When a landscape or a piece of architecture is travelled through and documented with a lens, the topographies of the surface are lifted into the condition of the image. The physical space is discarded as a material husk, and the images collected form their own topological model of the site from which they are extracted.
On September 20th 1967, Robert Smithson traced a soft line through the landscape of Passaic, New Jersey, documenting the landscape that was awaiting the construction of Route 21, a six-lane highway that would parallel the route of the Passaic river. The landscape is 'voiced over' within the text as a narration that eschews a transcendental subjectivity for one sopping with a carefully curated subjective perspective. Smithson's written voice presents a highly individual moment of perception of the registers of temporal, cultural and geological time frames competing in the terrain.
In searching for 'monuments' to document, the first one he encounters as he steps from the bus is a bridge that spans the river. Heidegger speaks of spaces emerging, or coming into new purpose as two sides, only with the construction of a bridge. Each span splits the ground: 'Banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other […] [O]nly something that is itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there before the bridge is.' The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around itself. But as a starting point for an encounter with a gathered landscape, how does this bridge begin to gather the landscape about itself?
'Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of "stills" through my Instamatic into my eye.'
The bridge, named immediately as a monument, is by the same gesture elevated from its material function into the symbolic order. It becomes an image-architecture. The monument is the marker that stands, and that stands in for something else. It holds a place with a perlocutionary desire to imprint a stilling, a melancholy gape in the present that recalls an historical event, and a desire that this stilling should be iterative, self-perpetuating.
Not only is Smithson's first monument a type of hermetic 'image-architecture' by virtue of its naming, but it is immediately encountered in the text as immaterial. Made doubly an image by the fact that it is viewed through the frame of a viewfinder, it is an image of an image. If the image is the state of the 'mortal remains' of architectural elements in a landscape, then here we encounter the production of images of remains. Sontag writes: 'To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.'
Smithson's landscape is a collection of textual images that do not exist outside their own subjective mediation - in the self-conscious ways in which the text refers constantly to other forms of depiction: the novel (the wry aside of the Earthworks), the monstrous light-bulb of the projector, the postcard, landscape painting. The sky over Rutherford is described as 'cobalt blue' – a painterly pigment, that contrasts vividly with the drab newsprint landscapes in the New York Times arts section he has brought with him for the journey.
Finally there are the series of monuments themselves. Each one that is 'unearthed' from the route to appear in the text is printed as a square ink-dotted photograph that spans the top of the pages, shot in a flat and un-enigmatic style. The description of six pipes, that jut from a riverbank to flood the river with 'liquid smoke as the tip of an infernal fountain […] secretly sodomizing some hidden technological orifice, and causing a monstrous sexual organ (the fountain) to have an orgasm,' is utterly absurd when juxtaposed against the two plain views of mud and pipes.
The text is more 'photographic' than the images are – they do not concern themselves with the landscape outside the blank and immediate framing of each monument. They are documentary, and they are the least of the document, floating in a sea of text that overwrites and outstrips them. Sontag writes: 'The photograph is a thin slice of space as well as time. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (“framing”) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from anything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently.' The small collection of the ironic monuments photographed are discontinuous objects mapped into and against the narrative.
Having moved away from the European photographic tradition that favoured the picturesque, we can situate Smithson in Sontag's description of American photography, which implies 'a more summary, less stable connection with history; and a relation to geographic and social reality that is both more hopeful and more predatory.' Describing the work of the photographers that accompanied the 'Opening of the West,' and their frequent staging of Native American rituals, she expounds how embedded in the tradition of the photographic mapping of the land was a desire to re-write it: 'photographing something became a routine part of the procedure for altering it.'
What, then, is the function of this solid sequence of squares, joined at the end by an aerial map of the region, with a toothed diagonal of quadrants depicting the area of collection? How do the co-presence of the text and images act upon one another?
Smithson describes the way in which a ground plan, or a topographic map, 'a "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.'In his works Non-Sites, he presented geological elements of landscapes as crisp abstract sculptures, creating a 'dimensional metaphor whereby one site can represent another site which does not resemble it [...] To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas'. The works are not, and cannot be, designed to lead an audience back to direct experience. The images in Monuments are merely a way of presenting the source materials for the catalogued journey - they become a medium for a proof of having borne witness.
