Red assembly: The work remains
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Date
2016
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape
Abstract
The work that emerged from the encounter with Red, an art installation by Simon
Gush and his collaborators, in the workshop �Red Assembly�, held in East London in
August 2015, is assembled here in Kronos, the journal of southern African histories
based at the University of the Western Cape, and previously in parallax, the cultural
studies journal based at the University of Leeds published in May 2016. What is presented
there and here is not simply more work, work that follows, or even additional
works. Rather, it is the work that arises as a response to a question that structured
our entire project: does Red, now also installed in these two journals, have the potential
to call the discourse of history into question? This article responds to this question
through several pairings: theft � gift; copy � rights; time � history; kronos � chronos.
Here we identify a reversal in this installation of the gift into the commodity, and
another with regard to conventional historical narratives which privilege the search
for sources and origins. A difference between (the historian�s search for) origination
and (the artist�s) originality becomes visible in a conversation between and over the
historic and the artistic that does not simply try to rescue History by means of the
work of art. It is in this sense that we invite the displacements, detours, and paths
made possible through Simon Gush�s Red, the �Red Assembly� workshop and the work/
gift of installation and parallaxing. To gesture beyond �histories� is the provocation to
which art is neither cause nor effect. Thinking with the work of art, that is, grasping
thought in the working of art, has extended the sense of history�s limit and the way
the limit of history is installed. What to do at this limit, at the transgressive encounter
between saying yes and no to history, remains the challenge. It is the very challenge of
what insistently remains.
Description
Keywords
Red, Exhibition, History, Installation
Citation
Witz, L. et al. (2016). Red assembly: The work remains. Kronos, 42: 10 - 28