I react immediately to the fact that you say “an image that feels stuck in my head,” that you create an image as a reaction, as either metaphor or t-shirt. Yes, this doubling-back action of inverting the inversion is perhaps abstract but not ambiguous content, it’s “not nothing.” A negation of the negation does not simply result in a positive, in fact, it most commonly amplifies and augments the negation.
There are languages in which a double negative produces a positive, but not in any of the languages I speak: English, Swedish and German (which I utilize but don’t fully comprehend). These all affirm the negation with the second negation. But I think my material work speaks another vernacular. “Not nothing” becomes something, and this formulation is also the exception to the rule in the English language, but in fact it’s a disambiguation, which just means we understand whether to interpret something as negative or positive according to context, content, ideas. And I enjoy playing with these contextual disambiguations within my work: absence as material – sans motif can be a space and ohne titel can form a critique when we understand, or at least have a hum of, the situation.
Slippages in translation, yes, this is a corridor I see as a place to settle in, instead of as a walkthrough. And indeed what moves, morphs, or slips up within a back and forth, and back again translation excites me – as well as words which appear to exist but are made up or vice versa. I think of mellanrum, my favourite Swedish word, as a word which becomes lost in translation when transmuted into “middleroom”; I say transmuted because, within the literal translation, the philosophical is struck from its meaning and turned into a construction. A room between two other rooms, a lesser than central room, inconsequential space. But as an idea, at least to me, a mellanrum is a space which is “not nothing,” just as sans motif is as subject and the in between is a destination, zwischen Erscheinenlassen und Zu-Erkennen-geben.
Operating between language and object is a fantastic mellanrum to spend time in, and lounge. There is a linguistic concept called compositional phraseme, which loosely means that we understand meaning from the language that composes it (I paraphrase). And I’d like to think of my work, even my material work, as an extension of language – that we can explore through its compositionality.
But to refer back to your “image” – and the inverted inverted – I strongly believe in the act of valorising, and I don’t mean monetarily, an object through selection. I also believe that this inversion, as you say, negation, as I say, creates something residual, even when reversed or negated once more. Not necessarily a positive, but “a” something. Maybe it’s that, which you find hard-to-put-your-finger-on, “the heavy nothingness.”
Yes! I am the forever heutagogical student, but I have been loving teaching also, but I teach with a heavy ear to the ground of learning. I think there is a great mistake in considering teaching and learning as Janus words, two opposite faces on the same coin (of knowledge), I would never consider learning and teaching opposite or contradictory. If I could do it all again, I’d still drop out of school at 15 because I had too much to learn – I still have so much to learn now, sometimes I feel panicked by the fact that I’ve barely scratched the surface of all I want to know.
I try to practice a kind of Pauline Oliveros approach to listening, by which I mean, I aim for a certain attentiveness in which I lose the awareness of “the self” in the situation. The ear is tight to the experience. I have realised that there are simple ways to try and implement this, at least in the situations you yourself “control.” Yesterday, as I was reading with my friend Olga, we asked for there not to be a professional photographer present, which is a simple way to create a better listening environment. I have come to be frustrated with readings, performances, events in which one should be able to experience, to keep a heavy ear to the ground, but is constantly interrupted by documentation which capitalizes on the “event” as format rather than the “experience” as format. But in other situations it is easy; engage in dialogue with anyone you find interesting and the listening seal becomes vacuum tight.
I love that you mention the domino effect of the destruction and consequential re-assembly of the entire show. Accidents happen, but are usually left untold in the narrative of the “finished” work. To me, there is no finish, there is the process and then there is a point at which you stop working on that particular process. And I think it is somehow my responsibility as reverence for this process to share its mishaps, calamities and blunders – which is also why I was telling people left and right at the opening of Absolut about the cataclysmic crash which occurred. I suppose I don’t synonymies (is that the right word?) failure with non-success.
The weight of the text is for me the heaviest of all, which is also why it often exists as an element within the sculptural language in my work. You mention the weight of the black unit “Konsum.” Its literal weight far outweighs that of the book-work “Die formelle Zitierung,” consisting of 64 books by Nobel prize winning authors in literature 1901-1970, the plinth, and the perspex hood. The actual “weight” standing in-situ is clear, stark and belongs to the physicality of the works. However, to me, as I said, the weight of literature still trumps all.
