Some notes on Nostimos by Allan McLeod
Like memory, Nostimos is divided. While memory, a central theme of the installation, is divided between the present and the past, Nostimos is divided by medium: print and film (Nostimos being the title of the film). While we ask what the present is by looking to the past, the artwork asks what print is by dividing the viewer’s attention between the numerous prints and a film.
Nostimos asks a question about a medium, the answer it offers is a meditation on memory. If both print and film are records of the past, it is the viewer's attention that brings them to life and into the present. The divided media introducing a self-awareness to that act of attention. In doing so, thematizing the divided nature of memory and our uses of it.
The achievement of Nostimos is in the very simplicity of using two mediums to address the theme of memory. Dividing the work keeps it open. An openness that calls for active viewing. A correspondence is made between the movement of viewing and to memory's unstable place in the present.
Print may be memory, but Nostimos shows neither print nor memory to be simple or settled, since both interrupt the present. The artwork does not offer untroubled reverie or an idea for the viewer to simply "get" (equally untroubling). Rather than an illusion of unity—of art, self, or the present--Nostimos keeps the viewer moving on the shifting grounds of print and film.
The poet John Keats characterised such divided and mobile awareness as a "negative capability", the capability to withstand uncertainty. As memory can only be that which is not present, so the viewer of Nostimos is asked to tolerate things—print and film— not adding up, because our memories—along with ourselves and the present—do not entirely add up either.
In On Memory and Reminiscence Aristotle can be said to find the origins of visual art in memory—the re-presentation of sense-perception—when he compares it to picturing. Bridget Tempest's print and film installation returns picturing to that origin, allowing each viewer to explore the divided nature of self and memory, between which one can address the other.
Like memory, Nostimos is divided. While memory, a central theme of the installation, is divided between the present and the past, Nostimos is divided by medium: print and film (Nostimos being the title of the film). While we ask what the present is by looking to the past, the artwork asks what print is by dividing the viewer’s attention between the numerous prints and a film.
Nostimos asks a question about a medium, the answer it offers is a meditation on memory. If both print and film are records of the past, it is the viewer's attention that brings them to life and into the present. The divided media introducing a self-awareness to that act of attention. In doing so, thematizing the divided nature of memory and our uses of it.
The achievement of Nostimos is in the very simplicity of using two mediums to address the theme of memory. Dividing the work keeps it open. An openness that calls for active viewing. A correspondence is made between the movement of viewing and to memory's unstable place in the present.
Print may be memory, but Nostimos shows neither print nor memory to be simple or settled, since both interrupt the present. The artwork does not offer untroubled reverie or an idea for the viewer to simply "get" (equally untroubling). Rather than an illusion of unity—of art, self, or the present--Nostimos keeps the viewer moving on the shifting grounds of print and film.
The poet John Keats characterised such divided and mobile awareness as a "negative capability", the capability to withstand uncertainty. As memory can only be that which is not present, so the viewer of Nostimos is asked to tolerate things—print and film— not adding up, because our memories—along with ourselves and the present—do not entirely add up either.
In On Memory and Reminiscence Aristotle can be said to find the origins of visual art in memory—the re-presentation of sense-perception—when he compares it to picturing. Bridget Tempest's print and film installation returns picturing to that origin, allowing each viewer to explore the divided nature of self and memory, between which one can address the other.
