A self-confessed book addict, Signer has been amassing books and printed matter for many decades. However, he stresses, he doesn’t use his library to research art ideas; he goes there to escape, relax and indulge his huge appetite for information and images of all kinds. On its shelves, books on geology and vulcanology, meterology, hydraulics, aviation and polar exploration jostle for space with volumes on art and architecture, photography, cinema and the avant-gardes. Their topics are often eclectic to say the least, ranging from folk and “outsider” art, via scientific parlor games, kayaking and ball lightning, to Renaissance garden design, early twentieth-century uranium mining, dynamiting bridges, correct silver-service waiting procedures, siege warfare, and the obscure Swiss sport of Hornuss (to give a necessarily incomplete list).

From 2011 on, Signer has granted Withers free access to his library, where she has made many scans of out-of-copyright material for her own research. Installed in the staircase at the Rose Lipman Building, the Library of Marvels (Fast Version) will offer a glimpse of her findings, and shed unexpected new lights on the enthusiasms and fascinations lurking in the background of Signer’s internationally acclaimed sculptural practice.

Library of Marvels (Fast Version) will coincide both with Signer’s Slow Movement show in The Barbican’s Curve Space, and the Barbican art Gallery’s exhibition Magnificent Obsessions: the Artist as Collector (February 12 – May 25 2015).

The installation will be in situ until 31st May 2015 (show extended from 4th April) at the Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Bauvoir Road, London N1 5SQ. On May 16th, there will be a screening of Peter Liechti’s documentary Signer’s Koffer [1.00pm] followed by an omnibus screening of Signer’s Super-8 Films [3.00pm-6.00pm].

Further information here

It is not possible to watch Roman Signer’s Super-8 films with half an eye. You can’t follow them while forking up your lunch, slurping mouthfuls of coffee, scribbling notes, looking up contextual information, or chatting with the person sitting next to you. Unlike a good deal of contemporary film and video art (projection-based installation in particular) they are not “ambient”. The individual films are short, ranging from less than a minute to a few minutes in length, and they all have some form of narrative arc: a beginning, a middle and an end. (In some works the end may simply be a consequence of Signer’s spool of Super-8 film reaching its final frame. Nevertheless, it will literally be an end: a positive element of the filmmaking process that requires recognition.) The films are all silent, and the absence of aural information increases the need for careful visual attention. Although the Super-8 films can, and have, been exhibited in the form of a multi-screen installation, you can’t comprehend them by “grazing” from one screen to another and sampling isolated, random fragments of footage. However they are presented, each individual film must be committed to completely, from start to finish.

This is not just because some of the films pivot on super-fast changes and surprise events – precise moments at which (for example) ignition, descent, collision, combustion, explosion, implosion, disappearance or collapse takes place. It is because the films require a deep adjustment of one’s attention across their entire duration: not just an enhanced vigilance, but a special kind of attunement or psychical activation. Watching carefully, one opens oneself up to the moment of the poetic.

Launched out of the blue, that statement risks seeming grandiose and woolly. This essay’s purpose is to explore it theoretically. In the process it will help itself to ideas from a heterogeneous range of sources: both rationalistic, analytical Anglo-American thinkers including Richard Dawkins and Roland Penrose, and Europeans such as Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes and, in particular, Cornelius Castoriadis. This methodological roll call looks frankly quixotic, but the justification for it, as will be established presently, resides in the elemental simplicities of Roman Signer’s films. For the final purpose of all this is primarily art-critical. The goal isn’t to generate a definitive philosophical statement about the poetic, but to illuminate Signer’s work, and all the philosophical questions that it opens up. Furthermore, as this essay unfolds, the apparently crisp dividing-line between the “analysts” and the “continentals” will, at least in places, begin to look less well defined…

Continue reading in Roman Signer, ed. Konrad Bitterli and Andreas Fiedler, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, KINDL -Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2014, pp. 160-184.

The clues were everywhere – in the show’s imagery, most obviously. The three pieces from a series bearing the curious title “Lukes,” 2013–*, resemble simplified fridges, while those from the “Dregs” series, 2013 –, look like cooking pots – preserving pans, maybe? Meanwhile, in a handout, deliberately lengthy lists of materials bore evidence of obsessive and very twenty-first-century methods of laser-cutting, sealing, protecting, and finessing substances and surfaces. Aluminum had been hand-hammered, sandblasted, mirror-polished, or powder-coated, and zinc sheet “coated with passivate” (to reduce its environmental reactivity, as well as to give it the distinctive brassy-yellow iridescence of the metal substructures you find inside electrical appliances). Inside the “fridges” are pieces of foil that have been powder-coated, giving them an incongruous sense of rigidity and permanence, and knife-shaped steel items whose evenly rusted surfaces recall rust’s preservative rather than its destructive connotations. Also in the mix: “protective” plastics and netting, and “snake-eye security nuts and bolts” – all the better to keep things fixed exactly in place, my dear.

