The Thing -Final Post

We can look at Carpenter's film, Judd' s essay, O'Donaghue's poem or Foucault's 'Preface', but ultimately we need to draw from these resources 'fuel' for our own practices.

In Carpenter's film we see 'The Thing' as a locus of distrust, paranoia caused by the unknown (as appropriate to a 'War On Terror as to a 'Cold War' perhaps).

In Foucault's Preface, 'Things' are less important than the 'Table' or Order on which and by which we organise them as a system of Knowledge.

In Judd we can see a repeated dumbing-down of European art language, the introduction of casual and equivocal speech (e.g. 'fairly'). The word 'Things' appears in this context, a way of avoided addressing art and sculpture with grandeur, a way of making art's problems more malleable and manageable.

We can use these texts to ask our own questions about how to deploy this term, to what extent our sculpture embodies the idea of 'The Thing along with any other meaning it might have. Does our sculpture contest the historical notion of The Thing? Is it singular or dissipated? Is it resilient or ephemeral? Is it recognisable or muysterious? Which of Judd's many examples does it compare with?

Could our sculpture evoke that uncertainty celebrated in Carpenter's film? Or does it question the organisation of objects that we come to know as a reassuring culture or knowledge?

Could our sculpture evoke the human attachment to Things, or their apparent, ultimate disinterest in our own existence and duration?