Press Release 
Museum of Vexed Text:
Peter Suchin


Museum of the Vexed Text is the first public showing of Peter Suchin's filing cards or fiches, the basis for a form of note taking with which he has been engaged for some 20 years. The cards contain a wide range of jottings, scribbles, doodles and diagrams. These include quotations from friends and acquaintances, lists of things to do, spontaneous phrases, puns, suggestions for titles, telephone numbers, diary notes, citations from the radio, mnemonics, teaching prompts, anagrams, and extracts from books. Such notes are, in short, the variegated traces of an idiosyncratic, if paradoxically quotidian practice of writing.

The present selection is of French index cards, first used by Suchin in 1990 and picked for their convenience as a writing surface, their pleasant proportions and colours, and because they can hold a relatively large amount of information in a compact space. They replace cards of much smaller proportions used by Suchin in the 1980s as well as notebooks first employed in the 1970s. The fiches, over 700 of them, are here displayed in a random order and though each carry a date or dates, a narrative exposition is not intended.

Initially folded for portability and ease of writing, both sides of the cards have, in the majority of cases, been marked. Biros and other ink pens (not pencil) were preferred. The exhibition comprises approximately a quarter of the material so far accumulated in this form. A pragmatic approach to the editing of this presentation was employed.

Museum of the Vexed Text also includes a number of Suchin's paintings and published writings.

Peter Suchin was born in 1959. He has contributed essays and reviews to Art Monthly, Art Press, Frieze, Portfolio, Variant, Here and Now, Untitled and Mute amongst many other journals. Compendiums and Palimpsests, a show of Suchin's paintings, was held at T1+2 Artspace, London during August - September 2003.

[ Photos ]     [ Events ]