"Mary
is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke
the sentence; now she has broken the sequence." -
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
As one enters
the narrow make-shift hallway of Apex, immediately to the
right one encounters two apparently uniform paragraphs,
red on white, that make up Kay Rosen's wall text entitled Oh,
Eau. At first glance, the texts seem exactly the same.
Upon reading, the only difference between the text is an
alteration of punctuation, but this difference creates
two diverging narratives - one of an impending deluge,
the other the tale of a broken heart. Through the subtle
move of shifting commas and periods, Rosen blurs the boundaries
between reading and viewing, setting them in flux, challenging
the transparency of both words and images.
She makes a double
move through time and space, much like Mary Carmichael,
Virginia Woolf's alter-ego in A Room of One's Own.
Rosen sets to work "to catch those unrecorded gestures,
those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves,
no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling..." Errant
Gestures: Visual and Verbal Correspondences looks through
and past these shadows, exploring the works of artists
who wander outside established formal and conceptual limits
in order to challenge the process of producing social meanings.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Janet Cohen, JonMarc Edwards, Rie
Hachiyanagi, Mark Lombardi, Andrea Ray, Kay Rosen, and
Leslie Thornton each perform an errant gesture: a strategic
double play designed to interrogate the relationship between
form and content, signifier and signified.
These works collectively
engage in a semiotic activity where at first glance visual
and verbal signs collide and press against each other with
no seeming syntactic progression. Upon closer inspection,
however, each of the artist's process reveals a sustained
commitment to two sites of critique: formal and conceptual.
Understanding how language relates to speech and signs,
each of the artists in Errant Gestures in turn engages
their formal medium with an aesthetic language. By doing
so, a doubling occurs, in which the artist grafts one form
of language onto another to produce a conceptual language,
an interstitial site, through which visual art opens up
traditional aesthetic categories, but also underscores
the inherent ambiguities and slipperiness in language.
There are always
gaps between what is seen and understood that point to
a politics of language: how one's particular location to
language informs the way experience is organized. Who determines
these gaps, these slippages of meaning? In other words,
who controls the meaning of words or as Humpty Dumpty rhetorically
poses the question to Alice (in Through the Looking
Glass), "the question is, which is to be master - that's
all." The works in Errant Gestures also pose this
question in an effort to reveal language's shortcomings
as well as its potential.
Inspired by Michel
Foucault's discussion of the calligram and Walter Benjamin's
notes on correspondences, Errant Gestures aims to
look at works that point to the gaps, ambiguities and potentialities
of language as well as challenge the hierarchy and binary
between reading and perception, the visual versus the verbal.
In a reading of artist René Magritte, Foucault conceptualizes
the calligram in which "letters...remain points, sentences
lines, paragraphs surfaces or masses...the text must say
nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader.
As soon as one begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates..."2
That is, although the calligram may seem to render thought,
an idea, it does not say, cannot yet say. The linguistic
puns of Rosen, the wordplay of Edwards, and the conceptually
driven documentary exercises of Cohen and Lombardi say,
but do not say directly, in different ways, engaging
in and diverging from the concept of the calligram through
their errant gestures of art making.
At first glance,
the red and black clusters of notations in Janet Cohen's Montreal
at New York, 7-18-99 appear less about documenting
an inning in a baseball game than a carbon copy of a statistics
exercise that has been worked over repeatedly. Cohen's
shorthand for strikes, balls, hits, and fouls - consisting
of letters, numbers, exponentials, shapes of diamonds and
circles - however random, plot pitches that fall in the
strike zone and the play that ensues. Her idiosyncratic
visual language attempts to compress and manifest time,
space, a passion for baseball, conceptual art and thought
especially that of the pitcher's and her own.
Mark Lombardi's
large-scale drawing translates the collusions of Banca
Nazionale del Lavoro with the Reagan, Bush, and Thatcher
governments in the arming of Iraq into a constellation
of radiating arrows, small circles (players in the game),
larger arcs, solid lines (the movement of influence), dotted
lines (the movement of assets), and wavy lines (traces
of frozen assets). The intricacy of his "narrative structures" -
a complex web condensed with connections forged and made
obscure - relay and spin a proliferation of "public information" that
takes on a life of its own.