All these works carefully consider the collapsing and expanding of process and geographical space into a text, or a gallery space, through the medium of documentation. However, Smithson is often more interested in shifting and expanding the temporal information attached to a site than the spatial. Infiltrating his subject with anecdote, historical and scientific data, the temporal turn of the encountered environment as journey in a discontinuous fragmentary movement, leads not towards rewriting specific moments of the past, present, or future, but towards a sense of duration, implicit in all things, that can only be spoken of indirectly. As Merleau-Ponty writes:
Time is […] not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things. Within things themselves, the future and the past are in a kind of eternal of pre-existence and survival… It is often said that, within things themselves, the future is not yet, the past is no longer, while the present, strictly speaking, is infinitesimal, so that time collapses.
To call Smithson a Pathologist suggests either that he is diagnosing a disease, which he isn't – his landscape is blighted by industry and its entropy, but he does not raise this as a point of condemnation - or a forensic pathologist intimately excavating and examining the organs in a cadaver to discover the cause of death. But a pathologist is also intimately concerned with the time of death. When people die unseen, away from hospital monitors, on the floors of locked rooms or in remote accidents, the corporeal remains are picked through to discover both cause and moment.
Blanchot equates the image with the image of a cadaver, where 'at first glance, resemble the corpse, but the cadaver's strangeness is perhaps also that of the image.'He cites death as the state 'in which the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself.' – where he is no longer situated in his own being, the image takes over. However, a corpse is not a static entity - it is not sealed in the freshness of the newly birthed image, unless it is somehow preserved. When left to its own devices it is an object that re-writes its own materiality in a rapid exchange, as it cools, stiffens, blooms through an array of colours, swells, bursts, blackens and collapses. This is a rigorously documented chain of events, both orderly and highly variable in time frame, in which the body forms an uneasy chronometer, wavering against temperature, air currents, and carrion eating insect life. The degree to which the body has replaced itself materially marks the time elapsed, traced backwards to the moment of death – the blind spot, the split.
30.8.10
23.8.10
Publication
An experimental publication designed by Ken Kirton and Clare Acheson featuring the work of antepress. Challenging the conventional narrative associated with art writing, the publication combined text and image in a free publication created using three colours of risograph printing, which materialized during the MFA private view with the aid of a duplex laser printer.
Currently being featured in the 2010 Anti Design Festival, London, 18-26/09/10.
5.7.10
Soda-Brücke edit
(rough viewing copy, tidy to follow...)
--
Pale smooth forms are dropped in formation. They have become a fractured terrain, arrested in the slightest dissolve of erosion, with thinning strands pulling backwards to points held steadily in the cadastre. It is impossible to infer any duration from here, but simply to say that a significant amount of time must have elapsed since…
Bones begin soft, form first as flat membraneous layers of connective tissue fed with a sober flow of blood. Cells slip, form an array between the layers and reinscribe themselves as bone-formers that siphon calcium from the blood and pack it slowly amongst the waiting matrix of cartilage. As they are packed around the cartilage the bones take form, spin into intricate honeycomb, become spongy, then compact. They billow into arcs and planes that punctuate straps of dark red muscle with ossified white.
Wait.
Once, a memory of walking through a museum, pausing to watch maps made of white bones with spines flexed and pinned in smooth arcs, straining against the black wire fastening them. Watching onyx beads glued meticulously beneath eyelids that reflect perimeter lines of the cases precisely - holding strip lights bowing on each steep meniscus.
Standing still, and not speaking of much, perhaps pointing, it was uncertain whether there was a straining towards interrupted signs of permanence or impermanence, in the frozen displays of each sealed-in taxonomy. They hang without displaying the temporal marks of decay.
When these things are left to decay in place the eyes are always the first things to disappear completely. The bones are the last.
--
A decline in temperature must have the beginning for which there is no direct or discernible image – it is impossible to tell. Slumping evenly towards a plateau, and then on into half-lives of progressive cooling, it is the most useful single indicator of time elapsed. But there is immediately a small but widening fissure inside which form the errors in over-estimating or under-estimating the interval.
