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Historically, the catalogue essays of curated exhibitions have united work under the umbrella of curatorial intention. Under this schema the work's ability to surpass illustration largely rests with the art itself. From the theme shows of the '70s, however, emerged a rather more sophisticated version of the group show. Rarely are works today as crudely linked as they were once, under banners such as "The Weather" or "Interiors". Increasingly, the interaction between curator/writer (text) and artist (image) is undertaken on a collaborative basis and accompanying texts seek to contribute on a parallel and complimentary level. From out of the coffee shops of Leichhardt percolated the basic premise for The Memory of Forgetting: an exhibition of miniature artworks held at ThePerformance Space and directed at an exploration/ investigation of the relationship between image and text. It was an ambitious undertaking by four Sydney artists: Michael Bognar, Bruce McCalmont, Diane McCarthy and Ingeborg Tyssen, and an imaginary essayist, Juan Pinguino Enfadado from the Universidad de Coma Corazon.
The use of an imaginary text recalls both Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and its predecessor Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, both of which use narrative as a device for contemporaneous comment. Even more than this, The Memory of Forgetting critiqued, through parody, the use/misuse of wordy language and French texts as a means of supporting, authenticating or validating exhibitions. A large blown-up extract from the catalogue was centrally located in the main gallery of The Performance Space and served a number of functions: it provided the viewer with some clues to the tongue-in-cheek nature of certain aspects of the exhibition; its large scale made comment on the seeming ability of text to overpower