Sketches of

Universal History
Compiled from
Several Authors
by Sarah Pierce
 Sketches of
Universal History
Compiled from
Several Authors
by Sarah Pierce

Edited by Rike Frank

Book Works in association with The Showroom
Contents

4 Introduction, Rike Frank

8 The Artist Talks
30 A Short History of Ekphrasis and its
Demanding Audience, Melissa Gronlund
42 Monk’s Garden
45 Partially Unburied Shed (with textual variations),
Barbara Clausen
56 Sarah Pierce, A conversation with Rike Frank
62 It’s time, man. It feels imminent.
84 The Meaning of Greatness
109 We New Traditionalists, Sarah Pierce and
Pádraic E. Moore
120 Towards a Newer Laocoön
122 And So On And So On: Seven Non-synthesized Quotes,
Conjectures and Questions Prompted by Sarah Pierce’s
Towards a Newer Laocoön, Declan Long
136 Future Exhibitions
158 Invitation to the Interval, Tom Holert
168 Chronology 2003–2013
172 Works Cited
176 Colophon
Introduction
Rike Frank

Pierce’s decision to obscure her own ‘place’ within a practice by

using a methodical term to represent her artistic work and by choosing

of what it means to be in
one’s work in a solo show or in the form of a book.

explore how authorship and ‘knowing’ operate within available and open

and ascribes meaning and thus value. The displayed reformatting and
reiterating of content and formal structures articulate our experience of

transaction: as an act of structuring controlled by the subject and as

condition of the artwork interfere and complicate processes of antici-

and represent works of art as a responsive network of re-invented past

artworks and ascribed meanings. The combination of different
a leading educationalist and founder of one of the earliest institutes for

. As a resource for future and displaying multiple temporary proximities. This process is not

linear history of humankind the publication carries with it a lineage of artwork to disappear. What comes to light is a treatment of the object as
a conceptual mode that binds the tangible and intangible together. Again

term The Metropolitan Complex towards the discrete or the contained. And although one cannot ‘get rid’

relationships. To the same degree Pierce demonstrates with this book

articulated through working methods that often open up to the personal the shifting dynamics in representation that arise between moments of
and the incidental. Characterised as a way to play with a shared neurosis authoring and strategies of a certain disavowal of such a (monographic)
of “place”...’ book’s claims – its authority (and authorship).

—4— —5—
neither in chronological order nor do they represent a contained body practice.

Early in life we are told: you are not the centre of the universe.

the parts resonate through each other. There are certain moments of

It is hardly my contention that artists should strive to regain

access to past events as to future artworks.

consider how this inherent aspect of subjecthood (its self-

have something to say about the way in which systemicity

tendencies of signature style or an over-riding theme operates in artistic procedures.1
the work of one artist we come to understand the ways that artworks

catalogue essay in
and presentation that Pierce undertakes highlight a continual negotiation
of the terms for making art: the potential for dissent and self- going beyond the associative reference to the title and Pierce’s liking

artworks. which often opens to

and what exactly might these concepts say about how ‘systemicity
operates in artistic procedures’?

‘voices’ back into what Foucault calls the ‘murmur’ – those gestures that
into formal structures. More than what how we know binds us
together in culturally produced and time-based manifestations of ‘the
just-past’.

of one person’s work.

the treatment of documents and source material as well as the reprint of

have been supporting Pierce’s practice throughout the last decade.

to the publication. Each writer presents terms that come out of his

—6— —7—