In fact, Reus’s array of pans and fridges did include some real scraps of food, but nothing you could eat, no matter how famished you might have been: each last bit had been embedded in another deodorizing, preservative substance. Lukes (Aggregate Local), 2014, is a small fridge tipped on its back. Inside, held in a block of transparent, lavender-tinted polyester, cabbage leaves swim like tiny ornamental carp. In Dregs (Pyramid Simmer) and Dregs (Flash Batch), both 2013, “pans” assembled from flat metal sheeting (and thus entirely unfit for cooking purposes) contain, wonderfully, “rubber dipped burnt pizzas.”

If, viewed one way, Reus’s installation was a not-quite-kitchen, it was at least equipped with some not-quite-plumbing. Creeping around its periphery was Filer, 2014, four sections of partially routed-out aluminum tubing filled with foil, food packaging, plastic mesh, and the like. Tucked alongside the not-quite knives, fridges, pans, and so on were also a few not-quite toilet seats. And in a clever twist, the installation’s floor had also been given neither-nor status: It had been raised by just a few inches and set in from the walls, creating a border, or gutter, around its perimeter. Thus, it served as both floor and sculptural plinth.

Reus’s contradictory collision of material preservation and material indeterminacy was deftly executed. Robert Gober’s 1990s installations would be a good point of comparison, not least to highlight the changed terrains of present-day sculpture. Parked on young sculptors’ bedside tables right now, one guesses, are not texts by Freud or Kristeva but fluorescent-highlighted photocopies of texts teasing out questions of anthrodecentrism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology in its various guises. Also shadowing Reus’s games with materials is today’s fascinating universe of consumer products made from alien-seeming, new-fangled, high-performance stuff: super-absorbent hydrophilic polymers, silicones that turn fuzzy heads of hair to spun silk, indestructible-seeming plastics, or that ultimate counterintuitive substance, the two-dimensional object graphene. It is within, and against, this remarkable new realm of materials that Reus and her peers (Alice Channer, for instance) are plotting their ideas.

*The title “Lukes” proved surprisingly resistant to etymological research. A provisional definition was supplied by retired architect Margaret Withers: the noun is related to “lees” or “lyes” and is roughly synonymous with dregs or residue. So, appropriately enough, it appears itself to be a type of linguistic left-over.

Magali Reus: In Lukes and Dregs showed at The Approach between 18 January and 16 February 2014

Text © Rachel Withers & Artforum International Magazine, Inc. 2014.

Images © Magali Reus and The Approach.

Höch’s incarnation within Dada was represented by pieces such as the collaged Porträt Gerhard Hauptmann, 1919, which splices a smiling female face straight through the Weimar literary lion’s wrinkled mug, or the tiny photograph Weltrevolution (World Revolution), 1920, a reworking of details from Höch’s famous photomontage Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar BeerBelly Cultural Epoch in Germany), 1919. That piece, and several other celebrated Höch Dada montages, were not in the show, but the absences were balanced by a lavish serving of pieces from Höch’s “Ethnographic Museum” series, ca. 1925-30, and contemporaneous, related experiments with collaged human faces and body parts: the disturbing portrait Mischling (Half-Caste), 1924, for example, with its level, unwavering African stare and its absurdly tiny, grafted-on rosebud mouth. At their best, these montaged images are brilliantly concise and arresting – perception in the form of shocks, indeed.

