A response to the commute, a series of audio works by S F Ho, jaye simpson, and Helena Krobath, which was curated by Whitney Brennan director of Arts Assembly.

“Arts Assembly is pleased to present the commute, a new digital initiative that explores the concept of commuting and its relationships to safety, accessibility and public transportation. For the first iteration of the commute, artists S F Ho, jaye simpson, and Helena Krobath produced new audio-based works relating to their daily commute or a route between places of their choosing. The works are available for free download accompanied by online maps (when required) to follow while you listen to the artists’ audio works.“ — Whitney Brennan (Arts Assembly website)

Full text can be found here:

https://www.artsassembly.ca/earrings-noodles-and-recurrence

Master’s of Arts thesis
European Graduate School
Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought

Abstract

Pivot: Tropes, Tropisms, and Non-Metaphor

Using a non-philosophical methodology, I propose to track the theological origins of the concept of trope through hermeneutics and into deconstruction, turning to biology for a recuperation of the root tropos as movement-towards. This movement-towards will be argued as a metaphor-in-the-last-instance of its unilateral relation with the real, extended into language and abstraction through the indication of movement and valuation in relation to environmental gradients. I argue that the focus on movement is a key non-philosophical strategy, as it necessitates a description that “requires its constant recasting [and is] not determined but indefinitely rectified.” Movement’s perceptible necessity is change, a phenomenon that is describable, but never as a stable scene or calcified order.

Also inherent in this instance of movement is an allowance for the abstraction of that description of change in order to construct adaptive value environments through which to navigate and understand change. The evolutionary development of the organism requires this abstraction, which is determined by its environmentally devised tropisms, the most basic being geo-, photo-, and hydrotropism. The initiation of the trope through movement is a base form of conflationary description of the real with abstraction. This form will be used to reassess analogous gestures, in value and language. Its interrogation is necessary to think the dyadic philosophical relation of “the object and the thought of the object….the real and language in the mixture of the logos.” Its continued use and morphology throughout textual philosophical practices is further evidence of the trope’s “prohibition of knowledge in the name of interpretation.” Using dynamical systems theory to describe multiple field gradients, and the movements within them, I will attempt to apply this methodology to abstract metaphor environments.

From a turn-towards, to a turn-towards-God, to a turn-of-phrase, the trope exemplifies the exploitation of the real through philosophy. This exploitation substitutes a constructed ideological value environment for that of the initial external biological stimulus, in a coercive attempt to manipulate various movements-towards. I argue that by reducing the trope to its biological constitutive element, that of the pivot, a perceivable reaction to the external stimulus of the real, we can both trace the monumental inflation of its extracted value from the real, and begin to attempt a methodology based on its determination in the last instance.

Full text PDF available on Academia.edu

Cover image pulled from the software: https://github.com/anvaka/fieldplay

under:

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2017-2020 Andrei Kashcha

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

PostScript commissioned by Artspeak, on Justine A. Chambers’ work, Semi-Precious: The Faceting of a Gemstone Only Appears Complete and Critical

Full text available at Artspeak.ca

Exhibition Page from Artspeak

Abstract

This essay addresses the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project and its ensuing political turmoil as an expanded assembly of performative processes. Bringing contemporary media theory’s examinations of the composition of an apparatus or “dispositif” to bear on recent developments in vitalist materialism, this essay argues for the inclusion of non-human material elements in the political sphere. In particular, it defines the tendencies of contention between oil and water as a fundamental antagonism within these elemental materials. This study is grounded in the public performances of provincial, federal, and municipal governments as they relate to processes of control and resistance. In its analysis of current rhetoric surrounding the project, including political performances, this essay aims to redefine the conflict over resource extraction and pipeline development through a strategy of resistance that figures oil and water as political actants in an expanded choreographic assembly.

Keywords: choreography of processes, environmental politics, diluted bitumen, disposition, new materialism, non-human agency, political performance, resource extraction, Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion, water
Full text can be accessed through Canadian Theatre Review, Volume 176 Issue , Fall 2018, pp. 69-74.

