Uncommon Sense
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear,
so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Karl Marx’s sentiment might better be revised to read: “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, ad nauseam – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, and by each subsequent iteration, sadder and more absurd than the last.” History reveals our worst compulsions; it is heavy with repetition fatigue, weighed down by our wilful forgetfulness. “What we cannot remember,” a certain psychoanalyst once said, “we will repeat.” History, then, is less a pat retelling of the past than a cautionary tale of the cruelty we are fated to reprise.
Lorienne Lotz has long made a study of history’s rehearsals, her compositions a stage on which a changing cast of corrupt characters return time and again to familiar plot points. The seeming instability of truth is a thematic throughline in her enquiries, as is a sense of being oversaturated and overstimulated by the glut of news media that has come to define the polarised present. Evading the entrenched positions of contemporary politics, Lotz instead pursues a productive uncertainty in her material engagement with her subject. “These works do not seek resolution,” the artist writes. “I am interested in what happens when absurdity is no longer hidden beneath the surface but becomes the surface itself.” Read the full Essay here
Essay Written by: Lucienne Bestall
