence, absence and memory as nothing more than various states of viscosity.

At the center of the exhibition is a playable script presented in the form of an interactive fiction work, a kind of text-only computer game navigated using basic commands such as "examine", "take", "look" or "go". This script, which starts in the exhibition space, and of which the viewer is both protagonist and operator, releases successive layers of description that inform or distort the the exhibition. In restoring bits of text and speech to the otherwise mute portraits in the show, this stream of text strips bare and in the same movement buries the object of research. The result reveals an exhibition of only "remains", the abandoned indices of a textual genealogy strewn with barriers and dikes, whose downstream course cannot be reversed.

This simultaneous logging and mapping of the exhibition withdraws from the didactic function of explanation to reappear as a text which is no longer addressing the viewer at all, speaking only its own language and producing not clarity, but increasingly liminal territory. While the objects present themselves in a state of almost permanent potential, the text, much like the mazes of overlapping description in the bachelor machines of Raymond Roussel or Alfred Jarry, exhausts interpretation and disorients intention, leaving the exhibition and the viewer to float, unresolved, between two waters.