The interval.
Sheared off at the edges. An estimation, or a portrait, can be roughly approximated, but should be correlated with all other phenomena and close observations utilizeable in establishing the limits of an elusive probability, narrowing backwards towards the brink...
--
The room appears to be sealed, locked from the inside. The temperature is fixed by the constant circulation of cooled air that still travels through hidden ducts, and emerges as a steady exhale through the parallel lines of a metal grill mounted in the ceiling. This is good. The rate must at least be relatively steady.
--
A dark dried tide has seeped across the carpet towards the edge of the room and halted against the wooden panelling that stretches out behind the crests of ruffled bleached bed linen, mounded towards one side, to leave intimate channel. The tide beneath is marking the edges of the furniture, darkened towards the centre in subtle banding, as the heavier particles have been deposited closer to the remains. A rapid substitution of form on form must since have eased in pace to a slow shrivel, leaving faint traces of the incremental movements, divided by the weeks observed between each brief contraction of the flesh. Slipping tatters cling to the disbanding reef as the fluid has spread outwards in its concentric rings, inspissated, and hardened into a penumbra cast by the gasps of collapsing architectures.
The prodigious interval is confirmed by the over-yellowed peel of the edges of the wallpaper, away from vertical lines where the pattern does not quite meet itself, away from the radial cuts around wall lamps, the incisions around power points and switches marked with the cumulative hatchings of fingerprints. The light switch by the door is flicked down, but there is no light on. A piece of the long-blown out filament in the fizzed out incandescent bulb, perhaps left on, has dropped from the slim antennae that held it, and rests in the bottom of the clear glass droplet above the lettering.
Perhaps days have passed since the structure caved in on itself, as the gases that distended it into a plump limbed black tadpole blew through the blubbery flanks. The organs are all simmered burst plums, and spit pips.
--
Several weeks must have passed. Rough-wristed gloves, dipped and showing signs of drying, mimic the shape of an emptied hand, loosened at the knuckle. Five ridged yellowed shells remain attached at the tip of each beneath the snarled back arch of the cuticle. A roughly woven and monochrome tapestry of fibres have also sloughed from follicles into the proximate glop, dressing the edges of the head.
It is far too late to be close to certain. The tongue is surged trapped language between the crests of loosening teeth. The eyes are shrivelled shadows lolling into the bony hollows behind swollen slits.
--
It is apparent that in anticipation of eyelessness hundreds of convex lenses have thrived on the surface. The curve of each lens contains a muted fulvous liquid behind the haze of a cloudy cataract that blinds it. They range in diameter from two centimetres to twenty, blankly attempting to cover all the possible lines of sight inside the room, blankly observing the erratic drift of the final particles of kicked up dust in the air currents attempting to settle on the unmade bed, the undisturbed furniture, the half-opened suitcase. They attempt to watch also from oblique angles each instant of the soft undulating seethe of the organs beneath the thinly stretched epidermis. Several appear to have burst open like bladder wracks. There are wet tracks following the curves downwards to swelling drops, collecting and containing the reflection of fractured perspectives. The room has multiplied in miniature. It has become a fractal labyrinth. The surface visible through the breached empty lenses is boiled into a candy pink shine that has begun to dry in patches into an empty vellum. A few weeks must have elapsed.
The abdomen is a raw dim globe, bloomed into rapid topography whose sheets that display faintly etched territories are held in a peeling into slim scrolls, dropped over the edge.
--
The surface glistens, duskily, in tact. It can't be certain but it seems that around two weeks have passed. The surface is marmoreal. Slim rivers of mineral serpentine trace diffused and sinuous curves away from the broad welled delta formed in the cavity of the abdomen. Soon afterwards the surface is burnished Shagreen, the chest, the limbs, the face, greenish-yellow, greenish-blue, greenish-black.
The mineral impurities that settle as layers in limestone are mobilized and recrystalised in place, under the intense heat and pressure of metamorphism. They form the characteristic swirls that meander through the rock, cut from quarries and polished into grand panels and wide banisters held up by bulging balusters in the sweeping staircases of grand old buildings that smack of the shrivel of empires.
