Demur

That could be a leaf from Duchamp: to select a random object on a given day and time. Except, not to specify when an object may present itself. Instead a method that is aligned with objective chance—Breton’s trouvaille (the surprise find). An object may randomly present itself in a scenario akin to Barthe’s punctum. This is a moment where the object forlorn in an exterior setting (landscape or urban environment) becomes a snapshot to the minds eye as an unintended detail; a detail in the picture that pierces the everydayness to which it is seemingly absorbed. It’s potential to move into language is determined at the moment it is imaged—the flicker of the eye. The object then moves through a series of processes as it is remade materially and textuality. Yet, it is never complete and can only ever be an image of what is not there (or what it is not).

This is where Slug emanates, derives. The slugs are castings of empty spaces that are materially transposed as they are (re)configured across different materials and sites. The presentness of Slug can never be attained in as much as the signifier is always an object cause of desire. The object as a palimpsest for the body of the viewer; the body of the viewer is displaced in trying to make associations with the temporary cluster of objects under the signifier Slug. The image-repertoire proceeds and precedes the viewer.

Just as the idea of the slug is the cavity as wound, a signifier for the absent body, so too is the remade newspaper article on the execution of Timothy McVeigh in the piece Death Town. The body of this subject is not where it is meant to be; the still live subject and the anticipated dead body have not converged. Yet the particularities of this subject are not of direct concern here—though the reader is free to write associations with the specific actions of this subject—rather it is a concern with the absent body to which this text object acts out; thus being a central node of Demur. The absent body that has so affected a small town may in a literal way be read as perverse humour, but the main concern defines the body as a material object that has been displaced; an object not where it is presumed to have been (or should be). Death Town performs materially as a textual means of describing the complications of the text that is presumed through everyday use to provide stable and inescapable meaning. What happens when the object is not where it is meant to be? And what happens when the object is not what it is presumed to be? This is exactly what Barthes’ highlights in S/Z, his analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine. Sarrasine, the sculptor, presumes Zambinella to be female as he is unaware of the traditions of the castrato in this form of opera.

The anticipation for the ‘real’ dead body characterises our construction of events before they occur, rendering the real event a replay of something that has already been prescribed through language. McVeigh’s body not being present (dead or alive) was the topic of this newspaper article. It is reproduced slightly larger in Demur as an etching printed on rice paper. Just as the body of the subject of the article is not present, objects enact an illusive and displaced play with any attempt to represent them in a matrix of object-subject relations. The longing for the absent body is the object cause of desire, yet once it literally appears another will be sought. Which is why this newspaper article is treated as a found object in its own right without requiring a context; a moment of isolation of the body-object in its visceral image-repertoire.

Slug may be associated with this visceral object that cannot be found in the same way the body of the subject has missed its appointment with death; they are both somewhere else and nowhere else. Clearly, Lacan’s real is operating here: that always troubling sense that we cannot define death; it is always beyond us while we drive towards it. Derrida’s conception of the cinder as that thing that is always off to the side, unrealisable, impossible yet always leaving its remainder/reminder evokes the problem of the textualised object.

These gaps in signification are played out in the ‘Eight to Nine’ cluster through the random relationship between the image and the word. The arbitrary relation between the signifier and signified generates textual movement. The nine words are sourced—in the same order—from a dictionary of etymology, but most importantly the word in the last of the group is ‘slip’. This last word is a direct acknowledgement of the signified slipping below the signifier, as in the post-structuralist conception of the sign that emerged beyond Saussure. Slip is the last word that feeds back into a continuous chain of signifiers: the signifier continues to do its work as that of culture, beyond the author. This displacement, the slipping of the signified is also what occurs via the photographs that seem to have their referents sitting on the cast mattress. Or are the cast objects on the mattress referents to the photographs? Semiotically neither came first; they are signifiers skipping their signifieds. Materially, the objects also slip from printed paper, bronze (and in other scenarios: silicon, wax, resin, lead). This dislocation of source is further confounded by one of the castings derived from a rock whereas all the others are derived from fragments of mass-produced products. The rock casting that appears as being derived from some kind of product is paired with the word slip, again as a reference to the dislocation of origins.

Several associations in Demur provide scope to let the image-repertoire keep running its textual threads. They include the use of paper made from rice for the printing of Death Town; the four brushes referencing the association with death in Chinese culture; the Demeure photograph cites the Japanese horror series ‘The Well’—the woman brushing her long black hair in the mirror. (Demeure in French means ‘remains’ as well as ‘to stay’, while its contemporary use is associated with a certain character attribute, usually female gender based); the cast drink container on the white vessel is based on a traditional Chinese warrior figure; Rather the suspended clear resin casting of a piece of anchor float slowly turns, suggesting the skull in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors especially in it’s photographic form.

Demur means to raise an objection (notably used in a court of law) and also to remain, or to stay. It is the remains of a difference (différance); the object that is a textual remainder/reminder of something always already absent. The object cause of desire that binds us from the real.

Objects

Scuttle

  1. Scuttle, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  2. cuttle, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  3. Vessel and man, resin, patinated bronze, 2014
  4. Vessel and bone, patinated bronze, 2014
  5. Untitled (bed and scab), patinated bronze, 2014
  6. Untitled (bucket and gaps), Tengucho tissue paper, polyurethane resin, 2014
  7. Like, lead, 2012
  8. Rather, polyurethane resin, 2012

Eight to Nine

  1. Slice, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  2. Slick, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  3. Slide, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  4. Slight, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  5. Slim, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  6. Slime, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  7. Sling, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  8. Slink, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  9. Slip, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014
  10. Eight to Nine, Hyrdrostone plaster, silver electroplate on bonze, 2014

Slug

  1. Slug, linen, resin, lead, 2014
  2. Untitled (rest and remain), patinated bronze, silver, 2014
  3. Death Town, etching on rice paper, 2014
  4. Untitled (four brushes), patinated bronze, 2014
  5. Demeure, Giclee print on Somerset Museum Rag mounted on Di-Bond, 2014

 

 

Eight to nine (a fragment)

The fragment, pure in its own right, untainted, untinted, unprocessed; simply placed as is, or combined as is. A collection of fragments uncontained; a temporary grouping of objects clustered according to aesthetic determinants: distance, size, proportion, angle, bulkiness, texture, shape, light, tone. A collection of fragments on a bed, a surface, a platform without centre, without hierarchy of meaning and reading; material signifiers inconclusive, dislocated, confounded—the purely interstitial object: the dream of the paradox. The object that is read through it’s whole tactility, through colours without tints, without concealment (as though untainted by meaning). Textures and surfaces that render an insistence of their rawness, on a decentred and uninterrupted textuality. Fabricated objects that are ‘precise, mobile, and empty’ in the their conventional signification; illusive signifers that vacillate and shimmer (as in a mirage), or the ‘interstice without specific edges’.[1]

 Duchamp insists on tufted…The surface of a mattress pulled together with knotted thread might be said to be tufted. Capitonne is specific to the kind of buttoned padding used in upholster furniture…[2]

We can relate Lacan’s ‘points de capiton’ where the subject finds anchor points, fixings of identification contrary to the affects of splitting and the real.

Nine malic moulds scattered on a bed of plaster. Duchamp referred to the negative of the photograph as a mould. In this conception the mould is an apparition, the object of an appearance.

 

[1] Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, 1st American ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 17.

[2] Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp : A L’infinitif (115 p.: ill. ;). Note 41 by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk