Present Perfect
Luca Antonucci + Daniel Small
December 12, 2013 - January 25, 2014
Reception: Thursday, December 12, 7:00-10:00 pm
Present Perfect ruins the distinctions it proposes, and moves back and forth in time through a speculative discourse with fetishized abandon. Some objects serve as placeholders for the elusive present, while others are reminders of a past that is never fully recuperated. The excised space of objects since removed are gaps to be found and filled but exist in a lineage of objects that can never be located. Instead, they are parallel continuums that never meet despite their representations being close approximations. There were no limitations to the strategies employed in locating, obtaining, and exhibiting these objects. All have dubious provenances and were stolen, repurposed, fabricated, fictionalized and rerouted through varying historical chronologies.
Taken together, the synthesis of these relics collapse and repurpose objects that are never limited by the finitude of the contexts in which they might be read. For instance, the Winged Victory of Samothrace is an author-less triumph of Greek Hellenistic sculpture that represents an unknown victory. Today, the original rests in the Louvre, while at the site of its' discovery, a plaster replica acts as its' stand-in. The most well known iteration of the sculpture sits in front of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, where yet another pastiche memory of it takes up residence in the fountains in front of the casino. The Winged Victory's plaster surrogate and its' phantasmic iteration at Caesar's Palace are both accepted even as anachronisms, but despite this acknowledgement they elicit more of a response than the original ever could.
These objects and images are not reified variants of a past we know we never knew. Instead they couldn’t be any closer to completing a history that has become unhinged between the past and future. It is for this reason that a present is never fully constituted. A present perfect, acknowledges the past exists, but without specific dates, times, and information. It is the consequence of our memory as an unfinished reality that disperses itself amongst a myriad of sites and contexts.
As an object becomes estranged from its' original setting, it becomes a projection of imagined narratives reconstructed for present desires and ideologies. Instead of the objects serving as a cipher for the past and as gatekeeper of information, they become a series of illusions derived from delusional fantasies. History is based upon the objects and information that were left behind; objects and information deemed not important enough to steal, co-opt, cover up or recapitulate as narratives that bear no resemblance to the experiences or sites that constitute them.
Just do it. Nike.