Arborescent lines meander pressed against the surface and form the characteristic swirls of tributaries that swarm into arteries, sable brown, in the shoulders, the chest, the limbs, the face. The skin is carnelian, pressing down against the buttery foam of subcutaneous fat.
--
Just two days must have elapsed. Seized wide open, fine geometric flecks dot the two cloudy hemispheres with steadily blackening constellations of points, visible from both sides. Each terse translucent globe of the static planetarium has begun to buckle slightly. If the images of galaxies become locked in position by a failure of the mechanism, with the bulb searing through the same pin-points into the vast curve of the domed ceiling, the projection becomes incapable of moving through simulated seasons or aeons, and hangs as universes ground to a halt, or moving backwards against the narrow point of the present.
Within 24 hours the straight lines that can be postulated between the flecks have slackened and re-drawn, slackened again. The lines crumple and shift into woozy arcs as the domes empty, as the humors leech, and begin their gradual collapse.
--
Now the upper surfaces of the skin are palest, apportioned into the faintest of contour bands towards the summit. These are archaeological strata. Wrecked pumps and flaccid sluices have allowed blood cells to trickle downwards through the serum and pool behind the skin, forming a low dark lake traced against the edges. It probably began 15 minutes after… it was apparent 20 or 30 minutes after…
The flat edge of the tapering foot of the table leg, the spiral of the flex attached to the base of the telephone receiver pressed against the knee, the knuckles pressed against the carpeted floor. Compressed against each plane of the backdrop, the lake is held stable above a light seam that traces the contact between the surfaces. Dark crescents have formed inside the earlobes, behind the fingernails. The bottoms of the organs have engorged and tiny ruptures have scattered soot into the surrounding tissues. This duration is too variable to serve as a useful indicator.
--
Within three hours, within four, the eyelids have hardened, the lower jaw fastened invisibly. There is a puckering of plucked gooseflesh into shallow foothills. Next the small joints have fastened in a perfect replica of the , advancing asymmetrically, and then against the leg of the bedside table, the crown of the head locked against the bed base, the whole thing is a whitening caryatid, chiselled limestone, briefly buttressing the geometry of the objects.
It will relax, slacken, smooth itself out in roughly the same order as it formed.
--
When a foreign body enters the flesh, the epithelial cells form an enclosing sac which secretes a crystalline substance that accumulates in layers. Inside the mantle, the bony rim of the eye-socket, a soft moist tongue rasps around the sediment and licks a fresh word into place.
A few moments have passed.
A slim film has formed on the surface of the eyes, wide open, which softens the forms cast back in them. At first, barely perceptibly, edges will have diffused, colours become shallow.
Next positions of objects will have become indistinct, and the space inside the room will have erased into depthlessness. The image is swallowed serenely in a nacreous bloom that takes its place.
The image is the nacreous sheen of the eye.
24.6.10
19.6.10
18.6.10
31.5.10
Bibliomancy
...perhaps offers the most absurdly obvious solution.
p.12 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Fragments, Vintage London, 2002
29.5.10
9.9 seconds
A piece of the blown out filament in an incandescent bulb has dropped from the slim antennae that held it and rests in the bottom of the clear glass droplet above the lettering.
22.5.10
20.5.10
One thing leads to another - Everything is connected
Art on the Underground exhibition 14.05.10 - 10.06.10, City Hall, London
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/15457.aspx
15.5.10
12.5.10
9.5.10
> He says it was part of Hitler's Germania-Utopia called
> Güteraußenring (GAR).. Trains did roll over it, but only
> for a short time. Finally, with the construction of the
> wall, large areas of train tracks were taken away (to have
> free grounds for seeing and shooting potential escapees).
> But the bridge ruin remained, being used as
> a climbing-object (indicated by climbing hooks "made
> in USSR")
> There is another fragment nearby-
> which was not part of the GAR, but for a line transporting
> goods to the Schönefeld airport fabrication.
7.5.10
5.5.10
3.5.10
2.5.10
Minutes.
There is no direct image for a change in temperature but this begins immediately.
A few minutes must have elapsed.
A slim film has formed on the surface of the eyes, which softens the forms cast back in them.
At first, barely perceptibly, edges diffuse, colours become shallow.
