Afterimages
Subtitle: a re-presentation of selected works 1993 - 1998.
Contributors: Prema.
Publisher: InSites Publishing
Published: 1998
Place of publication: [Uley]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 24
Description: Catalogue Text by Martin Lister 

The work represented here was made between 1993 and 1998.  A retrospective catalogue looks back and across a series of works; a way of offering a view of change, development, or perhaps difference, in how an artist has worked over a period of time.  In this sense, a catalogue may promise to give us a view of process - the work of transformation over time.  Yet, the form of the catalogue, in fact the form of  books in general, can encourage something quite different. Publications tend to privilege and reinforce the singularity and discreteness of the images that appear on their pages.  Each image is framed by the edges of the page, each one is placed in considered isolation and held apart from the other (invisible) images sitting on the other closed pages.  Each one is individuated by title and date.  Of course, we turn the pages and make the mental effort to carry one set of impressions to the next, but the pressure of the form continually works to obscure the relationships....

.....The history of 20th century art is shot through with strategies to foreground ‘art 
as process’ over ‘art as commodity’; the effort to make work which resists an easy assimilation to a consumerist economy and culture.  Stories of how such strategies have been recuperated are well known: how the urinal became the curator’s precious object; or how, through its photographic, film or video documentation, the ephemeral and subversive performance becomes a form of cultural capital; a qualification for the next Arts Council grant or piece of corporate sponsorship.  There has been little, 
if anything, in this radical history which has not been commodified; setting artist’s interventions apart from the lived social relations in which they were made and finally rendering them up as items to be traded and invested in.  This may be the history, but in the work of an artist like Annie Lovejoy we can see these strategies at work in the here and now.
Notes: Published to accompany the exhibition 'return' at Prema, Uley, Glos., 29 March - 10 May 1998.