It is a wide open exhibition space. Scattered within are brilliant white fluorescent light tubes. I know this is an important piece of the conceptual art movement but when I enter the room they are not switched on. And so my gaze wanders off and focuses on book shelves which are lining the walls of the gallery. They are stacked high with what looks like exhibition catalogues, magazines and quirky objects and I begin searching for something that will shed light on this particular exhibition. Vaguely I am wondering why all these books and leaflets are here in the gallery and not in the museum shop downstairs. Browsing through the material, I am interrupted often by other visitors. Everyone seems to be in a real rush, in fear someone else snatches the item before oneself can get to it. Each item on the shelves seems to be provided only once so that the overall feeling of precipitance takes hold of me.
I stumble and get more and more frustrated because none of these books seem to be about this particular exhibition or about the artist. Everything I find is interesting but leads me on entirely different paths of association; I find images of baroque ceiling frescos showing romantic rose skies and clouds, I find collections of prose but I am too impatient to read them, I find hard bound and cheaper, paperback copies and feeling more and more uncomfortable I am trying to find something to purchase.
I am already holding two copies, the book with the romantic skies which seems to be rather pricy as well as an experimental looking Fluxus leaflet, when I find a pile of apparently second-hand books at the very bottom of a shelf. Intrigued I put my previous finds next to me and start browsing. By this time I have outright forgotten that it was my aim to find the catalogue of the light installation, that in the meantime, has switched itself on and off again. These rather small, grubby, second-hand paper backs seem to have a real presence, and it is then that I find a Tupperware box holding four mysterious extremely small hydro plants. From the label I can see that they have been put into the plastic box in 1976 in their homeland, Japan.
I realise that I was never going to find the right exhibition catalogue; that the whole display of books and informative material was not set up to help me make sense of the exhibition. And I buy the box of plants not knowing how to look after them.
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