I came to art through reading and writing, so perhaps this is why it sits, as you said, with a “heaviness as orienteering” myself around art itself. There is also a jarring moment when the front (?) of the book – because we say the back of a book is to its spine, which is my kind of humour – is facing the front, meaning that we don’t see the titles of the books. We see the books as a whole, a whole weight, a mass, a lived-in mass, (de-)coloured by their former domestic placement and now on show. On show is then a row where gaps symbolise an absence of presence, the presence of war and protest, so in fact the gaps, the spaces, weigh topically far heavier than the books, thus what weighs nothing at all, weighs heavily on the work.
I have a tremendous issue with how to materialise, thus bring about a certain recognisable weight, to my texts, which, to me, weigh the same as the material work in a show. Yes, I read them, thus I orate them, thus they enliven alongside my work. Perhaps then the text echoes, through the volume of the resonance box, which is my body, as I read, and becomes all the more voluminous for it. But I hope to find more ways…
I have a soft spot for Baudrillard’s “whole series minus one” and recently wrote it into a text concerning my collection of milk teeth lost by my daughter, the second of which I lost. And currently, I am writing a text within which I touch on lacking, how "It finds its way in, unintentionally, as if on purpose, ah well, unintentionally as much as, if one eats tomato sauce while wearing a crisp white shirt – one can imagine the outcome. And there is always a stain on what I do, there is always an inadequacy in what I finish, always a tear or a spot, smudge or smear on my person. There is always a rip, a tear somewhere in a garment I’m wearing, one can niggle a finger into and be met with skin. But perhaps ‘besmirched’ is my ‘unfettered,’ whilst ‘put together’ is my restraint.”
And although this paragraph is closely observing the aesthetics of my person, this same lack exists in my work, intentionally, unintentionally as a parallel to what I’m wearing… I think it is rooted in an urge to show the not-togetherness of myself, and my lack of professional attitudes, opposing the idea that this means lacking competence, lacking social savoir faire, lacking structure, when in fact I work prolifically through procrastination as a method.
There is also an intentional formulation of “lack,” as you say, “without,” as I would say. The presence as absence, the deficit as benefit, the negative space as motif – these all form critical discourse within my work, and I would consider a subject to be a vernacular, rather than just a topic. The absence of language can say a lot, but the absence of material often needs some kind of frame, a residue, an imprint of what is no longer there, a trace, a container around that which is absent. In language, spoken or written, silence takes up an enormous space, but it’s hard to do that with material. What I have done in the past is to place something very, very small in a big room, utilising the room, and with it the clearly present absence of anything else in that room, as a frame, as a space which magnifies the very small work. The work, then, is not “just” the small thing placed in the room (for example a silver edible chocolate covered almond balanced on a cornstarch gelato spoon, fastened to a nail, or in a later version, just the almond, now cast in sterling silver, inserted into the wall, in a small hollow becoming the antithesis to a wall hung work) but the room itself, the architecture of the gallery, meaning the work is site-specific and will always change according to the space it inhabits.
In allowing the stain to be visualized, actualised, present, there is the negation of the norm. Not only to say, here is a dishevelled surface! – but – here is a surface left disheveled, but one could have tidied up! I don’t know, sometimes syntax is like math and I am a tired mother. I am not quite clear about the relationship between the flaw, vis a vis not removing the flaw, we enter full circle with the negation of the negation and into a cul-de-sac of not-nothing, but I love it, lets leave it in and unresolved, as so much is left unresolved when one is tired, and let that be the reason for not asserting exactitude, in keeping with our theme.
What you say about this conversation is nearly verbatim what I postulate. My theory about interviews is that it is really only ever interesting if the interviewee and the interviewer enter into a dialogue where each feels an ambiguity between question and answer and don’t really polish up their answers too much. I prefer lingering in and lulling in lush linguistic territory. I wonder, though, how interesting it is, for a third party to read? Maybe very, maybe not at all? But indeed, yes, one could easily reduce us to two word-nerds and one wouldn’t mind really… Things could be worse.
But I digress, as usual.
