(taken from text called curatorial dreams)

43, keep quiet

I’m once again in the dark and nighttime is running. This was the case once before and curatorial dreams can be the other side of a project that became a text. I’m cold and can walk up and down and this happened before. Wearing just a belstaff jacket and hat involves constraints, but the Tate Modern first became a desert and now nobody looks. Nobody looks in fifty years and it's like science fiction. And Tarkovsky’s Stalker did the honours. I’m in the dark with a script and the script is just a text. One that comes nowhere near what Lacan calls the voice.

I remember listening and not listening and not hearing what there was as to hear and this also happens with the psychoanalytic school. I call recent video noise and come up with a conundrum.

I've a conundrum it seems. There’s first silence or the silence of the analyst and everything fits around this silence. Talking remains and falls as writing and texts are dense. There is the work of art and art can be anything that’s not like the voice in psychoanalysis. Being in the dark channels an expression that looks like the Tate Modern in previous passages or a desert eventually and nighttime is personal. I can’t stop talking in this personal world and turning the voice into silence isn’t possible. I interrupt and silence can’t be the silence of the night. I wander around carrying an eighteenth century Japanese lantern wearing only a belstaff jacket and hat. I should pull it down it seemsm but have my hands full and I’m not on my own. The gesture is complete and being in the dark helps. Looking is no longer possible and I've said this before. A desert pervades and being in the dark exorcises what’s left of trajectories fifty years ago.

There’s first silence, then the voice that can’t be silence, then the caprice of a thousand and one dreams. The surreal that remains surreal shelters work that was once called conceptual. There’s silence, voice and an umbrella that holds up the night. The work of art is a shockwave, shutting out silence and the work of psychoanalysis. I can’t keep quiet.

Christopher Sands, still, 18 July 2018

Christopher Sands, still, 9 august 2014