In toto, the exhibition showed that Hoch is best when she is oddest, finding a subtle strangeness, a dépaysement beyond more legible Berlin Dada polemics. Around the show and within its catalogue, much ink has been spilled over her work’s ideological tendencies, and specifically her reuse of photographs of non-Western subjects. In Mischling, for instance, does Hoch enact a Dadaist “performative parody” (in Christopher Townsend’s words) of “objects of political loathing,” or does she simply reiterate the primitivist, exoticizing language of her time and place? It’s a legitimate discussion, no question, but Höch’s radical weirdness slips through its net. Yes, the collage Die Kokette I (The Coquette I), 1923-25, is a satire of the New Woman – but this tiny, solemn, enigmatic heiroglyph is also so much more. When Hoch does polemic and nothing but, by contrast, it’s not as interesting; Take Staatshäupter (Heads of State), 1918-20, for example, or Marlene, 1930, in which two spectators gawp at Dietrich’s legs, inverted on a classical plinth, while the diva’s mouth and chin float, moonlike, in the sky. Sure, the latter work allows great scope for media-studies-style “decoding,” but it’s weak; its slack lines and shaky handwriting, plus the need to cite the actress’s name to render the image legible, all strike a lame note. In Höch’s best pieces, sheer, sneaky oddity trumps the decoding process. Her most polished post-World War II collages are key evidence. Delicate, elusive, intense abstract squiggles with fey, eccentric names – Sumpfgespenst (Swamp Spirit), 1961, or Raumfahrt (Space Travel), 1956, for example – they are both seductive and evasive; one’s eye seems to slither around on their complicated surfaces. Working in her Berlin suburb after the war, alone but for the Schwitters-esque cabinet of artistic relics she’d saved from destruction, Hoch chose to speak a language much closer to Merz than to Dada.

Text © Rachel Withers and Artforum International, 2014

Images © Hannah Höch / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany

For their project Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future, 2005, artist duo Pope & Guthrie (Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie) procured a dazzling mustard-yellow bus bearing the Bata-derived slogan of the subtitle and, in 2004, escorted a mixed group, including thirty former employees of Bata’s UK factories (in Maryport, Cumbria, and East Tilbury, Essex) on a pilgrimage to Zlin. In March and April, 2005, their digital video documentary of the project premiered in both English locations. The artists have ambiguously characterized Bata-ville as “a search for the Bata spirit,” maybe referring to the bosses’ vision, maybe to something more nebulous. Predictably, the film reveals both Bata the man and his social experiment to be ambivalent and emotionally invested objects for the firm’s now-aging ex-employees.

En route, a life-size replica bust of Bata Senior—a faintly ludicrous yet overbearing presence—surveys the travelers from beside the bus-driver’s seat. In Zlin, the pilgrims inspect the fabled office-in-an-elevator in which he traveled between floors at his administration building, undetected by his workforce. One ex-worker recalls a factory bathroom with a built-in surveillance window to prevent time-wasting; another hints at the dire consequences awaiting those who stalled the production line. Northerners and southerners mingle cordially, but it’s acknowledged that the Tilburyites enjoyed the lion’s share of Bata “trimmings”—swimming pool, social facilities, and so on. Maryport’s workers had no purpose-built homes and despite their efforts, theirs was the first factory to be wound down. Despite all this, they largely agree it was an exceptional, inspiring place to work. En route home, some are moved to tears by the trip’s revival of the “Bata spirit.”

One traveler describes the dreamlike aura of present-day, semi-derelict East Tilbury contrasted with the thriving community of his memory. The Bata-ville project was largely enabled by public funding for East Tilbury’s regeneration, and superficially it might appear as part of that process’s “trimmings.” However, the project’s participants were all self-selecting individuals who’d responded to the artists’ invitation to apply for a place on the trip, not a targeted group supposedly being “empowered by community art,” and their awareness that they’ve struck a working deal with the artists comes over fairly clearly. (“I feel I’ve fulfilled my contractual obligations” comments one.) The project’s performative basis is underlined by the artists themselves, who sport parodic, early-‘60s-style hostesses’ outfits, and on occasion sternly intone extracts from Bata’s bible How I Began.  Under the Bata system, with its blend of quasi-socialist rhetoric and capitalist-paternalist practice, culture functioned as a lubricant of industrial output.  But (as Guthrie suggests in the documentary’s closing moments) for post-industrial urban renewal schemes such as the one that funded Bata-ville, culture itself – as in service industry activity or recreational consumption – is the “product” to which it’s largely hoped regeneration will give rise. The irony lends a subtle melancholy to Pope and Guthrie’s project.

Pope & Guthrie’s Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future was screened at East Tilbury Village Hall and the Plaza Cinema, Workington, Cumbria, and premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, in 2005. The documentary can be purchased here.

