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Books - Leftover

MA Creative Curating Course

Goldsmiths College, London, 2002, £10

I am told that Leftover is a publication that explores disorganisation, collapse and disruption as positive and creative gestures. However, on receiving this precisely folded foolscap file, I am more reminded of the kind of document passed around by an eager young executive hoping to impress the board members around the table. Much to my relief and satisfaction I soon realise that I have been consciously and deliberately misdirected. In fact, this publication is more like a jack-in-the-box waiting to launch an interventionary explosion into contemporary curatorial practice.

Unfolded, this container for newly commissioned works by eleven international artists appears on one side like a blown-up black-and-white Polaroid of an office. As with most curators’ and artists’ work spaces, this chaotic office shows the Leftover project in progress. Images and texts are displayed around and about, suggesting from the start the unfixed narrative of this project. The Polaroid, a seventies leftover itself, sets the tone for this mobile exhibition.

Unlike most publications, I feel neither responsibility to start on page one nor guilt at flicking to the last page. All the works are loose-leaf, some on gloss paper, all different sizes. I select at random a work by Columbian artist Santiago Castano. It is a fragment of what appears to be a family photo album. Individual images fall off the sides of the page and the central photograph has been cut up and collaged unidentifiably. I find myself trying to make sense of these leftover memory traces, interweaving and questioning my equally fragmented knowledge of life in the artist’s home town of Bogotà based on news stories, South American literature and other sources. The preconception and reality of fear/threat in the urban environment mingle in this compelling work.

Elsewhere in Leftover a variety of conceptual directions are explored, creating a certain ambiguity that resists being fully unpicked while still permitting collective cohesion. Perhaps this conceptual tension stems from the extended curatorial team which produced this publication. It seems that there may have been some dispute over the philosophical origins of Leftover. In a dialogue between two of the curators, also included in this publication, ideas flit between snippets of (mis-)remembered quotes from Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, Scott Lash and then back again. What emerges eventually from this conversation, amongst other things, is that Leftover is playing with reinterpreted leftover concepts to produce something ‘new’ as well as grappling with hyper-organised disorganisation resembling my understanding of chaos theory.

If I am slightly bewildered by this dialogue, one thing is sure: the work included in Leftover is fascinating and includes a diverse spread of artists from Peter Davies to Olaf Nicolai, Dan Perjovschi and Harry Pye. All eleven artists engage stimulatingly with the project’s concepts leaving the curators to be congratulated on the structural formula. This is definitely an art book, exhibition, intervention - call it what you will - that I will return to.

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