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C103
Article; from Feature 'Life is what you make of it'
EVERYTHING...
Ronan McCrea
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Everything...
/ Ronan McCrea,
1998-2001 / Installation view
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In
Everything... (multi-coloured neon version, boxed)
1998-2001, a used
cardboard box sits on the gallery floor as if it has
been left behind. The box is open and contained within
it are four illuminated neon signs of different colours.
Each individual sign denotes a decade. The 60s, 70s,
80s and 90s all sit on top of one another, jumbled-up,
folded-out and collapsed. Each decade represents a
period of time in the form of a material object, with
each neon sign acting as a cultural signifier - one
constituent part of the whole of a sculptural object.
Forty years of history, four decades of the artist's
life and one box of glowing red, green, yellow and
blue represents 'everything' you want it to be. Everything...
highlights the fragmented nature of the past and its
constant reinvention over time. Within each decade
there are an infinite number of individual experiences,
each memory a part of a collective whole. The fragmented
nature of recollection means that only certain remembered
moments of the past are passed down through time.
The inheritance of the past through objects and images
of the past -which are gathered together in an ad-hoc
manner - emphasises the ruinous and fragmented nature
of history. If signification and meaning issomehow
embedded within the objects of our past, then they
play an integral part in our cultural inheritance.
Culture is made up of these many fragments and continually
transferred onto others, through storytelling, recollection
and representation. As the collector passes on the
collection, the story-teller relates narratives of
the past, and in this case the artist reproduces what
already exists through the production of more art.
The idea that an object can transcend its mere usefulness
and instead be animated with both allegorical and
historical meaning disengages the object from its
functionality - in a sense it acquires subjectivity.
In this way, a discarded neon sign no longer functions
as a neon sign, a cardboard box is no longer merely
a storage unit. The box in Everything... acts as a
container of signs and a carrier of meaning. If memory
is transmitted from one person to another by means
of the transfer of material objects and their narratives,
then Everything...suggests that memory, and the individual
histories that are contained within these objects,
can be collated as a form of collective identity -
each decade acts as a measuring stick, a cultural
marker and a tangible block of time that represents
a collective zeitgeist for our times.
By contemplating both thecollective and individual
signification of the last four decades in Everything...
it is the responsibility of the spectator to open
up the box and find their own everything. McCrea has
produced such an open work that it is possible for
each and every thing to be located, read and
authenticated in the meanings of the objects andsignifiers
of the past. As Nicolas Bourriaud writes in his essay
on ecleticism and the postproductive nature of contemporary
art practice, 'It is up to us as beholders of art
to bring these relations to light. It is up to us
to judge artworks in terms of the relations they produce
in specific contexts they inhabit. Because art is
an activity that produces relationships to the world
and in one form or another makes its relationships
to space and time material.'
Article reproduced from CIRCA
103, Spring 2003, p. 59.
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