In February of 2007, Yaffa Gilbet installed Incomplete: What I did during my winter break, at the Swell Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute. Incomplete was a bi-wall map created by an arrangement of made and collected items (including maps, plastic bags containing artifacts, and a massive newspaper/calendar) which represented specific linking events attributed to the artist’s experience of travel from California to Colorado (via Nevada, Utah, Wyoming) and Colorado to California (via New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada).

Having remained for a month in Colorado, the artist created a newspaper calendar, which signified the time in which her travel occurred. Gilbet chose to use the front and last pages of the local newspaper, The Summit Daily News, perceiving the front page as proof of “events of importance” within this particular “small town” community. And the last page, used for crossword and astrology, signified the hidden or unknown events of the community, thus becoming ignored or non-existent.

The maps are left over from the road atlas the artist used during her trip. As they are in various conditions, the maps are sandwiched between a folded sheet of tracing paper. Gilbet drew a black line, on the tracing paper, memorializing the road she traveled. Within the arrangement of the wall-map, the plastic bags are placed in consecutive order. Each bag contains artifacts, which the artist collected during her trip. The artifacts vary from found objects, gifts, receipts, propaganda, maps, notes, condom wrappers, etc. She identifies with these materials as “proof of experience” and the visual documentation of events.

Gilbet links the events/artifacts with black thread. The scale of the installation is large enough that the thread is nearly impossible to see until perhaps too late. Extending off the corner of the gallery, the wall-map becomes three dimensional through the linking of events. The viewer can easily walk into the thread while dazed by the multitude of visual content. The web creates a barrier in which the viewer is unable to get close to the contents of the piece.

In his Manifesto of Affirmationism, Alain Badiou states, “one can call “post-modern” whatever displays a capricious and unlimited ascendancy of particularities: the communitarian, ethnic, linguistic, religious, sexual, and any other particularity. And the biographical particularity, the “me”, as one imagines it can and should be “expressed.” He claims that the postmodern artists exhibits, “a Didactic-Romantic schema”. Quoting himself from, Petit manuel d’inesthetique, “They (the artists) were Didactic, through their desire to put an end to art, through their denunciation of its inauthentic and alienated character. And also Romantic, through their conviction that art should be reborn immediately as absolutist, as integrally conscious of its own operation, as truth immediately capable of reading itself.” Badiou defines “Didactic”, as submitting “artistic activity to the external imperative of the Idea.” And “Romantic” as seeing “in art the only free form of decent of the infinite Idea into the sensory…”

According to Badiou, is Incomplete an example of a “Didactic-Romantic" artistic product?

The “product”, installation, is an accumulation of materials over a length of time. Not really a “narrative”, the project is a “map” of the artist’s own experience. The materials do not exhibit an exploration of the artist’s own identity or community. Rather, the artist is a traveler viewing the community from the outside, documenting her experience of the other’s space.

At the same time, the wall-map does exhibit the use of text, and thus the viewer assumes that the artist is seeking to communicate something to them, the introduction of thread poses two issues. 1. Why is the thread there? And 2. Thread acting as barrier to the visual information. The thread exists within the piece solely for the purpose of the artist to experiment with her Idea of linking and crossing events. The artist is possessed to seek a “truth”, thus using exhibited materials to do so. She is less concerned about “communicating” anything to the viewer.

The artist did not intend to be “didactic” in the terms of “intending to instruct”, but she does exhibit a search of a specific truth, which was initiated in response to a “power” associated with a specific Idea. Her content is rather dry, and might belong in the field of science rather than art. But to Gilbet the Idea is most important and remains infinite through the process. In her work, the artist’s Idea creates the process, which results in the product. In Incomplete, the artist’s “product” is not actually complete, nor is her Idea totally resolved. Her use of this title, Incomplete, exhibits the fact that the artist is more concerned about proving her Idea, than she is about the completed aesthetic product.