Text © Rachel Withers and Artforum International 2005

Images © the artists/John Popadec 2005

Juan Cruz is translating Don Quijote (again), 2005, raised these questions and others besides. Over twenty-four days, Cruz sat in a back room at Peer, translating Cervantes’s novel aloud and “on the hoof” from the original Spanish into English, managing to finish the entire book by his deadline of November 6. (To his advantage, this was Cruz’s second attempt: In 1996 at London’s Instituto Cervantes, he spent two weeks working his way through the first third of the epic’s thousand-odd pages.) Cruz’s voice was audible on a single speaker in the main gallery. The artist himself was visible at his desk (along with a normally hidden array of back-room gallery clutter: pots, pans, dishcloths, empty wine bottles, etc.) through a small glazed window in the gallery wall. An orange gel on the glass served to pictorialize and distance the scene beyond. The arrangement recalled the painterly tradition of inset scenes – Velazquez’s use of windows to introduce sacred imagery into genre subjects, for example.

Cruz’s workplace hinted at various kinds of environment, some less salubrious than others: a radio broadcaster’s studio or a translator’s booth, but also a prison cell or (as Cruz himself has suggested) a peep show. Freely punctuated by repetitions, revisions, ums, ahs, and tantalizing silences, Cruz’s delivery frayed the novel’s already pleonastic story lines to the point of incomprehensibility, mutating the text into the rambling sound track of a thought process or even an esoteric act of self-pleasuring. Comparisons with Vito Acconci’s 1972 performance seedbed might be apt, and with them the question: for whose benefit was this seemingly solipsistic activity taking place? For all one knew, Cruz’s apparent absorption in his task could be a facade, maintained only as long as visitors remained in the gallery. Left alone, he might chuck the book aside and busy himself with something completely different. A press release stated that Cruz’s translation was being recorded, but this claim offered no guarantee of his diligence. After all, recordings can be made, stopped, and started at any time.

Critic Ian Hunt has identified “the sense of imperfect delivery, of imperfect transmission of ideas” as a key element in Cruz’s work, adding that this is a difficult subject for representation. However, in some theories of thinking, that’s a debatable notion: There are grounds for arguing that an idea can only be as perfect as its transmission. One might suppose that Cruz, plugging away at his desk, was privy to a richer experience of Cervantes’s text than his listeners. But reading aloud has an abstracting effect on language that almost always depletes rather than enhances the reader’s perception of meaning: the artist’s absorption of the novel’s content was probably just as discombobulated as that of his listeners. In a characteristically refined, subtle fashion, Cruz’s project troubled not just the fantasy of the perfect translation, but also the idea that, were one to peer into his mind, one might find there a more polished or nuanced version of Don Quixote than the one that fell so haltingly on listeners’ ears in the gallery.

Juan Cruz is translating Don Quijote (again), 2005, was staged at Peer, London, between 16 September and 6 November, 2005

Text © Rachel Withers and Artforum International 2006

Images © the artist and Peer, 2005

Michael Stevenson’s exhibition “Rakit” and the longer-term project of which it is part are at one level an exploration of art’s gift economy. The project centers on a factual episode in the life of the reclusive Scots-born Australian painter Ian Fairweather. An extreme example of the artist as anti-materialist “primitive,” Fairweather nevertheless won considerable fame and had work collected by the Tate. In 1952, in what may have been an attempt to reach London to see his work on display, he improvised a raft from scrap: wood, rope, parachute fabric, and fuel tanks jettisoned by Japanese fighter planes. Equipped with a vintage compass, information gleaned from public libraries, and an excess of confidence possibly inspired by Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki experiment, he set sail from Darwin. Sixteen days later, near starvation, he was cast ashore on the island of Roti, where he was taken in by local villagers and given food and shelter. Having saved Fairweather’s life, Roti’s inhabitants judged his raft a gift commensurate with the service they’d rendered and took it to bits. Later he was imprisoned by the Indonesian police and eventually, in a delightful irony, repatriated to the United Kingdom, where he discharged the debt for his passage by further non-monetary means: digging ditches in Devon.

