This is less a curatorial note, more a love letter:
Months ago, Nico spoke of the act of finding notes to yourself you forgot you had written. Perhaps it is a mark of the beginning of summer that this is becoming a practice I am more familiar with (warm weather inspiring other practices that aid memory loss). Some notes are impossibly cryptic (an example being a small tear of paper I found on my floor one morning with “mimesis + pwr”); others are slightly more intelligible, though the spelling remains ambiguous – the most recent one I found was, “start with an argument (philosophy), turn it into an expl__ation (art)”. It was indeterminable whether the middle letters made ‘explanation’ or ‘exploration’. Though slightly uninspired (either version you choose) and obviously unmemorable, this late-night message did invite thoughts of and on ‘purpose’.
It was only relatively recently I became conscious of my obsession with PURPOSE. A noun, for me, for many, that attaches itself to all aspects of life but seems to cling particularly ruthlessly to art. What is the purpose of art, what is the purpose of this work, this piece, what is the purpose of watching this, reading this, writing this, making this. And then at some moment, the question shifted from purpose to “what is the point?” As though the answer has to be direct, as though the answer has to be immediate. I am speaking of myself, but I don’t think this is an expectation I alone hold, specifically in terms of how we look at and respond to art.
It is not often I think of ‘the viewer’ in relation to morning to morning, but recently I came across Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (I don’t know how I managed to graduate with a BFA without ever having read it, but somehow I did) and it led me to consider this anonymous hypothetical eye (/brain/heart/body) in terms of what it is we’re doing here. Sontag laments, “none of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself”. Maybe it’s far-fetched, and it is absolutely romantic, but I’m feeling smitten so I’m going to say it anyway: here, on this far and unassuming corner of the Internet, we have found a return to innocence [I am at least resisting capitalization]. Getting over the giddiness of sensationalized sentences, I can say completely soberly that this month is an affirmation that here ‘the point’ is superfluous.
Our reprieve from the idea of purpose as being synonymous with product is also available to the viewer. The prevailing expectation to ‘get’ the work, a pressure placed on the outsider (and usually by the outsider), is alleviated because they are allowed along for the ride, however short or long it may be. But more than the emphasis on process, it is our request to focus not only on the work but on the space in between, which structures a way of looking at art that restricts the narrowing of eyes and ideas and understanding. To regard the space in between each piece, each artist, allows for the whole (or the “aura” as Walter Benjamin describes it) to be realized, and from that it allows the sensorial, the emotional, the ineffable, the experience of art that Sontag called for, to take equal standing beside our intellectualized understandings of purpose.
So, to you, dear viewer, if you’re out there, I ask only that you continue to do as we have suggested. And to you, morningtomorning: thank you.