- Venue
- Millennium Gallery
- Location
It is my wont, if possible, to go in to an exhibition knowing as little as possible about it, and only to read about it later. I hope to piece together the clues and see if I can figure it all out for myself, right or wrong, like solving an equation. Sometimes this all comes to naught, but usually I get to the gist of a thing.
I’m not so sure I exactly got it with Paul Morrison’s Auctorum, but anyway, I like my version, even if it does not exactly fit with the exhibition script.
A large black and white wall piece fills a wall, like amplified wall paper referencing a bygone pen and ink illustrative style and botanical drawings. In the same room is a nearly life-sized woman in gold. She is a stylised 18th century woman – an exaggerated version of a fashionable ideal of a certain time with a gigantic bustled skirt. There is a kitschy ugliness about her as if she is an upscaled mantelpiece ornament.
Next door in a big room to itself is a moving image piece. Dramatic fast moving clouds and mountain tops in grainy pixilation. Just as I am thinking to myself that I see no connection, the video descends to water, and then to underneath the surface, where it combines with animation akin to the black and white wall piece.
Further on is another room with framed prints on the wall, isolating the botanical studies, the woman, the block print style of illustrated books and etchings. Sort of 18th, 19th century things, not a definite past. And then I figure out that this is all about an imagined past – the way we remember or think about the historical past according to how it is illustrated – the style of our childhood history books which itself becomes obsolete. Each generation has its own version of past eras, different ways it is stylised and represented.
This view does not really match the curation blurb, but I got such a strong sense of this in the exhibition, as if I was wandering around the pages of a history book from primary school, a book which was just about to be gathered up and pulped whenceforth the history would be rewritten and only available in revised form.