The exhibition Rakit unfurled this seductively bizarre tale via a series of exhibits (all fabricated by Stevenson and his collaborators) that included maps painted on canvas, a vitrine stocked with relics, and a splendidly ramshackle yet functioning reconstruction of Fairweather’s raft (“rakit” in Indonesian). However, Stevenson’s overall project does more than stitch together the tale of an eccentric artist and absentee from the monetary sphere and his interaction with the Western Pacific’s indigenous gift economy: it also trails present-day gifts and donations of labor in its wake. In Whitstable, Kent, in 2004, the Sea Scouts helped Stevenson launch and (unsuccessfully) try to sail his raft to the Isle of Sheppey. (Writer Jeremy Millar made a beautiful video of the event; Alice Maude-Roxby took photographs.) The project was acquired by the German group of collectors Twodo, and later this year in Aachen they will officially receive and break up the raft, using an imposingly cumbersome ceremonial saw (also shown at the Herbert Read Gallery). The Sea Scouts have received embroidered badges. Reviewers have been rewarded with hand-printed replicas of a 1952 Times article about Fairweather’s exploits.

The exhibition’s vitrine contained a copy of Marcel Mauss’s anthropological study The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1924). Mauss was undecided about the historical status of gift economies, at times figuring them as evolutionary leftovers, at others as permanent features of all societies. Later theorists (Abbing included) tend to assume the persistence of gift systems in even the most “advanced” economies. Stevenson’s abiding interest lies both in art’s economies and their historicization, and “Rakit” goes beyond the documentation of art’s “archaic” economics by engaging gifting as an overt, strategic practice. However, Stevenson avoids romanticizing the gift sphere as a “finer” or more moral economic arena; in tone, his recounting of Fairweather’s odyssey is distinctly sharp-edged.

Michael Stevenson’s Rakit showed at the Herbert Read Gallery Canterbury between November 26 and December 23 2004

Text © Rachel Withers and Artforum International 2005

Images © as credited

Sunlight speaks the language Price first revealed in her 2007 video At the House of Mr X: a sophisticated, McLuhanesque idiom that digitally processes texts and images in the style of high-end 1960s and ’70s graphic design. Various images represent combustion while sparking into phallic metaphors: Solar flares eject plasma into space, or—a tiny detail sneaked into the corner of one screen—the silhouette of a burning match curls into a diminutive erection. Also featured are striking pictures of sleek female fashion models taken from the packaging for a well-known luxury hosiery brand. Posed in ways that would have gratified the David Hemmings character in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, they knot themselves into stylish tangles of foreshortened limbs and shield their faces as if in self-defence.

Meanwhile, running continuously atop one screen, is an animated image of the sun, assembled by Price from an archive of solar photographs at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (the UK research center where Price has been artist-in-residence). Scrolling texts advise viewers that the images are “photographed in ‘K’ light,” a light of “high temperature.” Here “K” presumably refers to Kelvin, the unit of thermal measurement, but Price’s presentation makes the scientific label seem like a brand name, and she strategically muddles it with another “K” brand, the Zildjian K Custom Dark Crash cymbal—the weapon of choice, it seems, for drummers internationally. We see the cymbal onscreen and hear it on the sound track, which builds from a skeleton of percussive effects and finger-clicks to a rapturous, swooping aural climax: Crystal Gayle’s easy-listening classic “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” but played backwards. The sound of words being inhaled rather than exhaled proves physiologically disturbing, and the image of Gayle and her equally glamorous female chorus links back to the hosiery models. Luxury marketing, mass-media images of female glamour: these visual languages, Price seems to say, are like an extreme fairground ride—a perverse, vertiginous experience blending pleasure and dread. One is reminded of Krauss’s summary of “narcissistic” video as “a kind of weightless fall through … suspended space.”

Price’s previous work has often explicitly explored factual narratives. Her Turner Prize exhibit The Woolworths Choir of 1979, 2012, commemorated ten people killed by fire in a Manchester, UK, store. Taken together, Sunlight’s exhibits also hint at an incendiary tale. The video footage, with its imagery of burning matches, scorching sunlight, contorted bodies, and gasping voices, identifies the models as protagonists in a “bitter” story. Elsewhere in the gallery, we find (among other items) an inked-over five-pound note that resembles a cinder and two paintings reproducing textile designs: one from a silk scarf, the other from a hospital gown. Maybe Sunlight parts two and three will reveal another forgotten tragedy—in which case Price’s project will turn out, once again, to be a memorial as well as a critique of a medium.

Elizabeth Price’s Sunlight was on show at Focal Point Gallery Southend between 30 September and 28 December 2013.

