LOVE, SARAH
“...when this community dissolves, it leaves the impression that it could never have existed, even if it existed. ”
“Myths never were, they always are. ”
“There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. ”
“The artist is a myth. ”
The artist Sarah Pierce has always been an enigma to me, a myth. I say this with trepidation, as I don't necessarily want this line to find her in the world (if she exists).
During my time as an MFA student at NCAD Dublin, I came to know the website named “The Metropolitan Complex”, and via that website the name “Sarah Pierce”. Today I know what it was about the name The Metropolitan Complex that struck a nerve more than 15 years ago. It wasn’t its ChatGPT definition — : “a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories”. It was more that the name pointed to my own insecurities as a hicksville native living in the big city. I hadn’t acquired a metropolitan complex, because I wasn’t fully institutionalised by the city, or for that matter, NCAD. I was equipped with the idea that the city was the place where I would find myself as an artist, not the Wicklow mountains. Further, I would grow to know, with the help of one supervisor in particular, Joan Fowler, that the art institution would be the thing that I would end up questioning after a honeymoon period of flirting for its attention.
The enigmatic and mythical status I hold for Sarah Pierce is not only based on never meeting her in person, or having an image of her to project some idealistic personality onto, or the fantasy that she doesn’t exist at all. It’s more that her unobtrusive presence in the Irish art scene, a presence that doesn’t force itself into the community as ego, but locates itself on the periphery, is enigmatic and mythical in the way psychoanalyst James Hillman describes myth: “We live myth before we declare it as ‘myth.’”
At the time of coming across The Metropolitan Complex I was painting, and I had no real idea as to what contemporary art was or could be. I was fresh meat; innocence caught in the headlights of the art institution. Through word of mouth the name Sarah Pierce would be voiced from time to time, but never really manifested for me as an object-experience in the world. In the early days I’m sure I experienced Sarah Pierce’s work at Lee Welch’s Four Gallery and Annie Fletcher’s EVA, and certainly at NCAD Gallery, but I can’t really invoke or describe what those object-experiences were, except for some text-based works on brown paper, and the Laocoön sculpture, borrowed and relocated from the NCAD campus.
Laocoön sculpture, NCAD Gallery
All I knew was, the artist named Sarah Pierce made work that had elements of discursivity which propagandised community against and within the administrational setting of the institution of exhibition-making (or something like that). I was a fan, and still am a fan of Andrea Fraser’s narcissistic institutional critique, which interrogates the institutions of the exhibition and the artist with the very agents and stationary that prop up the art institution. But whereas Fraser psychoanalytically splits to embody the agents and stationary to self-harming extremes, such as in Untitled 2003, my sense of Sarah Pierce’s work was she herself is absent.
And yet such absence is auteurist in nature. The ready-made research that digs deep into the archive for the forgotten and marvellous is left to do its cultural ventriloquising of history and precedent, presented before the — once again — headlights of the art institution and its wilful but lost audience. Sarah Pierce's work presents what James Hillman defines in terms of myth, as being something that is not about history or memory, but something existing in the world throughout time for eternity.
So it was with eagerness and curiosity I headed to IMMA where a reiteration of several of Sarah Pierce’s projects, exhibitions, and performative gestures are formalised within the conceptual framework (or conceit) of a 20 years solo exhibition, what some might shorthand as “retrospective”. What is tricky about this in respect to the nature of Sarah Pierce's work, the nature of which I have just been discussing here as an art practice that doesn’t come to fruition, but continues to conceptually posit and critically poke within the framework of its own dissemination, is that the artist is figuratively cornered in rooms with mirrored walls and ceilings of her own making. Sarah Pierce’s practice packaged as a retrospective within the grand Georgian domesticity of IMMA, reads as a museum show in the old not new sense. The originary exhibitions, presented as scenes within scenes, are displaced from their specificity, their original motivations and movements within the previous architectures of their conception. They lose their ‘where’ and ‘when’.
The artist’s hope for their art to be reanimated and not succumb to its deathly collision with its own history is, most of the time, a lost hope. The archive, unlike myth, was. And anyway, I am very suspicious of the importance that artists and especially curators place on the archive. The curator is more attuned and dependent on history, who archives the present before the present has even begun. Whereas the artist is dependent on history for allies and permission to push the envelope of art from the past into the present. The archive seldom reanimates the present. The artwork is, most of the time, mortal.
To ‘redescribe’ — a word most commonly used within reach of the psychoanalytic couch — Sarah Pierce’s exhibitions as they are presented here at IMMA would be the worst tautology. The video installations, with supplementary museological texts and artefacts, need to be patiently perused, so you get a sense of the scenarios orchestrated, or mythologised, by the artist. Beyond the indescribable, more abstract gestures and materiality reorientate me into a space where text and meaning is jettisoned for more formally quizzical conversations between this readymade and that slice of fabrication. These outside-the-crop Thomas Demand sites of residual and littered double-entendre fabrications manifest as the Freudian dream, a Germanic Brechtian-Beckettian theatre, where form and content are found to be two sides of the same coin, or möbius strip.
Unlike Andrea Fraser, whose work critically channels the art institution via Andrea Fraser herself (or whom we have come to know as the “welcome” persona non grata apropos the art institution, Sarah Pierce is mostly absent in this series of reiterative presentations of her work at IMMA. This absenteeism, or objective omnipotence, is best signified in the series of interviews with individual or paired artists presented on a stepped stage. Before putting on the headphones, the landscape of TV-screened talking heads emphasises the body language of the artists. The kind of body language an artist holds when confronted with the why’s and what for’s of their art. Sarah Pierce’s questions to the artists are substituted with intertitles and a backing-track accompaniment of the punk persuasion. It is all very familiar territory, at once performed and seemingly sincere. These are artists who have been in the game and know the game. They know that when questions about art are posited in the name of art, there is always something meta in their delivery. Their shrugs and pauses and smiles say it all without saying anything deterministic or insightful. The last question in a line of questioning, is the same last and obligatory job interview question, the Do you have any questions for me kind of question. Sarah Pierce’s answer is edited from the cut.
