The Appearance of The Work World
The installation 'The Appearance of The Work World' developed ideas of editing, order and disorder in respect to a personal archive. Having anticipated a much more chaotic presentation of images from a large collection of negatives , the final images displayed were formed from what seemed like the most dumb, ultimately most simple, edit imaginable: five pots plants. The method developed during my MA was an approach to photographing objects which was closer to portraiture than to stil life; always from the same distance, a human arms' length, the minimum distance possible using a small, plastic, medium-format camera (HOLGA)which produces a very filmic, dream-state negative. In the end, the impossible order I was really interested in was dealt with in the text, wherein the chaos can reside in a simple way visually, only emerging in its madness through the act of reading. Thus the print pile was installed directed towards a blank wall (my thanks to Peter Kennard for his insistence of my having that blank space), on a stool approximately reading (lectern) height. The title attempts to disclose the idea of the work of the world, as independent from labour, thus allying the work of art with the way plants work instead of with anything productive in any economic sense. The appearance of things verges on disappearance in the present.The past is accumulated here, queried, observed, amnesia waylaid, little is understood, but that is enough, for now. ‘At night I would run through the streets and howl, during the day I would work calmly’ (Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day) 'The Appearance of The Work World' was first presented at the Royal College of Art, The Show (Fine Art Photography), 2002 |