A MODEL SURFACE SPLATTERED BY THE
THING ITSELF [1]
Hermione Spriggs, on occasion of a 1st yr review
I’ve had two slowly mutating word files on my desktop for
the last few weeks, names copied off the first line of their text due to
repetitive computer-crash autosave:
What is the medium
that is able to traverse two fields and hold its sense.docx
Going in with getting
close in mind and fucking up the thing.docx
Second line of the latter (preferable) reads: Going in with fucking up in mind and getting
close to the thing. Since I’m
constantly working in multiple here, and dangling in a mode of suspended
neither-nor (not home not-not home, half my language, too much Skype) it seems
appropriately anti-gravitational to begin discussing this year’s work through
two simultaneous trails of thought.
This body of work constitutes a series of doubles, or, since
‘double’ suggests something timeless and pervasively visual, perhaps echo or
palindrome are better terms to use. Anyhow, clustered utterances that talk amongst
themselves and intensify through self-replication and, through centripetal
conceit, suffer a kind of clammy heatstroke. These scenarios dance a pivot on
the brink between clotting and overspill— pushing on a membrane or sploshing
overboard. Taken as a body, the work as a whole is itself a kind of aftershock,
lunging with a certain degree of directness out of a particular ethnographic
scenario and (ideally) regurgitating out material affects of it’s origin.
The structural inspiration of this work is that within which
rigid structure dissolves: a social situation wrung from the sweat of a single
wet spot in a very dry place. This is easily said of the hot pool itself, but
also zooming out, I find it hard to ‘get in’ to urban California. It’s rather
lateral, and almost inflatable in the sense that I bounce and roll off sunny La
Jolla. No dive, no follow-though. Hard to bleed or yell, or chaotically jumble
or start an ascent[2]. Driving out
to the Salton Sea is a pressure release. I find myself treading on splinters of
churned up American gut and getting it, and feeling productively raw. There’s a
whole lot less in Slab city, we pack less. It’s the extremity of a mediated
‘without’, and I think it might provide the necessary state of extended remove
to enable the untouchably dry (San Diego, the ‘with’) to reveal its own sense
in relief.
Lets call that a stage direction: lunge out in aftershock
with the hope of relief.
relief, noun.
a method of raising shapes above a flat surface so
that they appear to stand out slightly from it[3]
Which brings me back to the first docx., the crossing of fields. Or the
swinging between, from an oscillating third pole. I’m thinking of this as a
kind of ‘agility training’, a phrase which Donna Harroway explicates
wonderfully through her narratives of Californian dog-athletics[4].
Needless to say, it is the human half of the dog-owner partnership that
struggles to relinquish control, in order to slip into tandem with the graceful
strides and perceptive recall of the animal. It’s a means of gaining something
through the loss of human agency – ‘profoundly disturbing’ in the words of Paul
Carter, and directly related to my mention of follow-through; a sort of
onomatopoeic consistency that reaches under norms, species, spaces.
'We are truly in the business in fostering a communicative athleticism
towards the messy.' – Erik, a friend.
On the bus home after a seminar with Stuart Bailey, unfurled
and exhausted, I met an ex-commercial fisherman—
“to know something you have to fight it.”
…To fish for albacore tuna, you stand with a rod braced
against your chest and facing the sea. When a fish bites the hook it’s flying
through the water at 50mph using its own momentum. A practiced fisherman uses
an albacore’s existing flight path (trajectory, energy source), to cajole the
fish into leaping out of the sea, and into his boat with the flick of a rod. He
learns this through repeated swings of his steak in the wrong direction: a
fight with a 4foot albacore is bloody and exhausting. They have sharp teeth.
To know a fish you have to fight
it, but to catch a fish you have to fly
with the fish. Talk about
follow-through, bodily mimesis, the thought of a
—sounding line—
It’s very much about this:
“To listen into cultures or, throwing off the guise of detachment, to
be a performer participating in the echolocative rituals associated with
becoming in relation to another, suggests a loss of agency—a condition the
modern westerner finds unspeakably distressing.” (Paul Carter)
And also this:
‘…It is a way of transcending your capacities by embracing your
incapacities and therefore a way to interrupt the brute assertiveness of the I
Can though the performance of I Can’t performed in the key of I Can.’ (Jan Verwoert, Exhaustion & Exuberance)
—It is plausible that detachment from something we know well
legitimates a re-entry of the kind that overturns. To return might be to
overturn when to turn on the spot would be to turn.
gargle/gurgle/gobble/gargoyle
‘Mishearing can be creative: in situations of cross-cultural encounter,
where power is distributed unevenly, echoic mimicry can be a means by which the
relatively weak resist silencing’ (Paul
Carter)
A call and response that laughs at itself whilst laughing
with the [fish, whistle, laptop, rock]…Then out of the chaos touches the thing.
Listen
for gobbler thunder from a ridge top, knoll or similar high spot at dawn. The
higher you hunt the easier it is to hear and course faraway gobbles… Sneak quietly down into calling
position.… and draw a
solid line to the bird’s roost tree.
(taken from online hunting forum dccl.org, my underline).
With this in mind I’m thinking about a form of ethnographic
art practice that exists in and through corporeal engagement, both on and
post-site, yet is agile enough to re-enter and provoke the anthropological/artistic/textual
conventions to which it responds. I am hunting for snarks[5], or an
un-image[in]able onomatopoeic consistency that exists in denial of rational
space-time categorization.
After recently conversing on the topic of ‘who gives a shit and why’, I
realize that it may be an important recursion to have the work loop back into
something it can push against – i.e. the academic publication or
anthropological conference. But the present challenge is to pass ideas and
thoughts about thoughts through middling/ muddling spaces and materials. I’m at
this stage here of sinking into the stuff, and musing as to whether a ‘hunting
paradigm’ could be developed as a means of negotiating these poles of art and
anthropology (see Gobbles Sound Ok
for more on this).
The work I enjoy is propelled by an underlying desire to subsist intensely on the edge (categorically,
geographically, institutionally) and a frontier-like spirit, likewise embedded
in my experience of Slab City. This provokes a co-dependent lure towards
isolated pooling places and a need for intimate (echo-locative?) discourse with
other strangers. Art that influences my own is
generally self-sufficient and research-laden, often occurring as an apparently
natural product of curated existence in particular situations, in coherence
with a prevalence of unconventional media, adopted from or resonating with
sites of engagement (be this voice, tools, text, material). The work I have faith in is
resourceful, recursive, mimetic and, through these means, activates
presence.
Looking forward to the conversation,
Hermione.