Text © Rachel Withers and Artforum International 2014

Images © the artist, Focal Point Southend and MOT International, 2013

Two freestanding projection screens, parallel to one another, show monochrome video sequences. One screen eclipses the other, forcing viewers to circle around in vain search for a vantage point permitting a simultaneous view of both. On one screen, a camera (apparently) tracking horizontally seems to travel through solid walls, revealing a sequence of empty rooms, each giving onto yet more distant spaces. With their high ceilings, paneled dadoes and polished floors, the rooms were graceful, but also tatty and melancholic – in need of renovation, as a realtor might say. Projection number two has the camera descending, elevator-style, past floor after floor, visiting a seemingly endless succession of passageways, each different yet all decorated with the same faintly patterned floral wallpaper. Light – maybe daylight, maybe artificial, it s impossible to tell – seeps from under closed doors, but there’s no reason to think anyone’s home – or rather, in their rooms, since these liminal spaces most closely resemble hotel corridors.

Appearances, of course, prove deceptive. Dahlberg’s sets are architectural models, built to a circular plan, and filmed with a centrally positioned rotating camera, hence the seamless continuity of the installation’s footage. What seem to be tracking shots are really ten-minute, 360-degree pans, describing loci that inevitably read as nodes in a labyrinth – a subtly scary one, too, since its vertical and horizontal extension implies the impossibility of finding an external vantage point. Taking the panopticon as its starring point, Dahlberg’s investigation suggests a psychoanalytic appropriation of the panoptic model, revealing the surveying self as itself both self-surveilling and vulnerable to surveillance. Might there be hiders in the house, unseen presences behind those half-closed doors and darkened entrances? The camera’s full-circle pan becomes readable as a paranoid attempt to watch one’s own back. This is territory Dahlberg has charted before, in Safe Zones I: to fetch a sweater, 1996, Spying out the apartments overlooking his, the artist found that a gun collector occupied one. Dahlberg calculated the “safe zones” in his own home, paths from room to room that were outside his neighbor’s potential line of fire. Following these, he shot photographic evidence of his neighbor’s hobby, but also videoed his own convoluted progress through the zones, a fugitive in his own house.

With the reflexive moment of philosophical thought, Cornelius Castoriadis writes, “Things are no longer simply juxtaposed: the nearest is the furthest, and the forks in the road…have become simultaneous, mutually intersecting. The entrance to the labyrinth is at one of its centers – or rather, we no longer know whether there is a center, what a center is.” And Umberto Eco observes that multicursal labyrinths (like Dahlberg’s) need no Minotaur, because in them one can make mistakes – the visitor’s own errors play the monster’s devouring role. Dahlberg’s labyrinthine experiment, manipulating categories of interior and exterior, serves as an ambiguous model of the philosophizing psyche, its mood delicately poised between lyrical reverie and creeping paranoia.

Jonas Dahlberg: Vertical Sliding/Horizontal Sliding was on show at Milch, London, UK between January 19 and April 8 2001

Text © Rachel Withers & Artforum International Magazine, Inc. 2001

Images © the artist

In the years following 2005 Ross made the recitation many more times in a diversity of locations and institutions. Anniversary–an Act of Memory was launched with a solo recitation at the British Library in 2008, the Declaration’s sixtieth anniversary year, and it was planned as the first of sixty. However Ross’s (in her own words) “modest strategy” of solo recitations started to inspire others, and by June 14th 2013 nearly a thousand people had taken part in the project. They had approached the artist, rather than vice-versa, inviting her to facilitate collective events in which each individual reciter proclaimed a particular article of the Declaration that he or she had chosen.

And so, Ross explained, the performances were always the same at the level of the Declaration; and yet each one was always quite different, involving new contexts and new speakers, each with his or her own individual motivation for learning their chosen text and voicing it in public. The performances’ languages also diversified, and by the end of the process parts of the Declaration had been spoken in over fifty languages, some of them endangered. Signing featured too, and in April 2013 the United Nations online translation database uploaded a video of the Declaration in British Sign Language – a direct consequence of Ross’s work. The venues involved ranged from art galleries, libraries and universities, via government premises (including, in 2009, the House of Commons) to sacred spaces: on November 13^th 2012 at Southwark Cathedral, forty-two pupils from The Cathedral Primary School of St. Saviour and St. Mary Overy recited the Declaration in Mandinka, Irish, French and Jamaican Patois as well as English.

In a way she had not originally anticipated, propagating the habit of memorization and public recitation became central to Ross’s project. Her passionate intention was both for the Declaration to be widely remembered and repeated, and for its reiteration to have positive effects. “Expression isn’t the same as action”, she insisted, not long before her death. “One has to commit to the actualized defense of human rights. The act of recollection forms just a part of that urgent process.” [i] So although the project Anniversary–an Act of Memory is now concluded, its aims and practices are still live. There are now hundreds of people able to voice an Article from the Declaration (and in some cases, the entire Declaration) directly from memory – to keep it in mind and potentially to act on it, and the iterations will undoubtedly continue.