Next positions of objects become indistinct, and space is erased into depthlessness.
The image is swallowed serenely in a nacreous bloom that takes its place.
The image is the nacreous sheen of the eye.
When a foreign body invades the flesh, the epithelial cells form an enclosing sac which secretes a crystalline substance that builds in layers. A soft tongue rasps around sediment and licks a fresh word into place.
Bones start soft, form first as flat membraneous layers of connective tissue fed with a sober flow of blood. Connective tissue cells slip, form an array between the layers and reinscribe themselves as bone-forming cells that siphon calcium from the blood and pack it slowly amongst the matrix of cartilage. Packed around the cartilage the bones take form, become spongy, then compact. They billow into arcs and planes that punctuate straps of dark red muscle with ossified white.
We had walked through the museum, pausing to watch maps of white bones strain against black wire, to watch onyx beads, meticulously glued beneath eyelids, reflect perimeter lines precisely
and hold striplights bowing on each steep meniscus.
Standing still, and not speaking, it was uncertain whether we were straining for signs of permanence or impermanence.
1.5.10
29.4.10
Hans Haacke
Die Freiheit wird jetzt einfach gesponsort - aus der Portokasse
Freedom is now simply going to be sponsored - out of petty cash
Hans Haacke, 1990
26.4.10
CSH proper, improper
Julius Shulman, Tremaine House, Santa Barbara, Richard Neutra Architect, 1950
I am reading Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet.
22.4.10
15.4.10
Uriel Orlow, 'Remnants of the Future' @ Laure Genillard
16th January – 10th April 2010
Remnants of the Future is a multi-part installation comprising video, photography and drawing. Taking as its starting point a number of sites in Northern Armenia near the Georgian and Turkish borders, in this new body of work Orlow continues his investigation of the spatial and pictorial conditions of history and memory.
Orlow’s video focuses on Mush, a housing project just outside of the north Armenian town of Gyumri. Mush is named after the once flourishing Armenian town in Eastern Anatolia, which in 1915, during the Armenian genocide, became the site of massacres and deportations. Construction of the 'new' Mush began a few months after the major Spitak earthquake of 1988 destroyed many of Gyumri's housing blocks and made thousands of people homeless. Promised by M. Gorbachev to be completed within two years, construction of the new Soviet-style suburb eventually came to an abrupt halt as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Russian construction workers were recalled by Moscow. The newly independent Armenian state did not have the means to finish this ambitious housing project and it has since remained in a ghostly state of incompletion and near desertion, inhabited by inhabited by migrating birds and gleaners who eek out an existence by slowly dismantling the Soviet style housing blocks.. The video is accompanied by a sound-scape by Mikhail Karikis using the radio waves emitted by dying stars (pulsars), which still reach us after the star has died and which were first mistaken for intelligent life messages from outer space.
A series of photographs explore the afterlife of a nearby textile factory, which had at one point produced over 50% of the Soviet Union's textiles and was destroyed during the earth-quake. Reaching even further back into history is a series of twenty drawings of death masks – including Lenin, Tolstoy, Eisenstein and Mayakovsky – made by Sergey Merkurov, a Gyumri-born sculptor who became famous for his monumental sculptures throughout the Soviet Union. A floating cover of Francis Fukuyama's seminal post-cold-war book 'The End of History - The Last Man' and a hand copy of a UK government document on Armenia operate as lose footnotes to the rest of the work.
Orlow's practice tackles the impossibility of narrating or representing the past and engages with different documentary forms. Spanning little known locations in Africa, the Arctic, Eastern Europe and Switzerland, Orlow's work explores blind-spots of representation and knowledge through a careful act of framing and re-arranging what he finds in a place. His modular, multi-media installations bring varying image-regimes and archival research into correspondence following associative, conceptual and formal threads.
‘Orlow’s challenge to our desire for continuity is radical: the truth of this peripheral space is not one, he suggests, that can be told narratively. […] Orlow’s work asks us how we can read the past in a way which does not involve a simple hierarchy with the present. More than this: he wants to know what history is and how it binds itself to an institution, a thing, a space, a face. The fragility of the whole project is its fidelity to its subject’s fractured nature […].’(Mike Sperlinger)
