‘NOTES on a return’ to a not-Forgotten: Durations of the missed and the previously unvisited

摘要

Employing a concern about the temporality of eventhood as impetus to academic engagement, this article addresses an anxiety familiar to all performance goers, practitioners and scholars, that of ‘missing’ work. Acknowledging the status usually afforded to those ‘present’ at an event, experiencing this through a primary durational aesthetic, this paper focuses instead on a specific non-attendance.To miss implies the existence of a particular temporal duration in which a performative event subsists and through which this is communicated. Beginning with an experience of ‘not-forgetting’ (Badiou), and thinking performance both in terms of duration and objecthood, this paper offers a close reading of a missed encounter with a series of gallery-based events which I did not visit.Operating across multiple spatio-temporal distances, ‘NOTES on a return’ (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, 2009) persistently invites and initiates returns from those who missed or were missed, resituating archival documents, audio recollections and newly commissioned works within the same spaces where previous performances and installations had taken place.Constructed as a series of events, it is likely that many visitors ‘missed’ parts of ‘NOTES on a return’ or engaged with hindsight via attention to other resources. Attending retrospectively to this programme, this article constructs an experience though memorial, material and digital documents, drawing, amongst other objects, on a ‘live’ presentation by curator Sophia Yadong Hao (ICA London).Testing the ways in which displacements of time and context inflect, enable or limit our perceptions of art events, this article liberates notions of encounter from the limitations both of transient performance and the object thought as static remnant through attention to the ‘missed’, exploring the possibility of returning to and making a memory of something previously unvisited.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.728455