Exhibition text for ‘Here, under our tongue’ by Tom Hsu at Burrard Arts Foundation, August 9 - September 22, 2018

Tom Hsu’s ‘Here, under our tongue’ takes care in lingering over remnants. Taking photography’s signification as an index, this exhibition tunnels recursively into the frame of the camera to carefully hold and examine that which is left over after the event. Plying gestures, situations that exceed explanation, and other bizarre refuse are the subjects of his work.

The material excess detectable across the images is reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s obsessive monoprint addressing the cinder. Derrida describes the cinder (cendre) as the thing that remains, tied down to documentation and also erased by it, containing the seed to start a fire, a “trace destined, like everything, to disappear from itself, as much in order to lose the way as to rekindle a memory.” This distinct thought vibrates in the relocated sound work, the visually flattened images of plants, the accoutrements required to provide hospitality. Throughout the work one can feel a sentiment of the care of coming together. References of Hsu’s family history of hospitality and food service are scattered throughout. He ties these communal events to the darkroom in an analogy of balance between what is presented and performed, and the darkness which produces these appearances.

The images and their accompanying elements initially invoke a sort of askance shame, depictions of the inelegant, unnecessary, and unrecognizably perverse. There are things that we do not like to associate with the self, shown clearly and resolutely as inextricable from it. Bodies, food, florals, deflations, vanities and other undignified temporary luxuries that give us pleasure can be found in various forms. They suggest the same cloying gesture that can be found in the repeated images of hands: they all seem to be grasping towards something. What might initially present themselves to us as the ugly surplus tendencies with which we tend to deny association become in Hsu’s framing queer phenomena of an indirect approach to intimacy. The intimacy that the subjects of his work are seeking is queer in that it is irrespective of sexual love, indiscriminate to gender, but immanently physical, and wildly multi-directional. Bodies in their excess become conflated and implicated with other bodies, objects, machines, text, and images.

The term ‘excess’ often carries a derogatory tone in contemporary usage, as it is positioned within the language of capitalism, consumerism, and waste. In this case, Hsu tends to these examples of excess in a manner that is akin to mourning, care, and rediscovery, rather than condemnation. His gentle handling of what some may consider abject is a subtle tell of the intention running through the original event that is photographed. The body or the object is approached from a multiplicity of angles, and what we begin to find as the spine running through the middle of them is a love of connection. Hsu approaches the need in these objects and events sidelong, carrying with his camera an inextricable mixture of criticality and celebration. What makes these instances waste and glut is that we turn away from them, treat them as temporary, denying them their exuberance once the moment has left. Tom Hsu is an artist who is willing to provide the care that they ask from us afterward.

“It is, however, a question of making a withdrawal, in order to let him try his luck on a gift without the least memory of itself, in the final account, through a corpus, a pile of cinders unconcerned about preserving its form, a retreat, a retracing only without any relation with what, now, through love, I just did and I am just about to tell you

— Jacques Derrida, Feu la Cendre, 1987″

Text for Sarah Davidson's exhibition "For the Trees" at Dynamo Arts Association, April 2017.

Printed by Moniker Press.

You Can’t See the Forest

ΔSuniv = ΔSsys + ΔSsurr ≥ 0

all spontaneous processes produce an increase in the entropy of the universe 1

There is a similar ontological pull between forces of preservation and ruin. The second law of thermodynamics has caused much depression and anxiety in the neuroses of the nihilists since its development in part in 1851 by Lord Kelvin. Although contemporary conceptualization of this law is the necessitation of an increase in entropy in a closed system, the law was originally formulated to refer to a transfer of heat. Kelvin (or William Thomas, as he was colloquially known)  stated that compensation to this irrevocable heat loss would require “a creative act or an act possessing similar power.” 2

