Text by Francesca Bennett
What is an exhibition, besides a roomful of temporary things?
How many borrowed things do you have at home right now? If you tried to count, how many could it be? For me, it’s mostly books: 11 from four friends’ shelves, and five from the public library, and six more from a different branch of the same library to write this, so 22 books passing through my shelves, across my couch, my bed, my desk, all of which I share with someone else. It’s normal to have things temporarily, to share. If I had a lawn, I think, maybe I would borrow a mower, or more likely, I would be the one who lends my mower out, because at least 22 of my own books are on loan right now, some temporary, some permanent, and some others not yet one or the other.
How many other things do you have from others? I have five to seven shirts from a friend, which is to say that I regularly wear five of seven of her late husband’s shirts, short- or long-sleeved, with buttons on the side that I prefer, and when I do up the buttons in the morning or whenever, my mind wonders about becoming, about what happens when a solid something passes through a gap. Could I be more like him—more sparkling, absolutely sharp-eyed, with a hoarser laugh—by wearing his shirts, or is some other act responsible for that? Borrowing and lending books, I have two or more somethings to share with friends—the objects and their feelings and/or facts—and I wonder if, unspoken, intangible, my feelings could also travel from a book truck to a holds shelf to the nightstand of a stranger, because I am also one—a stranger—in fact.
One book that I love—its own “world of brusque, precipitous passages from one state to the other”¹—first came to me from the public library, with a second hold slip inside, bearing an earlier date above the name of an artist whose name I knew then, but who shows with watermelon in hand at a summer barbecue now. In between, I read the book and returned it to the library, and—sort of looking—eventually found a copy secondhand, and amid the same feelings and facts, I marked the passage that spans pages 309 to 313—an arc from single to ongoing act—with a sticky note near the bottom of page 310, at the point in narrative time where/when: “they sewed up the ox’s hide, filled it with hay, and put the animal back on its feet in the same position it had been in when it was alive.”
A few years ago, I passed that marked copy to another artist, citing a talk that he gave before we were friends, where, in a wide-ranging slideshow, he had included a photograph of an(other) effigy of a bull, also made out of the plants that it ate. As a so-called “cultural worker,” I know that I’m supposed to be upset about how visitors to museums only spend 28 or 27 or 21 or 17 or, most likely, 10 seconds with any given artwork, but if I think about how one of our oldest extant paintings—“a depiction of an unknown bovine”—was made of water and stone in a cave some 40,000 or perhaps 52,000 years ago, I can’t help but wonder how many of us could or couldn’t differentiate hay and straw at a glance.”²
__________________________________________
1.The book is a translation of La nozze di Cadmo e Armonia by Roberto Calasso, published as The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), it is held at the Vancouver Public Library in hardcover and softcover editions, and contains within itself this line on page 342, that is not about itself, but is, in fact, about The Iliad.
2. These facts and figures have passed through various places, but I’ll cite “Time Spent Viewing Art and Reading Labels” published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (February 2016) and “Cave Painting” published by Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (“last
edited on 26 July 2025, at 22:43 (UTC).”).
In early summer—while writing this text, imagining the borrowed room that you are in now, in late summer or early fall, perhaps reading this amid strange and familiar and borrowed things, amid what humans eat or ate—I visited my sister and her children, and one afternoon, exhausted by swimming but rehydrated by the watermelon from my hold-slip–artist-friend, we went to the library, for a mere 15 minutes. The youngest made a paper bag puppet, with a purple-crayoned owl stuck in pieces with stick glue. The oldest, over shoulders, watched older boys playing a video game, their avatars over-muscled, unlike them. The middle child sat with me, twirling her hair with her fingers as we read the story of long-haired Sedna, that many-storied being whose own fingers were cut off, becoming the animals of the sea.³ A week later, the owl on the sideboard still smelled faintly of wax, but I wonder whether the middle child—whose memory I have already experienced as eerily eternal—will ever remind me, perhaps when I am braiding her hair or when her mother is braiding mine, that Sedna also cannot braid her own hair.
This middle child also still can’t help but put everything in her mouth,⁴ a kind of seeking after knowledge that makes me think of this line that I photocopied and highlighted in disbelief and delight more than a decade ago, from another borrowed book: “In the Renaissance, fish glues were sold in rancid wafers; the artists would pop them in their mouths to rehydrate them.”⁵
I have, many times over the years, wondered—with curiosity and revulsion but so far without action—about how long or short a time I would be able to keep such a thing in my own mouth. While writing this, I think, what we find useful, or edible, or beautiful at the end of the world might surprise us, but to someone else any one of those things might only be old knowledge made new. Hypothetically buttoned in an artist’s-smock/laboratory-coat, here, in this borrowed room, and now, in 15 minutes or more, or less, could you wonder—hand to mouth—what temporary things you could share that might last?
Francesca Bennett
Summer Solstice to three days after Lammas Day, 2025
__________________________________
3. Having recently seen her tapestry of combs at the National Gallery of Canada, I picked out My Name is Arnaktauyok: The Life and Art of Germaine Arnaktauyok (Nanaimo: Strong Nations Publishing, 2016), found front-facing at the front of the library, on an adults’–eye-level shelf.
4. “Persistent oral seeking,” my sister says it’s called, and it seems to me that her child is in good company among artists: Diane Borsato, Jasper Johns, cave painters, the artists of the Renaissance…
5. James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York, London: Routledge, 1999), 20. Sub-titled “How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy,” I think back to buttoning my shirts when I re-read from page 1 to page 2: “As in painting, the means are liquid and [/] the ends are solid.”