Materiality and Memory / ‘hao yang!’
It is now 14 June 2023, more than two months after I encountered the artworks for the first and last time. (The exhibition closed two weeks ago.) I am relying on a copy I made of the artwork statements to assist me in re-approaching the pieces that were the most elusive to me—one of them is SOUL / SOULPRINT by Ana Osprey. Unfortunately, this is all I can gather:
‘As simple as that – we hear words and the words stay in us […] But you can’t just read the soul. Only when the soul decides to open up and prints (writes down) itself some marks become readable. Which ones is [sic] only for the soul to decide.’
What material were the hanging plates made of? Corroded bronze? Was acid used? How were the words engraved on them? And what font was used?
Materiality fascinates me. Whether an alloy sculpture or an oil painting, I feel the urge to inch closer to an art object’s surface—the uneven layers of reflective, rusting atoms, the rippling sea of electrons—in order to investigate its form and textures with my eyes and (how I wish) my hands. I want to pare things down to their parts through which the whole is made in order to arrive at complete comprehension. After all, it is by externalising what is otherwise hidden and unseen that essence is revealed. Like visualising a kiss as the brushing of electron clouds, nuclei skirting around each other—there, our universal loneliness. Or like Freud’s ‘disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes’.
The last dream I remember of █ occurred near the cusp of July. Nothing remarkable happened. Had I had my way, I would have laid him down on a divan, tapped play on ARTPOP (the track) and asked him:
Why in all your glamour and cruelty
Come to me the pregnant man emojis1
A hybrid can Why
stick tongue at me? withstand these things
give me the finger?2
Why We could, we could belong together—
Why shout my name from outside with a cigarette perched like a see-saw between his fingers?3
I cannot believe I dallied around in the gallery for three hours, only to exchange a total of five sentences with █; to walk home alone with the promise of see you again held close to my heart like the clear plastic cup of gin and tonic he had prepared and passed to me, onto which I held tight even after the drink had all gone down my throat or simply evaporated. I cannot believe I still hear the gurgling of Schweppes as it streamed into the cup from the yellow metal can tilted carefully by █’s right hand. And I cannot believe I still remember his listless foxy eyes, their upper hemisphere hidden behind his monolids, how they were located a head above the shallow creases around his stubby neck, and how they seemed always ready to roll upwards in rejection.
Can you read the words? I know what this is. This one is bitch.
So imagine my soulprint from that evening: the dumb white page of a Google Document scrawled over with the few words he said, the few overheard, and perforated with all unsaid.
1 Gen Z absurdist humour. You, too, send cowboy emojis for no reason.
2 Playful gestures. Games mean nothing beyond themselves.
3 Boredom.