JonMarc Edwards'
pictographs -- compression of image, text, information
and abstract painting via a textual device, what he calls
a "monosyble" -- function much like Foucault's calligrams.
The sensual lines and shapes of Edwards' wordplay fulfill
a visual plenitude what Foucault remarks as "hushed in
the vision, hidden in the reading."3 The smooth curves
of lacquered wood unfurl meaning beyond its connotation
that at the same time seems, in the case of Light,
to illuminate the wall on which it hangs.
In contrast to
Foucault's concept of the calligram, Benjamin saw the world
as language where mute objects with their "linguistic potential
became legible to the attentive philosopher who named them,
translating this potential into the human language of words,
and bringing them into speech."4 The juxtaposition of these
mute objects produces a correspondence: a dynamic relationship
in which an artist and/or viewer appropriates and reconstructs
an event, idea, and object, changing not only the "mute
object" itself, but re-invigorating it. Avery Gordon likens
the process to "entering through a different door, the
door of the uncanny, the door of the fragment...of the shocking
parallel."5 Errant
Gestures explores the dialectic of these displaced
connections through the works of Thornton, Ray and Cha.
In Adynata's
mise-en-scène of luxurious colors, excessive imagery,
overlapping soundtracks, found footage, and still images,
Leslie Thornton explores the desire that underlies Orientalism
and the mechanism that sustains it. The film begins with
an attempt to mimic through gestures and dress the photograph
of a Chinese mandarin couple and towards the end juxtaposes
found footage of a 1950s science fiction film of a man
trying to decipher "the code" with dialogue from a Korean
soap opera, highlighting the absurdity to understand and
fix the Orient. Through the asynchronism and excess of
sound and image, Thornton provokes a visual uncertainty
as well as thwarts Orientalism's desire to escape and avoid
signification.
Borrowing the
setting of Marguerite Duras' novel Destroy She Said,
Andrea Ray sets the viewer court center on a chaise longue
in front of a still image of a tennis court projected against
a wall. The repetitive sound of tennis balls being hit
converges with the soothing yet spare reading of days gone
by at a resort sanatorium. Ray's Fatiguer (tire) lulls
and lures the viewer in a double play that both conforms
and disrupts the viewer's conventional strategy of watching
a movie or reading a book.
In Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha's video Mouth to Mouth, an orifice appears
like a void, attempting to enunciate the vowels of the
Korean alphabet. What follows is a soundtrack of static,
running water, and birds singing that block mediation and
articulation. The disjunctive sounds and the blizzard of
video snow that almost threaten to efface the disembodied
mouth, coalesce into an uncanny layering that heightens
one's desire to look, listen, and speak.
The artists in Errant
Gestures in one way or another attempt to break free
from the signifying representational function of language.
Rie Hachiyanagi's work focuses on the ellipsis and postponement
of language, in particular how language comes into being.
For Hachiyanagi, language as well as her material (handmade
paper) partakes in a fluidly organic process that explores
the potential conversion of silence into language. Informed
by Martin Heidegger's search for an essential language
that names everything that is and in turn grants being
to beings, Hachiyanagi builds a house of being that
suspends and traces through the many "invisible" threads
a silence, creating a possible threshold, an approach
to being.
Heidegger writes
in On the Way to Language... "we always see the
nature of language only to the extent to which language
itself
has us in view...that we cannot know the nature of language...is
not a defect, but rather an advantage."6 All of the artists
in Errant Gestures take advantage of the slippages
and gaps of language, creating manifold language systems,
a pastiche of visual patterns, and a cacophonous present
that are at once elusive and concrete, yet ephemerally
tactile.
1. Woolf,
Virginia. A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1957, originally published 1929): 88.
2. Foucault, Michel. This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1983): 24.
3. Ibid. 25.
4. Cited by Ernst Bloch in Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing:
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997):
12. See also footnotes 39, 40.
5. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 66.
6. Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz
(San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1971): 134.
Susette Min © 2000 |