ELIZABETH EASTMOND
atching my step (on crutches, accessory: moonboot, gaze necessarily at floor-level) my first encounter at the Michael Lett exhibit is a waste paper bin. On closer inspection one containing the sad residue of left-over bulldog paper clips. et al.? Of course. What a relief! Great entrée punctuation marker to a major current exhibition. Plus a relief to know, from the title, . We've been looking. For direction. On looking though, what at first glance reminded me of the 2004 Autumn cover, which, for once (more relief in retrospect), displayed an object not an artist: a portaloo … was here a giant similarly parodic minimal-like box-shape filing cabinet, also on wheels—but nice red ones. For me, they coincided. The cabinet was painted that dense blackboard black. It constituted itself plus its unseen contents, allegedly the artists’ papers,. My hopes were raised. Portaloos may handle excretion, waste, but filing cabinets, the old-school containers under investigation here, are, by contrast, retainers. Of all that information. What on? We want to know. We want to know, don't we, ‘about’ the artists and their hidden psyches? Their scandal-mag selves? Well, we probably won't get to do so in this case. But then you never know, it could be possible, given permission via application to the appropriate authorities and the assistance of another gloved gallery technician of course—or was that a member of the collective in the photograph? This could take time.
