Lawrence Weschler’s book of interviews with the American artist Robert Irwin, has the title: Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.
The moment you enter Ruud’s exhibition, you descend into it. My head is barely above the surface. The surface hides dredged up stories about the forgotten. In the gutters and alongside train tracks biproducts of our culture is decaying. It morphs into one mate- rial. Dust.
Remember this place. Pieces and chunks of your everyday surroundings are present in this space. The patina of the streets is present in this space. The core tradition and history of this space is present in this space.
Microscopic bleeding and blood vessel blockage in the brain, is the second most common cause of dementia. Remember this; your memory is your consciousness. If you could only remember in one split of a second you wouldn’t know you were there. Hewasoutoflove.AttheendIwashis external memory. I did it out of love.
We forget things on purpose, when the wit- ness disappears everything is forgotten, and we start all over again. Destruction, violence and abuse inflicted upon the singular memory can go on for decades before it becomes a collective memory, and we start remembering again. Out of love, because we’re out of love.
In this vault of the forgotten, Ruud has reminded me to look below the surfaces. There would be no flowering water lilies without its roots. The stuff (matter) that makes up forms is amorphous. And through our memories we create forms by stuffing them with stuff. It is the idea of a form that is imposed on the amor- phous thing. The stuff occupies the forms for a certain amount of time before it flows into the amorphous once more. The idea lives on in your memory. The content-container relation- ship is only temporary. Maybe for a couple of minutes or even 150 000 years.
Please focus on the intrinsic and ignore the material hierarchy. And remember; Seeing is indeed forgetting the name of the thing one sees.
— Igory Mansotti
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