It's only a recent thing that I read facing my audience. I used to read either entirely with my back towards the audience or oscillate between back and front. When shifting, I did so to embody two different objective roles – one symbolising the institution, and by extension, the norm, the male, the expert, the authority, the other, the artist, me, you. But I put this on pause for a moment, a few times I have traversed too far into theatre and reacted to the aesthetics of it bitterly, as if it eats the content, the image eats the text. But turning one’s back to an audience is a slight but powerful, small but manifestly present gesture. For some reason I cannot muster the theatricality of performance at the moment and constantly bring myself back to the strictest of requisites. I have some residual performance-trauma in which the image has been all that was left at the end, the image and conjecture.
Yes, I have been thinking about this a lot lately, how to not render text subpar to visuals and how to refrain from the misconception that text is a supplemental form(at). The text, whether meant to or not, has no real chance at becoming anything else than an appendix when it appears ‘alongside’ something. My one and only absolute answer during this process – Yes!: images trouble me, documentation trouble me, the lack of space for language in documentation trouble me.
There is a work in my current show which only exists through the “Exhibition Text,” since it failed, during production, to become what I wanted it to be. It does not “exist” in the show but in the exhibition text I decided to still refer to the “missing” work.
“In the backroom which is the front room, in an accidental but flirted with Asher-ambience a triptych should have hung, made for the specific experience of entering through the gallery backroom, in which tradi- tionally works are kept hidden from the general public and shown only to collectors and other v.i.p’s. This work was supposed to be shown to all and coupled with a performative gesture of the gallerist opening the work at visitor’s request. White gloves would have been adorned to touch the genuine velvet covered triptych and would have been what is inside, open, visible but also what it is outside, closed and hidden, a box. A Schrödinger’s cat kind of thought experiment could be entertained when the motif is removed from the triptych.
Because unless opened, inside it, contained, would be its ecclesiastical potential, albeit as an unknown iconographic promise, or aura, determined by the history of art’s proof that triptychs most often depicted a religious motif or brimmed with religious allegories and symbolism. And since the unknown often has more potential for affect than the known, our Schrödinger’s cat box-cum-cupboard allegory could imply that the closed triptych means god is dead, and/or alive within it. However, because of an issue with production, this work was never completed to the standard it needed to be and so it was left out of the show but present as intention and proof that artworks do not always turn out, through circumstance, as you might have liked.
A most astute example of something “being through its lack of becoming” and making space for a “lack of work” as work. I tend to make exhibitions which are terrible to photograph – works are too long, too tall, too inopportunely positioned, too large, too small, too hidden away… I feel tremendously anxious about exhibition documentation, the levelling, the correcting, by that I suppose I mean the insistence on deadening something which could be alive through brightness and contrast. And yes, once again you ask the question to the answer I just spelled out before reading it… “It’s so obvious it sounds silly to even say” is a good show-title. The works assume direct absolute positions instead of postulate possibilities. There was no great debate of where they should stand, there never is with my material work. I believe in objects as collaborators, even if it sounds like a disney-fication of inanimate objects. I don’t always feel entirely in control of their positions, I think I know what I want and they obey, or they position themselves how they may and I obey.
I have a plan in the works for an upcoming show where I will use documentation, installation, the opening and duration of the show, all as material within the show. These are topics I constantly think about, strategies I contemplate. I used to be much better at it, I’ve had openings where I was not present because I went to get a massage, my only documentation of “the social” being a furrow the pressure of the massage pillow had burrowed into my cheek, a show in which I exhibited only “bad works” that I was ashamed about or disliked, then discarded on the street, the image of the then-work-now-rubbish documented as any other banal rubbish-which-looks-like-art-image. I placed an ad in a local newspaper for a show I had in Finland without my name and used it for the invitation. I tried to send Kunsthalle Wien a picture of me and my daughter sticking our tongues out as an artist picture. I think images, documentation, the performativity of images are wildly exciting. I just think it’s not very usual that platforms which regurgitate art documentation allow for this type of experimentation, they simply don’t accept them to maintain their standard.
I thought that we could insert absolutely zero professional images into this interview and instead a melange of personal happenstance, an array of images that were taken on the days during which these questions were being posed and answered. If they happen to relate to the work within them, so be it, and I know some will, whilst others are simply life surrounding the event.
