On Merlyn Riggs’ art practise
Merlyn Riggs’ collaborative art practice is structured and delivered, hosted might be more apt, through the act of hospitality. Merlyn operates a peripatetic tea room. She has also recently run a food drop-in centre based in Deveron Arts’ shop/studio. The drop-in centre provided a warm space with tea and home made cake, a space to share both recipes and daily woes. Merlyn has a history of intervening, introducing conviviality through food that acts as a central term linking disparate groups. These alliances have included prostitutes and professors through cheesecake and politicians and the homeless through soup. Merlyn’s hands on hospitality that curates the event space merges the act of curation with the role of host, these terms carry religious connotations. The curator linked through Latin to curatus, the curate who is invested with the care or cure (cura) of souls of a parish, and the host as consecrated bread.1 The artist’s hospitality is a third term that also involves the notion of care. Jung suggested that the cure for dis-ease of the Western soul might be found through exploration of Christian development. This was not a zealous cry for religious conversion but a call to reexamine value.2 The process of re-valuing the everyday and the overlooked is at the heart of Merlyn’s practice. Merlyn’s drive for integrity grows up from and honours existing undercurrents that are particular to place. The importance of this roots upward process is something that Jung understood from his study of Western spiritual development. He found that abandonment of concretised Christian knowledge in favour of new and exotic Eastern wisdom produced only an intellectual aping of an (Eastern) attitude. This disconnected adoption of knowledge is always inherently unstable, it drives forward through the will and consciousness alone leaving it vulnerable to overthrow. Merlyn’s sensitive public practice artfully makes non-art out of ‘old somethings’ that are revalued into ‘new somethings’.3 This is an act of mimesis that does not look to ‘re-describe’ but to ‘re-signify’, her practice does not reproduce Platonic ‘weakened copies’, but engages in a relational mimesis that only takes place within the field of human action, becoming ‘an augmentation of meaning in the field of action’.4 Knowledge freed from stricture is returned to a more symbolic and possible position. For Jung this meant lifting dogma enforced through religious ordering, for Merlyn this endeavour aims to recover feminine sexual difference from its reduction to the maternal reproductive function or role at the hands of phallocratic culture.5 She searches for lost potentials of meaning in the form of the feminine, potentials that are considered barren, because they are not reproductive of a truth produced by power. Her endeavour to recover this situation begins with acceptance of the humblest things. She embraces the ‘at home’ through her thoughtful, reflective methodology and upsets the totality as she recovers the sublimated, the abject, the surplus that falls outside of mainstream knowledge production.
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Boston University Theology Archives. <http://sthweb.bu.edu/archives/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid> 2 R Wilhelm Trans. Commentary C Jung. The Secret of the Golden Flower. A Chinese Book of Life. Harvest Books: New York;1931. P127. 3 Kelley J. Editor. Kaprow A. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. London:University of California Press; 2003. 4 Ricoeur 1981.16. In Gray F. Jung, Irigaray, Individuation. Philosophy, Analytical Psychology, and the Question of the feminine. Hove: Routledge; 2008. P47-48 5 Cornell D. Beyond Accommodation, Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law. Rowman and Littlefield:1999. P8
Merlyn’s cure is found through the flavours of home, found with the Coffee Morning, Cake and Tattie Soup. These victuals all lend a fluidity to the proceedings that see her identifying underplayed community energies, breaking down social boundaries and insisting on creative participation and inclusion. She achieves this in several ways; first by working with the underplayed existing forces and drawing in the marginalised. Secondly through the limits that she imposes in the space of the event that she is hosting, these have included ticketed chair allocation, guests may not sit with the people they arrive with but instead they must break bread with strangers and meals where neighbours must fill each others plates. The guests are drawn into dialogue, becoming at once both creator of content and audience. The aesthetic is found through this shared participatory process. There is an inclusion of context, which is the antithesis of singular system production that ‘commodifies all of culture’6, or if we return to Jung, singular production via consciousness alone. For Merlyn art is without commodity, she rejects production of the schizoid art object that is available for passive conscious, consumption. These objects are usually found in the modernist white cube, in a ready realised, fully reasoned delivery of information that is usually supportive of the intent of the institution, objects that provide not ‘experience, but the evidence of it’.7 Her rejection of non-reflective transcendent objects that relate only as essence or ‘things in themselves’ returns the focus to the individuals and their object relations with each other that make up the event. Merlyn instigates a process of communication, she provides a space and a duration for experiential exchange that values and induces subjective, embodied ways of knowing.8 This is what she makes, this is her art. Kelly and Fergus Conner, Coarsespace
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Bauldrillard J. The Consumer Society. Myths and Structures. London: Sage; 1998 P15 O’Doherty B. Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Expanded edition. London: University of California Press; 1986 P64 8 Kester G. Conversation Pieces, Community and Communication in Modern Art. London: University of California Press; 2004 P90 7