Footnotes: Walking Backwards

Toward Meaning

Curated by Lydia Chai

Four artists look to the humble footnote for inspiration

When Vladimir Putin was studying[1] for the equivalent of an MBA, he inadvertently shot himself in the foot(note) by acknowledging a text from which he had heavily plagiarised. The tell-tale reference was discovered only last year by an American scholar.[2]

Relegated to the bottom of the page, footnotes are often thought of as having a lower priority than the main text. In fact, some consider them a nuisance since they interrupt and jostle for attention. Somebody once said, 'Give a footnote an inch and it’ll take a foot'[3]. John Updike wrote in 1957[4] on the frequent use of annotations in poetry in which he included a parodic sonnet made up of fourteen footnotes. He was perhaps concerned about the pedestrian footnote tainting poetry with its prose.

However, anecdotes like that of Putin’s misstep inevitably turn this hierarchy of words on its head and return authority to the footnote.

Artists, especially, delight in the tangential, intuitive connectivity of footnotes and their persuasions to wander down a detour now and then, because their unpredictability aids the art practice and research. The footnote is more spontaneous than its inward-looking and organised sister, the index.

Caroline Rothwell’s watercolours of hybridised flora/fauna possess innocence and wonder at human intervention with nature together with the menace that lies underfoot. These works are inspired by first-contact European drawings of the New World. Such drawings would have been inaccurate at times but they were all the colonisers had to go by as fact. The footnote facilitates postmodern sensibility as it delights in double narrative and palimpsests[5], and so it is the rewriting or recreation of events and histories that informs Rothwell’s invented worlds.

Footnotes are also peripheral visually and conceptually, and it is the periphery that is the artist’s domain. Consider Kirsten Dryburgh’s and Kah Bee Chow’s contrasting video works online that deal with the under-regarded familiar. Dryburgh’s amazingly lo-fi video revolves around the idea of the moon as a footnote to Earth but, of course, so significant to us that it pulls tides and affects clouds. Chow, meanwhile, zooms in on Asian eateries around Auckland from cultures on the fringe.

As a collection, footnotes are like dregs on a strainer, lending substance but filtered out for refinement and smoother consumption. Or else they are as roots at the bottom of the page, simultaneously anchoring the main text and expanding out from it – an analogy I explore in my drawings of stumps and roots. In his heavily annotated memoir, Martin Amis proclaims the footnote essential to 'preserve the collateral thought'[6]. His excellent choice of the word ‘collateral’ all at once describes it as a reinforcement, a subordinate as well as something that secures credibility.

On the other hand, one may argue that footnotes are not fleshed out; they are, in effect, ‘unrealised’ thought. As references, too, they only redirect to that which is more ‘real’ elsewhere.

This real/not-real dialectic brings me to the general galleryW/Owalls presentation: exhibitions in magazines seldom seem ‘real’, so to speak, because they are almost always a reproduction of the art that is shown. The magazine only refers, and images displayed within point to the original art that is photographed/scanned into the computer; and, in our case, point to a website that houses the ‘real’ videos.

Form, not authenticity, is the bone of contention here. How does one fully reconcile the magazine format with an artwork? My Aerial Roots foldout is such an attempt to work with the architecture of the page.

Thus, the magazine exhibition is like the footnote in that it points to something outside of itself. The art bounces off it like information off a satellite.

Finally, one may equate the footnote with something that is overlooked and there is one surprising ‘category’, if you like, of art that fits this shoe: iconic works of art. Sometimes an artwork’s visual identity is so dwarfed by its context or discourse that it becomes an altogether different signifier. When one views Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, for example, one is viewing its pop incarnations, tourism draw, history of theft and culture of replicas.

The physical painting itself has become a footnote to its phenomenon.

Footnotes:

 [1] Whether the President-to-be actually studied was questioned by many ever since the incident recorded in the next footnote.

[2]Putin Thesis Graded P For Plagiarism, New Zealand Herald, 5/4/2006. The American scholar in question is Clifford Gaddy 'who determined that 16 pages of text and a number of charts, tables and other graphics came from a book written two decades earlier by two American professors', William R. King and David I. Cleland.

[3]William H. Honan, Footnotes Offering Fewer Insights, the New York Times, 14/8/1996, B9.

[4] Notes, The New Yorker, 26/1/1957, p28

[5]Paraphrase from Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History Of Footnotes, Invisible Cities Press, 2002, p144.

[6]Experience: A Memoir, New York: Hyperion, 2000, p7.

"This exhibition was commissioned by galleryW/Owalls and Off The Edge magazine."

galleryW/Owalls is a space that attempts to deconstruct the concept of what constitutes a “gallery” - often imagined as a white cube, an exhibition space contained within walls. It positions itself as a non-profit, mobile contemporary art space which develops projects and commissions new works for the print and virtual realms. The gallery is interested in what happens when a work is created digitally is uploaded on the internet and published in a magazine with a mass circulation. Will the perception of art, art making and the art market change when there is not just one original or a limited edition of copies but 25,000 originals? And what if the images, animations or videos, stored in cyberspace, could be downloaded as pixels onto mobile phones or computer screens? Or perhaps freely downloaded, re-manipulated and owned by many people? What relationships will art and art making, and the traditional notions of aura and monetary value have then?

galleryW/Owalls explores the possibilities of new ways of making and thinking about art and design by dismantling traditional paradigms of the original and copy, private ownership and public property, aesthetic value and the market value, capitalist enterprise and the democratic impulses of digital technology.

The gallery host both solo and group exhibitions and projects. Guest curators will be invited to develop ideas and projects that will challenge both the usage of the space and the audience as well as the dissolution of boundaries between design and fine art, craft and technology.