Revisiting the retrospective of the work of Jordan McKenzie.

Abstract

The act of art retrospective, specifically that placed within a museum or gallery, is to reflect on, and give knowledge of something past. A retroactive overview of a person’s artistic practice, the retrospective exhibition is backwards facing rather than future focused. As an act that normally specifies finiteness and conclusion a living artist’s retrospective produces an anomaly as a consequence. In 2016 I simultaneously staged the Alternative Document symposium and exhibition. This included Retrospective 2027 by Jordan McKenzie, a living artist, as a keynote performance in the symposium. Positioned as a keynote in the symposium rather than the exhibition it not only offered the retrospective as a representation of the artworks of the living, but also challenged traditional formats of structural placement. Situated within colloquialism rather than exhibition, the aim was to set it adrift from the gallery and the predominantly visual to open it to critical debate. This paper analyses an approach to retrospective that differs from the conventional, as one that is performed, gestural and event-based rather than static and exhibited in a gallery and includes my critical conversation with the artist. It asks what this means for the artwork, the documentary in performance and ephemeral practice, the archive, the exhibition and retrospective in McKenzie’s work. Presented in Documents, Alternatives: a symposium of artistic process and practice, BSAD (Bath), 20 April 2018. The symposium is staged simultaneously with the exhibition Documents, Alternatives (#3) at BSAD gallery, which is open to the public 20th April – 1st May 2018. The exhibition and symposium are part of the Alternative Document, a project by Dr. Angela Bartram, Associate Professor and Head of Arts Research, at University of Derby.