[What is a topology of home, that [bodily] frame which delineates what is within, what is without—that frame which circumscribes the infinite within the finite, held in a perpetual state of flux, accumulating, modulating, repeating, permuting, always in an attempt to apprehend that frisson to once again impel stillness into movement—forwards, round and round, at times it is even necessary to circle back and retrace one’s steps—a pirouette, a plié, hovering on the toe’s tipping point—
This digital labyrinth of pages attempt, by more or less traditional methodologies to categorize my creative perambulations, but in truth—such as it is—I have and will continue to return, retrace, and renew such boundaries—that is one’s perpetual attempt—to retrace borders one remembers one has traversed—but how elusive memory can be, how nimbly does it tread over wandering grounds when left to its own thoughts—lost, fragmented, embraced in chance encounters—which is the border that circumferences sculpture? where lies the boundary that circumscribes cinema? or a poem that traverses into the grounds of essay—essayer, I try, I try—a sonnet that emerges a quartet. Such terms hover in the perpetual tension between <symbol> and fluidity, delineating paths in the oft trodden soil otherwise inextricable to the newfound (or stubborn) traveller— ]
Diagrammatic Slides (above) and Object A (left) from Per/formative Cities: A Nest of Triptychal Performances at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome (2024).
Above: Excavation (or the Vagaries of the Exposed) 2023. Oil, Shellac, Gravel, Cheesecloth, Gold Leaf, Rope, Clay, Coconut Shells, and Ash on Canvas (42 x 78 in.)
“…It is part of the universal process through which we experience (and consume) narratives (and their traces in art, music, literature, films, television, games, literature, etc.) that we ourselves as subject becomes an object, a sign disembodied from ourselves and yet still tethered who, like Theseus in the Minotaur’s maze, gets lost in the labyrinth of signs of the Spectacle. The ability to deconstruct and therefore comprehend these signs is thus for us a contemporary thread that links back to Ariadne which not only situates us positionally in the simulation of signs but also in the world today…” [a fragment from Embodied Disembodiments: Semiotics, Composition, Spectacle, an ongoing seminar project]
This seminar project, which both distills and clarifies much of my practice as well as expands it across different materials and media, addresses many topics that are very personal to me as a practitioner in contemporary art and media, particularly the questioning of how we are positioned within the contemporary Spectacle, and the shift to thinking of ‘com/position’ itself as an act of structuring and positioning both signs within a work as well as us in relation to the work, triangulated via the illusory yet no less tangible ‘cultural object (subject) trace’.
“The Reader scans the room and encounters an object—A—in itself a subject in the system of objects, visual and aural, that encompasses the Reader. This subject voices the disembodied sounds displaced through distortions and refractions, embodying a system of cities and myth, walking, playing, transforming perception into the perceived via abstractions…”
—from Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances, a solo exhibition which engaged with three novels by Italo Calvino—If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Invisible Cities, and Mr. Palomar—as well as the three cities which paved my own journey to the exhibition: Bangkok, Los Angeles, Rome.
Some Notes on Relational Modularity, Composition and the Contemporary Spectacle
Holding tension between Taxonomy and the Ideal, between our need for classification in order to comprehend as well as our need to elude that fixity, to be ever in flux, to be, as it were, infinite held within the finite. [1]
Its parentage lies in the tradition and legacies of both relational aesthetics and Fluxus, and its origins for me began with Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (via my essay “…perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two… Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, relational modularity, and nationalism’ which formed the basis for my solo exhibition ‘…These Things That Divide The World In Two…’. The naming of this mode itself is anchored (and counter-anchored) by both its halves: modularity, a term that we see echoed in areas as diverse as science, technology, operations management and music—a trait that reflects my own interdisciplinary nature; and relational, which brings to this modularity an inherently musical, non-bodily frame wherein the function of a module is fluid and shifts in relation to its neighbors—as a note shifts its function depending on where it is positioned, from root note to consonance, dissonance—Other. [1]
Within modularity, there are three inherent components at play: 1) the idea of subsystems or units that form a whole, 2) the whole itself, the system compromised of subsystems, and 3) the movement within, which I refer to as an act of translation as excavation. [1]
In relation to Beckett’s Footfalls: “The movement of the modules whose functions are redefined with each movement is an act of translation which excavates within that interstice between us without and they within.” [1] — This pertains to my reading of both characters within the play whose position is relational. i.e. May, whom we first hear and see, eventually by Act III permutes to Amy, while V moves variously as Mother in Act I to “I” at the beginning of Act II, to a third person narrator, to silence, and later, through Amy, appears, perhaps questionably, as Mrs. W. —This also touches upon my interest in Beckett’s use of what I’ve been referring to as topological deformations to constantly shift the relationships between I and Other, outside and inside. His late television play Ghost Trio is another great (and incredibly moving) example of this.