Based as it is in performance, collaboration and participation, Anniversary–an Act of Memory might seem to fit neatly into recent critical debates about the collaborative, participatory and “relational” art of the last few decades. It clearly relates, albeit loosely, to a variety of art practices that re-model the making of art as an occasion for consciousness-raising and self-education. Examples might be Tim Rollins’ Art and Knowledge Workshops with the at-risk students who titled themselves K.O.S. or Kids of Survival (early 1980s onwards), Mark Dion’s Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group, 1993, or even Joseph Beuys’s lecture-actions of the 1970s. Discussing her initial reactions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Ross described the impact of its Preamble, which enjoins “every individual and organ of society” to work “by teaching and education” to disseminate its contents. Deeply committed to the idea of art teaching as a radical practice, she was troubled that she had not paid attention to the Declaration earlier, and she decided to begin raising awareness about it. To this extent, then, Anniversary–an Act of Memory has a “pedagogical” dimension, welding processes of education and performance together.

However, current discussions about collaborative and “pedagogical” art often seem based in quite narrowly drawn art-epistemological questions and immediate historical perspectives, frameworks that don’t seem geographically broad or historically deep enough to do justice to Ross’s initiative. Working with the artist, the communities of participants and audiences involved in Anniversary–an Act of Memory were arguably establishing a practice that links back to long oral cultural traditions, ancient conceptions of citizenship and its duties and rights, and the disciplines of spiritual observance and the commission of doctrine to memory, just as much as contemporary “relational” art. The colossal feats of memory involved in Rajasthan’s Bhopa performances of epic myths is just one of many possible points of reference. Another (more recent and more obviously political comparison) would be the devastatingly fluent oral testimonies of twentieth century rights activists such as Fanny Lou Hamer: facts and experiences recounted and rights asserted over and over again, with absolute accuracy and stunning clarity.

Moreover, Anniversary–an Act of Memory’s performances certainly did not feel exclusively or even primarily pedagogical. Whether solo or group recitations, their atmosphere was, if not exactly ceremonial, then very serious in character: freighted with a consciousness that an important task was being undertaken and that it should be done well, sincerely, and with passion and dignity. Infused with feelings of celebration and urgency – maybe even, for those with religious faith, a sense of sacramental significance – they were performative in the way J. L. Austin articulated in How to Do Things With Words [ii]: participants both identified their human rights and simultaneously, through those autonomous acts of free expression and self-assertion, they exercised those rights.

Anniversary–an Act of Memory’s iterations also insisted on the importance of memorization and accurate on-the-spot recollection, in a social and historical context where reliance on textual prompts and prosthetic memory (most obviously, connection to the Internet) is becoming – at least within advanced capitalist societies – so heavy as to be absolute. By recalling the long tradition of oral cultural practices, Anniversary–an Act of Memory tactically highlighted a widespread present-day process of cognitive de-skilling. It is also impossible to listen to the Declaration’s articles without registering the fact that around the world, right now, millions of people are persistently and grievously denied the rights it sets out. Shadowing each of the project’s “acts of memory” is the question of how we might cope if stripped of access to the textual and digital prompts that many of us now depend on. Thrown into an isolation cell, say, or into some situation with potentially grave consequences that demanded immediate, decisive judgment and action, and equipped with no resources other than our wits and our memory, how would we fare? Would our mental storeroom turn out to be hopelessly depleted?

These concerns are obviously not abstract or hypothetical, and they were central to Ross’s original conception of her project. Rights Repeated: an Act of Memory began as a response to the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes following the terrorist attacks of July 2005 in London. How was it possible, she asked, for such an obscenity to happen: for a completely innocent man to be hunted down by the UK police, pinned to the ground, and fatally shot? She concluded that there had been a complete failure of presence of mind on the part of the police; following distant voices of authority far from the scene, they had become blind to the real situation and the real consequences of their actions. Reflecting on historical precedents, she speculated that “a strong sense of communal commitment to a clearly articulated ethical code” was a key support for those who have resisted injustice in the past, and this in turn led her to the strategy of committing to memory the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its entirety.

