A VOID BETWEEN US

For years Gabriel Orozco has been on the hunt for hollowness, craving the air we breath, the time between events, space across places. It is not clear whether empty interstices exist outside the mind, how can they be measured, filled, tied to our emotions. For example, time between changes -be it only the blink of the eye- is ineffable and thus impossible, perhaps inexistent. Void duration is like a shadow, we can never see its silhouette at a glance. Escapism and vacuity intersect and they do so at the junction of freedom: emptiness cannot be seized without sacrificing its negative power. With its perpetual flight, the void challenges our mind ad infinitum, evoking sublime terrors, amnesia or floating reveries. Floating, as if the sea could be a vast (w)hole, too full to be empty and yet too seamless to be full. Liquid sky that tells us that vacuity is not always ethereal. Orozco knows this. He plays out the void in and around our body. Not sublime but poetic is his tale of halves, bodies and oranges. Fruit: prosaic but perfect, erotic, ripe of color. Oranges turn out to be hollow. Bloody, liquid recipients. In what sense are they interstices? How to rethink our interactions -with food, people, things- with the intensity of a hole in mind? Love can be a starting point, recites Orozco's poem before waning into the void. . .

5 V 93

"EVERY ACTION IMPLIES AN EMPTY SPACE. THE WAKE AFTER

THE FLIGHT. THE SPACE BETWEEN TWO WAKES THAT

COLLIDED TWO HALVES. WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SPACE

IMMEDIATELY BEHIND THIS BODY? IN THE SPACE BETWEEN

THE TWO WAKES OF AIR WIND? TRIANGLE. LEGS

OPEN. WIND BEHIND THE ACT.

PLUNGING INTO THAT SPACE FULL OF THE VOID

OF THE ACTION. VOID OF THE ACTION OF OPENING

THE LEGS. PLUNGING INT THE VOID OF

A WOMAN WHO EMPTIES THAT SPACE

FULL VOID BETWEEN TWO WAKES

OF A BODY IN ACTION.

BEHIND. IN THE COLUMN THE AIR

THE WIND PASSES AT OUR SIDES.

WE CUT THE AIR AND GENERATE

A VOID BETWEEN US.

THE VOID OF THE UNOCCUPIED.

THE VOID OF OUR ABSENCE.

THE VOID BETWEEN

TWO WAKES OF WIND.

THE KNIFE CUTTING

AND STRIKING AGAINST

THE TABLE. DOUBLE VOID

BETWEEN THE TWO

HALVES OF THE ORANGE AND

BETWEEN THE

TWO SIDES

OF THE

KNIFE

BLADE."

NO SOUL FOR SALE

The blur-hole adds to your anti-monument. Adds in the sense that it subtracts more matter, turning it into a corrosive splash, a gash in the picture.

UNTITLED (ANTI-MONUMENT)

On the night of the 28th of April 2010, a bag of cement was liberated outside of the University College of London's Campus. The cement was carried into the dark recesses of the university grounds and systematically dumped onto the stony base of a small gazebo within a secluded part of the campus. While the cement mixture waited patiently, water was carried back-and-forth from the men's washroom with two 1 litre water bottles and periodically poured onto the sandy mixture. When the cement reached the right consistency, the mixture was walked over like one does to grapes when making wine. The work was dedicated to a colleague at the Slade who gave me a small publication she had wrote on monuments. To return the favour, I declared to her that I would make her a monument. Instead of constructing a large phallus or figurative sculpture, I decided to erect (or de-erect) an anti-form anti-monument in the vein of Robert Morris and Lynda Bengalis. The day after the anti-monument was constructed, I returned to the site to see that the monument had disappeared. Only a stain of its former self remained. When I went to the place where I usually lock up my bike, I realized that a security guard was waiting for me and I overheard him whisper into his walkie-talkie, without subtlety or tact: "If I see him, do I call the police?" Needless to say, I was terrified and I stayed away from campus for an entire week, until I was summoned to the Deputy Dean's office. In the meantime, I had two close friends write these responses to the work. After I explained my motives for making the sculpture to the 'Dean,' he agreed that there was no malicious or ill-content in the act. We both agreed that the best solution would be to apologize to every single worker who had to clean up anti-form, anti-monument cement puddle.

–Andrew Witt

The monument is an anti-monument. If the monument is that which the victor builds to invest a sense of conclusion in the present, as Benjamin Buchloh says it is, the anti-monument must preserve the future through acts of aesthetic inauguration. To thieve a bag of dry concrete and have the natural elements paste it to the ground –that is itself the reversal necessary for the inundation of possibility, since what else remains of victory if its glue is strewn?

