End of ends

End of Ends is a text/sound installation by Steve Dutton and Neil Webb that plays with an understanding of the ‘ending’. It is a potentially vast list of ‘endings’ and an ever-expanding sound loop. The first physical manifestation of the work is presented by BendInTheRiver at x-church in Gainsborough on Sat 19/20/24/25/Sat 26 May 2012. Also presented at Possession, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 14 March - 5 May, 2013. ‘The starting point for the thinking was the consideration that all things must come to an end, and that it might be worth looking into the impossibility of making a work that in itself could not end, until everything else had. It is this element of the impossible which forms the drive of the work. The list began as a potentially endless document of endings, a book of infinite volumes. It was to be apocalyptic; mountains crumbled, planes crashed, territories flooded etc; but as we dug down we quickly ran out of the ‘big’ things and had to try a bit harder; they got a bit more intimate, stupid and bland; but then we got stuck again because then you feel that you have exhausted the things you think might end, which is very weird but true, but then when you keep going, maybe they become interesting, possibly revealing, opening into something almost repressed like some kind of Surrealist game. Despite the eschatological leanings the list could never actually be complete, that is, if the list of endings ends, then all ‘things’ have ended. Although it’s about things passing, paradoxically, it makes new and unforeseen events take place and this is where the sound really comes into its own. That is part of living, to recognise that you have to say good-bye to things, to good things and to bad things too, but in doing so you open into new territory. If we manage to get a few endings and ‘last things’ from around the world, we might even get a sense of differently nuanced ‘goodbyes’. That might turn up something beautiful, revealing, fascinating or just plain odd. Or not. The piece is developed to expand indefinitely, to be added to by anyone who wishes to participate in the work. Our hope is that the work, despite its focus on the winding down of things, will actually continue to grow out of these submissions of endings as if to deny the work its central raison d’être.’