Exhibition: ‘Thinking Aloud’

Curator: Richard Wentworth (artist)

Hayward Gallery, 1998

This exhibition was on at the same time as Constant’s New Babylon was released. When I re-read my Constant’s notes I remembered this exhibition catalogue I discovered more recently and found it rather interesting that these two occurred simultaneously. It felt rather like the response to the end of a era, the end of a millennium; there was uncertainty, even the element of fear, people were aware of their existence within a specific time. Both book and catalogue seemed to be about trying to put some order to chaos; a human condition to want to map, collect, define and confine for fear of change and losing something along the way. Humans have this inescapable desire to compartmentalise, “a drive towards the integrity of the list.” Does this become more predominant in times of crisis or uncertainty? Richard Wentworth addresses Robinson Crusoe in the exhibition catalogue, saying, “Containers are fundamentally of the body; (Robinson Crusoe) is clothed and fabricates an umbrella to guard his immediate territory against inclement tropical weather. Here, limit gives identity, a limit secured and defined within belts and pouches, muskets and perspective glasses (telescopes).”