–Nathan Crompton

I read Kafka’s metamorphosis this morning. There was a commentary in my book about the story, which said that all language is metaphor for describing the world. Like metaphor, language establishes itself high, a blanket whose contours vaguely conform to the undulating and multitextured world beneath it. Yet this blanket is not soft, its enunciation results in its encrustation. It becomes a part of the world, and for this reason, it is immediately taken literally. And all metaphors, (according to the guy) when taken literally, become monstrous. Reading monuments as a metaphor for historical events, I agree that they too share this quality. The shifting sands beneath the obelisk sway onward, they leave behind a threatening pointy shell. Literalized and autonomous, it can no longer find the same sense of belonging to the circumstances that created it. It describes no reality, traces nothing below it, nor houses anything. Thus, from outside and from inside, it becomes a monster. The guy, Stanley Corngold, writes: "Kafka's "counter-metamorphosis" of the metaphor in The Metamorphosis –so Anders and Sokel propose– is inspired by his fundamental objection to the metaphor. His purpose is accomplished through the literalization of the metaphor." I think what Corngold is trying to say is that by making the monstrous nature of the metaphor explicit, Kafka gets underneath the hard shell of how we describe reality, finds a home in it, and, speaking about it from without, sees up at it from within. For some reason your anti-monument and the chain of events it has caused reminded me of Kafka’s story. Like Gregor in the metamorphosis, it presents an interesting case: it has made the monstrous nature of the monument as metaphor explicit, by revealing its metaphoric literalization visually. The discord that resulted with the security guard, the strewn glue, these are all confirmations, literalizations, encrustations of the monstrosities reverberating from confirmed, literalized, encrusted metaphor. And so, the concrete ground by the bench, layered over by more seeping concrete that now undulates by its own law, spreading outward and hardening, into the hard fact of the security measures and narrow, necessary escapes. Tough, textured tracks trickle trying to trace trails through the trapped troubled times be low. Perhaps there are bubbles between the concrete ground and the anti-monument, invisible to everyone but the bugs there; invisible to us even when freed by the hacking axe or mase of whoever chops the anti-monument back into rubble and takes it away.

–Victor Sanabria

MEMORY BECOMES IN A BREATH

Gabriel Orozco -Breath on Piano

Andrei Tarkovsky -Mirror

THE END OF THE WORLD (ENCOUNTERS AT)

With “Encounters at the End of the World” Werner Herzog gives us one of the most poignant –bone chilling in the warmest possible way– representations of the correspondence that exists between catastrophism and utopia. It comes without saying that this dialectic doesn’t actually put in question the reality of global warming. What I am talking about here is culturally digested catastrophe. Perceived catastrophe, which generates, for better or worse, its autonomous fantasies. Global warming or not, entropy has been one of the watchwords of contemporary artistic culture for quite a while now. In turn, entropy or not, every generation has imagined its own apocalypse, religious or lay as it might have been. Yet, it is probably fair to say that in our age the daunting telos of the end of the world underwent an important revival. I am thinking for example of the mesmerizing entropic anti-hero Robert Smithson. One of Smithson’s favourites also comes to mind, the English sci-fi novelist J.G. Ballard. Ballard is one example –particularly in vogue today and deservedly so–of a genre which emerged after the Second World War in response to the diabolic mix of ominous Eisenhowerian serenity and nuclear terror. However, if retrospectively Ballard exemplifies the genre, at the time his was a lonely voice. He was uncommonly hostile to mainstream, i.e. American, science fiction, in alternative to which he proposed a ruthlessly critical vision of post-war reality. In his last book, the autobiography entitled “Miracles of Life”, Ballard explained how his crave for post-atomic fantasies was directly proportional to the passivity, complacent at best and narcoleptic at worse, with which the Western hemisphere greeted the advent of hardcore capitalism. At the cost of unpopularity, Ballard refused to wage another war against anti-democratic aliens, aka cold warriors, terrorists, etc. Instead, his fictions targeted mass production and its standard prerequisites: consumerism, materialism, automatism, spectacle and so on. For Ballard, sci-fi represented the new realism. The world as his saw it was suffering a massive, if mute, mental breakdown. What he did was to put into words the loud sonority he imagined this psychic collapse to have. By inflating the real hyperbolically, his novels obtained the critical effectiveness of a cunning subversion. In this way, Ballard redeemed entropy, turning its ruinous landscapes into vehicles for cultural antagonism. “Science fiction had a huge vitality that had bled away from the modernist novel”, wrote Ballard in his autobiography, “it was a visionary engine that created a new future with every revolution, a hot rod accelerating away from the reader, propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealist.” Sci-fi catastrophism signalled a radical rebirth. Just like Herzog, Ballard associated dystopia with utopia. A dis-topos can become a promising fantasy when pushed in the mind and once pushed far enough it might become a beautiful place that exists in reality. This place is a cave in the South Pole and Herzog has found it. One day, recites the director, humanity will perish and inside this cave a team of aliens will find the archaeological remnants to which we are doomed. At that moment, entropy will be overturned and the South Pole will become a Smithsonian “ruin in reverse.” In view of this reversal, entropy is necessarily anticipated as a redeeming promise. Ruins-in-reverse-to-be are utopias in actuality. Those aliens will find something compelling down there.

APROPOS SHIT AND SHINE

Piero Manzoni's beautiful "achromes" have always struck me as embodying a kind of dirty luminosity, all-over matte and yet glowing. Oxymoron is the modus operandi and it allows a flight from normality. Normally, light and dirt are contradictory terms. Normally, opacity and glow stand against each other. Yet, oxymoron leads us into a different territory, brimming with paradoxes that are often more sensible than the norm. There is something deeply fascinating and perhaps even liberating about dirtying light and lighting up what is murky. Manzoni's relentlessly duplicitous game is particularly sophisticated and beautiful to look at. His early "achromes" are at the same time religiously white and blemished like rough works of masonry. Virginal kaolin is the formula.

INTRO

On the hunt for sharp shimmers. Illuminations that prick the mind with the matter-of-factness of an obituary. Macroscopic, intimate things and yet dry, exact, minimal.

Sparkles as sharply carved as rocks.