Another work that has influenced my conceptual mode of relational modularity is Jannis Kounellis’ untitled Apollo piece (1973), which has been re-performed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2022 50 years after it was last seen. In the work, “Kounellis, seated behind a table strewn with broken statuary, holds an Apollo mask in front of his face, while a flautist seated to the right of the table plays a thirty-second excerpt from Mozart, pauses for two minutes, and then repeats the phrase. Completing the tableau is a stuffed black raven perched atop a plaster torso.” [2]
—Traces. The (somewhat ironic) anchor point of movement also necessarily brings about the subject of traces, themselves material objects of such a movement. I’m interested in the traces of these bodily (and sometimes non-bodily) frames—visually for example with the use of vinegar as an ‘invisible’ material whose material traces are seen, such as in my work with copper (for instance 16 Permutations for Copper) but also more surreptitiously in a work such as Extracción de la pier de locura (Extracting the Stone of Madness), which material surface is a visual trace of vinegar and bodily movement (the physical attempt at excavating the surfaces of paint). —There is a correlation to my work with sound such as in Avant le deluge, après les rêves, where I re-recorded layers of (sampled) sounds from the city and the Angeles Crest mountains through both of the Angeles Crest tunnels (constructed between 1940-1950) and the underground water tunnel beneath (and in between them), often moving the sound source in relation to the recorder thus ‘performing’ a bodily movement which we hear as disembodied traces, further dislocated through the performance made by the Genkii Wave ring within the MaxMSP patch I created for the work. —Translation as excavation then deals with traces on two levels, the traces themselves which must be excavated, and the traces of the excavation itself, which inevitably fall into the palimpsestian stratas which resemble itself pre-excavation, thus a [cybernetic] feedback loop.
——Ideas themselves are also material trace-objects that both have their own agencies—their own trajectories—and also the possibility (indeed a certainty) of being acted (and counter-acted) upon by a subject, whose performance upon the trace-object, like that of a musician and an instrument, is always a simultaneous movement of reaching back and reaching forwards.
Above: Interior view of …These Things That Divide The World In Two… at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary. The installation consists of a 9-channel sound installation (5-channels via aural exciters on 5 of the gallery walls, and 4-channels within the (4) hanging sculptures) which are controlled by a MaxMSP system engineered by Luc Trahand incorporating the spectators movement via Eye (webcam in the ceiling) and Ear (a microphone mounted outside the gallery walls listening to the sounds of the city, the environmental (as well as sociopolitical) system within which the gallery is situated). Within this audiovisual architectural system, the spectator encounters the embodied traces of permutations (Mother […] Mother i-iv) and the permutational copper wall piece, 16 Permutations for Copper.
MaxMSP patch for subject and system interaction (above) and hand-made copper sculpture through which the sound from the patch is ‘voiced’ and embodied, along with the plinth below for Avant le deluge, après les rêves (Before the flood, after the dreams) (Irrational Exhibits 13)
Above: [0-I-RI-R] within the ADN East German Guardhouse at the Wende Museum
In a similar preoccupying investigation of the cybernetic loop that is the subject-system dynamic, the installation [0-I-RI-R] at the Wende Museum consists sonically of 1 trumpet and 12 historical witnesses (whose recordings are from the museum’s archive) of those who’ve lived through the Eastern Bloc. The trumpet, performed by Ilya Serov, is a deconstruction and reconstruction of the East German national anthem within Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional technique (which is where the work gets its title: each refers to a permutational side of the twelve-tone matrix). The sound is once again ‘living’ within a MaxMSP systemic architecture (engineered again by Luc Trahand) where the interrelation of the two, the system which the trumpet represents, albeit deconstructed, and the historical witnesses that lived through such a system, are ever in flux: when there are more voices speaking at the same time—a collective strength—the trumpet recedes, becomes a bit duller, when there are fewer voices the trumpet is a little sweeter, it gains more power. This inevitably becomes connected with Embodied Disembodiments: Semiotics, Composition, Spectacle (a seminar).
Studio shot, January 2024, during the process of working on Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances.
Footnotes
[1] Excerpts from my presentation text “…Colour: none. All grey. Shades of grey.” Taxonomy, the Ideal and Relational Modularity for ‘…but the clouds…’: Interdisciplinary Seminar (September 20, 2024) exploring ‘grey temporalities’ in the works of Samuel Beckett organized by Eleanor Green and Swati Joshi and supported by the Samuel Beckett Society.
[2] Larrratt-Smith and Fuchs, ‘Jannis Kounellis’, 78, Phaidon
[3] Reference to Julia Kristeva’s concept of sujet-en-proces