The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
I liked this show immensely; it had the simple luminosity of an intelligent exercise in curatorial method. It was, in fact, a limbering-up exercise for curator Stella Brennan, as it represented her final submission toward an MFA at the Elam School of Fine Arts. Like all the most interesting curatorial endeavours, Brennan's show was a testing out of the mutual effects that theories and objects have on one another. In this case Brennan talked-up theories of temporal redemption and utopian secrets in relation to works of art poised ambiguously between the recent past and the remembered future. The simplicity of this exhibition, however, was only superficial. Given the aura of weightless innocence sustaining Brennan's curatorial endeavour, the precision of the show's self-consciousness seemed paradoxically precocious. Despite the illusion of benign transparency, Nostalgia for the future left me puzzled and melancholy. Though buoyant with reflections on the utopian nuances of art and design, and elegant in its styling and subtle informality of installation, this project was sad, sad, sad.
Though not sure exactly what this exhibition meant, I knew that I was somewhere in the vicinity of what Waiter Benjamin called Jetztzeit, or 'now time', that point where the present can barely contain a forgotten past. Where material returning from the past is magnetically attracted to material slipping away from the present. Brennan's constellation of installations, photographs and modern design artefacts triggered an uncanny sense of history moving beneath the present, about to break the surface. But what would this history have been? What truth of repressed history would break forth, as Benjamin promised, from such slivers of messianic time? Equally important, how did this conjunction of artworks trigger the