In Search Of Last Time
Mei Cooper >

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Making time for time
Mythily Meher

At the start of Waiting for Godot’s second act, Vladimir, the more introspective of the two tramps, sings a circular song about a dog who stole a crust of bread, was killed for it, and buried by the other dogs who then inscribe his grave with the story of how he came to rest. The song is designed to repeat itself forever, like a black hole for narrative. In it, says Eugene Webb, “time is not a linear sequence but an endlessly reiterated moment”. In Beckett’s small universe where Godot is awaited, time is a closed system with futility at the centre of its orbit. But even though Webb’s remark says something relevant to Mei Cooper’s In Search of Last Time, the players in this show seem fully aware of the world’s tendency towards sameness, and instead of despairing, they make homage to it. In Search of Last Time comprises six staged online and onsite shows in the Window archive that have bypassed the usual fanfare of an opening and ‘live’ engagment with an audience.

The works in these shows all orient to a theme of doing again, or happening again, but they do so with a measure of nostalgia or as contemplative studies. In the collaborative work between Mei and her partner, Mark Burrows, Mark (who is a photographer) was given artistic license to shoot the art-photo cliches he cringes at himself for being drawn to. Mei then re-eneacted these photographs, using Mark’s images as maps for what to shoot. In the text accompanying the show, they make an eloquent case for why the repeated documentation of certain worn subjects is not pointless. Joseph Nerney’s online work articulates something similar in spliced footage of waves breaking on the shore. His video composition reminds me of a scene from Antoine St Exupery’s The Little Prince, where the story’s young hero explains that the planet he comes from is so tiny, that if one so desired, they could watch the sun set over and over again, simply by moving a few steps forward every several minutes to follow it. These two shows are perhaps the ones most evocative of romantic sensibility, though Time After Time, a video mashup featuring all the versions of Cyndi Lauper’s classic on YouTube, comes close.

David Hofer’s paintings in Seconding all feature boats on the water, but the scenes are picked out in different tones from David’s palette each time. Each canvas makes a gentle rhythym and together they make a pleasing monotony.  David’s piece in the group show carries this aesthetic also, but plays on words and image: it depicts a reflection, and is entitled Pool house pool. In a space of their own, on the wall behind David’s painted mirror, are Priya Patel’s photos of what could be any concrete walls. A projection of Aindriu Macfehin’s juicily coloured Hiruharama Super 8 completes the onsite component of this show. Aindriu’s film documents his reinactment of part of a walk he once did to a commune he once lived at, that has since become a convent. Online, in Ten Minutes, Sophie Bannan remakes moments of dance scenes from famous movies, holding each pose for ten minutes while her pinhole camera burns the image to film. If dance is dance for its movement, then Sophie contradicts the meaning of dancing, but if dancers are dancers for their bodily control then Sophie exemplifies the essence of this craft. I think of these photographs as stills, and the double entendre is satisfying.

In Search of Last Time is not made up of fictional works, but fictional shows, and that distinction must be recognised. The straight-to-archive exhibition is like an artworld equivalent of the straight-to-dvd movie. Of course, the temporality of art exhibitions mean that most are destined to documentation, but there is something self-effacing about Mei’s gesture even though she’s playing up that quality. Speaking to her about the show, she mentions Robert Smithson’s thoughts on entropy, whereby the proliferation of abundance amounts to the loss of distinct pieces of information; so even if nothing is the same, everything becomes like everything else because there’s so much of it. “There is no moving forwards in such a system”, says Mei, “just sideways”. History repeats itself but is frozen in time.