Witness the mind's own machinations; see the paper catching your flight of ideas, patterning them, presenting transient figures and moments; “[w]hat was x becomes y, the line dividing them dissolving”[1] – “I caught Jennie with her hand on it once (...) she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, (...) I know she was studying that pattern"[2]
The paper is a phantasmagoria screen, and we are the “detective-narrator(s)”[3], searching for our own ghosts, the seeming presence of being superseded by a deferred non-origin.[4] The "figure of the ghost… is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive… the time is out of joint."[5] Locating the origin of identity or history is inevitably dependent on an existing set of conditions, so that "haunting (is) the state proper to being,"[6] recalling Verwoert’s instruction that one's grip must be loosened, and the object invoked. (Invoke your object now, in front of the paper, “rethink… myths of progress, linearity of time and teleological assumptions”[7]) Fashion and cultural theorists tend to agree that the look of what is generally described as ‘vintage’ is often related to concern for valuable items from a previous period, or nostalgia. Also generally included in this category is reproduction of old designs with contemporary material, or what is sometimes termed ‘retro.’[8] My wallpaper is not vintage in the sense of the former definition; it was printed last week. It is not retro, either, as it is not designed to evoke the 70s, though the installation as a whole does reference that period, and is therefore closer to what Heike Jenß defines as vintage: “a ‘construction of past images and historic looks which can be achieved with original objects as well as new ones that look historic.’”[9] But while a certain temporal disjunction may occur, it is not based on a nostalgia for lost futures.[10] Rather, it presents the results of a contemporary investigation into a past moment, wheeling all at once into teleidoscopic patterns, then refusing, upon closer inspection, to create symmetry. Transgenerational communication, then: an echo of "undisclosed traumas of previous generations (that) might disturb the lives of their descendants, even and especially if they know nothing about their distant causes."[11] And if this phantom is "the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its secrets from coming to light"[12] then it is a dishonest ghost, intending to mislead (tell a story to) the haunted subject to ensure the continued shrouding of its secret: “les lacunes laissées en nous par les secrets des autres.”[13] “The object of appropriation… must today be made to speak not only of its place within the structural order of the present material culture but also of the different times it inhabits and the different historical vectors that cross it."[14] Thus the wallpaper’s design attempts to make no hierarchy among images (I have failed at that attempt, of course I have) and flips and rotates them, to remove any suspicion of a storyboard. Neither is the paper nostalgic, in the sense of a “reactionary, sentimental or melancholic”[15] yearning for the past. It does not mourn the present, or progress; it does not indicate “a loss of faith in the future.”[16] It is relevant, though, to consider nostalgia in its alternative interpretation as having multiple “meaning and significance… and so… accommodating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances and melancholic attitudes.”[17] It is certainly true that some “feelings of regret for what time has brought”[18] are woven into this project, as well as the common desire to visit unknowable pasts (and futures), Time Machine style. Furthermore, the project acknowledges a discomfort with inexorable supersession and the demand for newer, smaller, faster gadgets at the expense of those making them, and a mistrust of the emphasis on constant progress which leaves no space for attachment, then appreciation, then loss. “This disorientation from any sense of continuity or durability increases our sense of ethical perturbation by cutting away the grounds for active dialogue between past and present. All that is left is the negativity of nostalgia – as if, in the headlong tilt of time, all we can do is sigh and lament.”[19] But a positive nostalgia, one which rejects the insistence on temporary and transient and seeks “a viable alternative to the acceleration of historical time”,[20] is one which can be seen here – in the making of a record and the printing of wallpaper, rather than a digital projection of a wallpaper design with an attached sound file. I am not idealising. “An active relation to the past has become almost impossible in our contemporary condition, where we have lost a sense of historical location and are locked into an endless succession of depthless presents.”[21] I just wanted real paper; a little tangibility. Dive with me back into the Box for a moment. Its papers are whispering and shuffling around us. We could find these people and ask them, I suppose. But they are no longer exactly the people we want – temporally, geographically, politically. We can’t ask them then. [1] DeLamotte, E., C. (1990) cited by Davison, C. M., (2004). ‘Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper”’, Women's Studies, p. 54. [2] Perkins Gilman, C. (2009). The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings. London: Virago, p.24 [3] Davison, p.61 [4] Davis, C. (2005). ‘Hauntology, spectres and phantoms’. French Studies, pp. 373–379 [5] Davis, p.375 [6] Davis, p.375 [7] Parikka, J. (2012) p.144 [8] Stefano Baschiera & Elena Caoduro [9] Jenß, H. (2005) cited by Baschiera, S. and Caoduro, E. (2015). ‘Retro, faux-vintage, and anachronism: When cinema looks back’. NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, p.145 [10] Fisher, pp.2-30 [11] Davis, p.374 [12] Davis, p.374 [13] Abraham, N. and Torok, M. (1987) cited by Davis, p.374 [14] Verwoert, J. (2007). ‘Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art’, Art & Research, p.3 [15] Pickering, M. and Keightley, E. (2006). ‘The Modalities of Nostalgia’. Current Sociology, p.919 [16] Pickering and Keightley, p. 919 [17] Pickering and Keightley, p. 919 [18] Pickering and Keightley, p. 920 [19] Pickering and Keightley, p. 920 [20] Pickering and Keightley, p. 923 [21] Jameson, F. (1991) cited by Pickering and Keightley, p. 923
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