words: “Don’t you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—don’t you know that ‘no’ is the wildest word we consign to language?” Werner thought Malcolm must have known this was an image of David Peck Todd, but she didn’t. Malcolm wrote to Werner, “There does seem to be something occult going on here, and I don’t think I believe in the occult.” Werner responded, “I am thrilled to be touched by the uncanny. Like you, I have my doubts about the invisible world, but something strange and lovely may be at work. I did not know of these connections—the Dickinson/Venus transit connections—before I found them in your collages. But I assumed YOU knew.” Malcolm wrote back: “What are we to make of my NOT knowing?” Malcolm’s unexpected art is one of the only instances of work in this show that is not directly occupied with memory, memoir, or memorial—such as Cici Wu’s The Disappearance of Yu Man-hon (storyboard 02) (2017), which regards the search for a missing boy and the importance of maintaining a memory of him, and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s haunting The Foley Square Monument New York (1996) from the Monument Drawings series in which the artist envisioned large-scale public memorials as tributes to figures or sites of importance to her. This piece was made around the time the artist received her first major public commission, for a sculpture to commemorate a burial ground for free and enslaved Africans that had recently been excavated at Foley Square (now the African Burial Ground National Monument). In Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1993), an essay accompanying an exhibition he curated at the Louvre, he argued that drawing originates in the attempt to recapture perception through memory. He writes: The origin of drawing and the origin of painting give rise to multiple representations that substitute memory for perception. First, because they are representations, next, because they are drawn most often from an exemplary narrative . . . and finally, because the narrative relates the origin of graphic representation to the absence or invisibility of the model.8
8
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 49.
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