This is a meta-critique of the art institution I am familiar with, where the exhibition is presented within the exhibition, where a self-referentiality with respect to the mechanisations of the exhibition in the context of the public sphere are presented and portrayed in the stationary and museology of the exhibition, where questions of censorship and the ambivalences that come with the translation and manifestation of the artist’s emotional and cerebral world into rooms within rooms within the exhibition, within the institution, within the fantasy and ideology of art being more, or the same as the institution that controls and conditions its place in the world, form a paradoxical architecture where EXITS become ENTRANCES.
There is always a coldness to the aestheticisation of the art institution, when the artist takes off the blinkers and cognitive dissonance to confront the politics and market context of their art in the public sphere. Represented as art, institutions are spaces where love and sensuality are erased. And yet, three quarters of the way through Sarah Pierce’s exhibition, just past the Brecthian debris, an alcove, an archive, presents both a possibility and quandary. The quandary being: I was unable to engage with the remainder of the exhibition after experiencing and reading what Sarah Pierce has displayed in vinyl text on an alcove wall:
Dear…
I've been thinking about what we do, what it means, how, for whom and why it happens. Much of this includes personal exchanges that surround cultural work.
My attachment to your work, for example.
Our relationships are a form of dissemination. They are our shared condition. I'd like to ask you to take part in a simple project I'm planning in my studio in Dublin.
Please send me something that describes the conditions surrounding your work, something collected, constructed, written or sourced, a work-in-progress, invitation, article, book, photograph, sketch, letter, poem, object, manifesto, video, or CD. Relay an experience or a conversation, something anecdotal, informal and attached.
Other people will see what you've given and if they want to they can add something too.
This is how we'll build an Affinity Archive.
Love,
Sarah
This gesture turns my criticism of the archive as a dusty sacrifice to the mausoleum of civilisation on its head. The simple display of objects sent by artists to Sarah Pierce based on her request above, is a beautiful and lively thing. And yet I had no desire to look through the note pads or books placed on the bockety wooden shelves, even if the warmth of the display lessened the threat of the invigilator’s shout “Don’t touch the artwork”. Nor did I have any desire to take a seat amongst the relational dissemination. The gesture, as defined by the French philosopher Tristan Garcia, in the context of the exhibition and the artwork, is made in the presence of the artist. Here, for the first time, Sarah Pierce is present, explicitly, as “Love, Sarah.” Myth is always attached to a protagonist or character, or what Jung would call an archetype.
Sarah Pierce’s display of other artists’ studio paraphernalia enlivens and unsettles the idea I have of the archive, in the way that Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction enlivens and unsettles the idea of the institution. Contra its more popular definition, Derrida’s deconstruction is more Freudian than Freud is given credit for, especially in its uncanny register. Deconstruction, for Derrida, is already happening within the text or institution in some uncanny corner, perhaps in the archive. Derrida doesn’t deconstruct, he just unpicks the locks and unblinkers the blind spots where deconstruction is already always occurring. Sarah Pierce’s gesture towards artists whom she is attached to personally inserts a hot thermometer in the glacial landscape of this exhibition. And although the artist up to this juncture strikes several matches via the re-setting of institutional narratives and forms, a fire didn’t light in my stomach. Until here, in this alcove, where a fire burned and still burns. So much so that I disengaged from the remainder of the exhibition, returning repeatedly to the alcove to stir the coals.
There’s something about the use of the word “Love” followed by “Sarah” here that destroys the ironical posturing of institutional critique (or reflection), or at least opens it up to new meanings and emotions. Love, for Slavoj Žižek, is destructive, as it is based on selecting someone to love from the crowd or the community. In the proferring of love you risk yourself and the community. In the press release someone writes that “Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth asks what it means to gather, reflect, and act in community.” It is the acting “in community” that is significant here, as if it is not a natural instinct or inclination to be communal. We have to perform community to enact community. If we think of community in the context of what Roberto Esposito calls “the misery of new individualisms”, community promises love for the other, even though the other is not always open, willing, or able to love. Jean Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot are insightful in respect to love and community, Blanchot writes,
“The community of the lovers [...] has as its essential aim the destruction of society. Wherever a temporary community arises between two beings, who are or are not made for each other, a war machine is constructed, or rather, the possibility of a disaster which, albeit only in infinitely small dosage, carries the threat of universal annihilation.”
All the words that precede “community” in the French philosophical avant-garde, from Maurice Blanchot’s Unavowable Community to Jean Luc Nancy’s The Disavowed Community, negate the possibility of community. And even when community does take on a cohesive cultural form, it either destroys, or inevitably “dissolves… leaving the impression that it could never have existed, even if it existed”. — Maurice Blanchot.
Sarah Pierce’s solo exhibition at IMMA posits the dialectic between the past and the present, history and myth, civilisation and culture, and the archive as a possible repository of presence. Personally, my experience of this panorama of abutting scenes spanning 20 years within the east wing of IMMA is powerful and generous, yet lacking spontaneity. That is until one moment, a moment that suspends my critical judgement that the archive is for the grave. Sarah Pierce remains a myth that is, not was.—James Merrigan
Sarah Pierce’s Scene of the Myth through 3 September 2023