‘Chance had produced that rare moment in which the whole symbolic accumulates and forces the body to yield’ [1]
To float is subtracted from the yield; I can rephrase that (somewhat): a floating object gives up itself in order to be reproduced (reinstated) in its opposite. It is the emptiness, the negative space that produces the reconstruction. Why is my desire so intense for the yield of a negative space? The cavity, the hollow—I also peer into the opening of the disused gold mine as though it should reveal something—the blackness is there to be completed; transgressed into weight, density, solidity. The possibility afforded by the negative space recreating a desire for completion, the body demanding fulfillment. The bliss released in this scenario of rapture as completion, expenditure, is quickly negated as emptiness; the cavity, the hollow is the realization of its inverse: preceding that which may be momentarily reproduced only to be annulled. The moment of annulment, where that which is created is erased, cancelled is in fact where bliss finds its site: bliss is the negation of the material manifestation after its realization. My body seeks the gratification of fulfillment (the yield), yet it is the annulment, the retraction of this fulfillment where the implacable uselessness of the body, the hopelessness of the body provides the window of bliss; when the body embraces its emptiness as a foreshadow of death. The mine shaft, the water well; I am lead to the bottom.
Yield, resin, lead, 2010
[1] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 86.