That Tangled Monster

Resentment for the ravages of time (like the decline in our health or the depreciation of our car) is common-place; as is a disinterest in the more complex machinations of ‘time’ – these being so beyond our ken, why bother?  The complex nature of Time is nothing short of grand-scale alchemy, so it’s much easier to just leave that tangled monster be – it’s always done its thing, so let it get on with it… life’s complicated enough, isn’t it?

And yet each of us must manage our own perception of a temporal, material world. We have to cope as it unfolds around us, and we all nurture a certain level of competence so as to operate inside it. Our endeavours are perhaps less resolute than the word ‘operate’ implies, but we have a tool – we’ve done some work. Under the cold, reliable gaze of the clock we regulate our lives; keep appointments, get paid by the hour, know how old we are… This is useful stuff, and it’s all because we created units of measurement based on an understanding of the movement of our planet around a star. An invention of necessity has given us a version of time that suits us well.

When I think about the Earth circling the Sun it triggers a curiosity for unimaginable distances and a sense of wonder at how gravity causes motion on such a scale… whilst remaining invisible. It isn’t concepts of time, it’s concepts of cosmic geography at play in my head. How clever we were then, to invent ‘clock-time’ as a function of celestial-terrestrial spatial relationships. 

In contrast to the measured, linear progress of clock-time, consider the personal experience of time passing, of duration, of life and living. Consider how memories of what has happened and expectations of what might be, can become compressed into a dynamic, living-present. I can make decisions now, that are entirely wrapped up with what has happened before, but I don’t scroll back through my mind’s diary and plot my course with any certainty; I may just as well dive in. I am myself, and I keep going. If I make the effort to recall something important from say 20 years ago or 2 years ago – it isn’t the numbers I’m thinking of, it is the thing itself – particularly its sense and relevance to me now. In this way time is entirely my own construct, and about my personal, mortal choices.

Occasionally an involuntary thought or feeling, whatever the trigger, can feed the past uninvited into the present; and so it becomes new, it becomes ‘now’ – the past even becomes ‘what now?’; potential. An emotively driven and reasoned out internal system of functioning somehow works in tandem with whatever mysterious and external structures of time and space exist, and over which I have no control.

It is these thoughts that are relevant to the two works ‘Rue iii’ and ‘Rue vi’ in the exhibition ‘Temporal Objects’. Although completed this week, they have evolved from ‘The Call’ (2018) an installation made 2 years ago across a large wall, next to a window, and which started with a single, material object – a black wooden hoop pinned at an angle. Graphite lines and more hoops followed. Over time I added and removed hoops, drew and rubbed out lines and created alternative light sources. I lived with it, watched it, worked with it. ‘The Call’ inevitably spread across the whole wall. 

At the time I wrote:

‘In a practical sense the role of the artist in this shifting parade feels no more or less significant than that of the sun. The sun moves the shadows, the artist fixes a circle at a new angle, rubs out a line or lengthens another. Such developments are absorbed and waited upon… more change will occur. Meanwhile zones of intensity become identifiable from the herd, even possible to name like constellations in the sky. ‘Dinner Plate’ and ‘Egg and Spoon’ were so discovered.’

**Extract from ‘Stuff Happens’, 2018, published by Arthouse1, London

These ‘constellations’ became instruments of the immaterial: of light, time, and change. Shadows moved, spaces opened up, viewpoints differed… nothing that amazing, pretty much what you would expect (but then we ‘expect’ so very many different things). In the end I took the whole thing down – no room for it.  

The significance of ‘The Call’ is its inexhaustible possibilities. The configurations and reconfigurations were done in earnest; the shapes and spaces, the lines and air – there was an intentionality that may have presupposed future work, I’m not sure; I was too wrapped up in it. Interestingly, configurations that I am sure were never there I now hold in my imagination, and they are indistinguishable from those which can unreliably be said to have actually been there…

© Della Gooden, May 2020

‘That Tangled Monster” was originally drafted to accompany my work ‘Rue: iii & vi’ in the exhibition ‘Temporal Objects’ at Saturation Point, London, 2020. Click here to see more images of it. Images of all work in that exhibition can be found using the link “Temporal Objects’ here

**Extract from ‘Stuff Happens’, 2018, published by Arthouse1, London