Unfinished Business

Nominative Determinism

Text by Pierre d’Alancaisez

This exhibition almost did not open. Reflecting on its own title, the project came to the brink of collapse an unreasonable number of times in its ten-month development: changes of direction (backwards, as well as sideways), scheduling failures, a commission which resulted in no work being made, answerphones instead of conversations, shipping delays, funding fluctuations, and finally the threat of the gallery losing its premises. Anyone familiar with the ways of the art world would surely sympathise: operational setbacks are not uncommon, and Murphy’s law has long prepared us to expect the worst.

But even in the starkest of landscapes, unfinished business would stand out for its autothysic tendencies, and the self-destructive force appears to have been domestic rather than majeure. The determined sabotage performed moments before a conclusion becomes apparent – itself the link between the works in the exhibition and the artist’s practices - was allowed to take over the prosaic logistical arrangements, as though dictated by the project’s title. The alleviating factor in this irony is that the carpenter ant’s suicide is essentially an act of altruism.

The works in unfinished business set themselves up for failure too. They present unattributed triumphs, non-events, bleak outlooks and empty poetry, filled with expectation and aesthetic and semiotic gestures which suggest a predictable, if not inevitable outcomes and conclusions. But the expected resolutions don’t appear, and the final scenes of the feel-good flicks are sharply edited away. The narratives apparent at fist glance turn out to be only structures, signs without words.

Read the full text and view further images and video of the works at Waterside Contemporary » http://waterside-contemporary.com/exhibitions/unfinished-business/

Download the PDF publication Nominative Determinism