Comprising of a Preamble and thirty Articles, the Declaration runs to just under two thousand words. Compared to the dusk-till-dawn epics of the Bhopas the recitation of the Declaration, which lasts less than an hour, represents the nursery slopes of oral performance. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the gravity and urgency of its message, its precise, legally formal language and strong elements of near-repetition make it a hard artefact to memorise. A good deal of video documentation exists of the sixty performances of Anniversary–an Act of Memory, and it’s clear that for some participants even the commission to memory of an article of a few sentences has proved a bit too much: crib sheets are clutched, quick glances taken. But these moments are not “failures”: the will to remember is transparent and, as Alexandra Kokoli has pointed out, the performances’ hesitations and discontinuities are intrinsic to the work’s aesthetic. “The repeated caesurae in ‘Anniversary’ dramatize the struggle for and in memory. Remembering one’s rights in order to defend them is a difficult pursuit”, she writes. Participants wait “in silence, anticipation, sympathy and trust” as each Article is voiced; there is “a tolerant, patient waiting for one’s turn, for the other to recall
 and hesitantly perform their part” that poetically embodies the ethos of the Declaration. [iii]

Researching her project, Ross felt it was critical that the “clearly articulated ethical code” deployed be a secular one, and in this she was acting on her personal ethical convictions. The code that she sought needed, amongst other considerations, to be one that enshrined within it people’s freedom to hold and manifest their religion or belief “in teaching, practice, worship and observance” (Article 18). Nevertheless, the Declaration’s nesting of religious faith within the secular framework of “the purposes and principles of the United Nations” has inevitably generated controversy and rendered it unacceptable to some. In 1948, Saudi Arabia refused to ratify it on the basis that it conflicted with Sharia law. Moreover, one can think of a good many objections other than religious ones to the idea of the “purposes… of the United Nations” as the ultimate determinant of global human rights. The Declaration has been accused of being both Western-centric and anti-feminist; the U.S. professor of law Catherine MacKinnon took issue with its use of “universal masculine” grammatical formulae. Others (Amnesty International, for instance) have argued that the Declaration is incomplete without the inclusion of a “Right to Refuse to Kill”, and although this right is alluded to in other UN documents, it has yet to appear in the Declaration itself.

However, the existence of these points of controversy hardly invalidate Ross’s project; in fact they do the opposite. As important as the affective qualities of watching people strive to remember and recite, are the difficult questions raised as one listens to and concentrates on the slowly uttered text. Should parents be able “to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children” as an absolute right (Article 26)? And should the family be promoted as “the natural and fundamental group unit of society” (Article 16)? Who gets to decide what constitutes a “family”? Presence of mind means thinking hard. In her teaching at Central St. Martin’s and elsewhere, Ross privileged effort, awareness and curious enquiry; polished finished artefacts were of value only in so far as they figured within active processes. Her underlying thinking in the devising of Anniversary–an Act of Memory would have been just the same. She was not holding out the Declaration as a perfect solution to the issue of human rights, a definitive articulation that could be trotted out pat without the labour of thought. She would have seen it as a necessary but contingent step in the right direction: a basis for more work, not an ending.

A small but telling detail about Ross’ commentaries on Anniversary–an Act of Memory is that she avoided any kind of fetishisation of her own recitations as a kind of memory feat. None of her interviews or statements goes into detail about her specific techniques and systems: “First I learned the entire declaration by heart” [iv] is as much information as we get. The start of each recital was marked by her tying her hair back with a red ribbon, and the end of each with its removal. Going to work, tying up one’s hair: one suspects this small ritual was actually a key memory ploy. In discussion, her emphasis was on the idea of mindfulness – of remembering and acting correctly under pressure. Her final illness was a cruel test of that mindfulness; however everyone who saw her during her last weeks found her self-possession, fortitude and humour remarkable and unforgettable.

In both her work and her teaching, Ross valued collaboration very highly, maybe even at the cost of recognition of her own achievements. The innovations that she introduced at Central St. Martin’s in the 1980s and 1990s via her Critical Fine Art Practice programmes had a significant subsequent impact on art school teaching nationally, and her initiatives in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and 1980s helped make possible the rise of some of today’s leading female artists: in a recent online article artist Conrad Atkinson paid tribute to Ross as a highly influential, yet “underacknowledged force in UK art practice and art education of the last forty years” [v]. Through Anniversary–an Act of Memory her influence spread far beyond the U.K. art scene into the lives of everyone who participated, and we will all remember her with the deepest affection and esteem.