In Shibboleth’s Brief but Richly Illustrated Compendiums of Knowledge series, One-Thing-After-Another has the function to show what happens when images are treated as more than representations and less than things.
The volume is a visual abridgement of the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopaedia from the Fifties. The aim was not to gather all the accumulated knowledge of the ages, but those things that were deemed relevant in postwar Britain, arranged so that they could be understood by juveniles.
Today and post-Brexit, Mick Finch reshuffles the visual apparatus of his childhood atlas into a montage that diagnoses something external about a world that no longer is, and something internal to that same world. Images are words are images. The way children speak sound after sound from word to word sentence to sentence shortness of pauses one tone alone side by side. No order of priority between man and reality. No one doing the looking and no one being looked at. No one being thought and no one doing the thinking. It is unclear whether we are meant to be critical, nostalgic or simply curious about what unfolds across the spreads. We are not called to act, but perceive. We are challenged to accept that framing history is removing ourselves from it in order to explain. Rather than seeing the world as it should be, we are invited to face it as it is: as a visual ecology, a liquid system of representations, a fact sequence. One after another. And we are somewhere in there.
Mick Finch is Professor of Visual Art Practice at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London.
