The previous post, transferred with slight edits from my other blog, will be further offered in a gesture designed to render still more complex its conceptual-art embeddedness, as an authorized edition. Details to follow someday.

I originally thought of this account of an actual dream as being situated somewhere in between Yves Klein and Tino Sehgal, but now I suppose it is more properly still stuck between Freud and Jung, with a nod to the fiction of John Crowley and China Miéville.

In Dreams....

  In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

[©? you decide.]

Early on the morning of May 11, I woke from a dream in which I had written a full review of an exhibition at a gallery in Atlanta. I was delighted that I had done the basic work of composing one of the many reviews that I still have to write, until I realized I had written about an exhibition that didn’t exist.

This is what I wrote in the dream, more or less, as best I can reconstruct it. The review is plausible because M.M. (spelled out in the review in the dream) is a large multi-gallery space that houses several independent exhibitions at the same time.

“Unwitting Underground,” at M.M., is a Buddhist-themed exhibition in one of the space’s several galleries that consists of works made from the materials left after the creation of the artworks in the other galleries. Assemblages, not all of them imitative of Sarah Sze’s approach to the problem, contain used-up tubes of paint, marble and granite chips from sculptures, trays of unsuitable found objects, and so forth. (Some viewers may be reminded of the recent show of Thornton Dial works that included wall pieces made from all the detritus he recovered from the studio floor, or of Howard Finster’s “I took the pieces you threw away....”) The work by the anonymous Buddhist artists who created the show incorporated as well all the inventory sheets, scraps of hanging wire, pizza boxes, etc.  discarded by the gallery staff during the installation of the other exhibitions.

One wall piece is a sort of webbed holster in which objects needed for the ongoing creation of art can be put on display long enough to be photographed for inclusion in the exhibition. I installed my cane, with which I hobble around to write these reviews, until the documentation was completed.

I suppose I should have waited until I finished writing, but of course then the cane would not have been part of the exhibition about which I had written.

—Jerry Cullum, May 11, 2013