Preservation is a word oft associated with environmental activism. However, its implementation is a distinctly “cultural” phenomenon, not a natural one. Namely, it is one of human beings, and their technologies. Preservation brings along with it a whole host of other activities. The verb implies an external process to occur in order to accomplish its goal. You have pickling, salting, fermenting, cataloguing, copying, categorizing, languaging, embalming. In reality, ruin itself is a much needed process in the activity of sustainment of diverse life. The transfer of heat from one system (biological, ecological, and, I would argue, visual, and ontological) is integral and the multiplicities of systems allows for a birth of organization in the transfer of this heat. Origin of Species by Darwin, and Kelvin’s laws of thermodynamics were published in the same decade. They both came on the tail end of the industrial revolution. Both theories were argued as paradoxical, and heretical, by the church. Both conceptually resist the possibility of a creative or intelligent design in the world. However, once you consider the closed system of thermodynamics as being one which encompasses you, the earth, the universe, this transfer of heat and its loss in the process - the movement of such energy - can still create a beautiful and complex diversity of ruin.

The ground … is not a latency but a container already filled, so that the gaze is experienced as being saturated from the very start; that the perspective projection is not felt as a transparency opening onto a world but as a skin, fleshlike, dense, and strangely separable from the objects it fixates… [these two perspectives] finally mirror each other in a complicitous reversibility, this is because they represent two funds of pure potentiality, two locations of the always-ever never-yet-filled: on the one hand, the horizon that vision probes, and on the other, the welling up of the glance. 3

Krauss speaks of a type of collage that Max Ernst worked with, that he called Übermahlung, or overpainting, at around 1920. Using gouache, he would mask found images with new spatial landscapes and abstraction. My principle fascination with these works is the way in which the visual language of the readymade material is used as a way of introducing tension between the rhetoric of the painterly frame, and the incipient organization of mass-produced print imagery. He painted masks around this uncanny valley, distorting perspective and arbitrary objects in his usual surrealist style. In doing so, the absurdity quite poignantly pointed out the bizarre tropes that typify our visual subconscious: the perverse abstracted way that we gaze at naked women; the methods by which we learn about the world through categorization; the prescripted differentiations that channel the sale of goods. The titles of these works read like parables. C’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme (It’s the hat that makes the man), la style c’est la tailleur (The style is the size), la puberté prôche n’a pas encore enlevé la grâce tenue de nos pléiades (The closeness of puberty has not yet let go of the grace that holds our Pleiades), démonstration hydrométrique à tuer par la température (Hydrometric demonstration to kill by temperature), a chambre à coucher de max ernst cela vaut la peine d’y passer une nuit (It is worth spending the night here, in the bedroom of Max Ernst). They also belie a sort of contemporary measure of abstraction that is pressed upon a fertile ground of previously produced material, or a reordering of the multivocal litany of objects through this type of masking, or the secondary layer of informational overlay.

A Farmer being on the point of death, wished to insure from his sons the same attention to his farm as he had himself given it. He called them to his bedside, and said, " My sons, there is a great treasure hidden in one of my vineyards." The sons after his death took their spades and mattocks, and carefully dug over every portion of their land. They found no treasure, but the vines repaid their labour by an extraordinary and super-abundant crop. 4

Our metaphors for the “natural” world have shifted greatly in the last century, as seen by this ancient fable, attributed to Aesop. I’m curious as to how this parable, if taken at turns literally and metaphorically, retains any relevance. Certainly the moral of the story has shifted. The original enjoys a certain marxist morality: the substitution of exchange value for use value is used as incentive, and through this the workers learn that their ownership of the fruits of their own labour is itself surplus value. I would like to posit a few alternative morals as well. That this abstract notion of exchange value is overlaid on top of the landscape to suggest and map a possible value system upon that landscape.  A value must directly or indirectly be placed upon the specific and the phenomenological in order to experience the full value of the landscape. This is done through two similar processes of overlay and masking. To add abstract information to the real, and to disguise the complexity of the real with an abstract plane in order to emphasize simpler parts. This is done through metaphor, through parable, through narrative, as well as, and within, systems of capital. Another possible moral for this fable is a confusion of processes of ruin and preservation. It occurs in the crux of the narrative pun. The kernel of wit in the parable lies in the structurally similar activities of destruction and creation. The digging up and turning over of the garden is initially an activity done with the intent to destroy the ground in the search for the abstracted notion of the earth (the treasure) hidden within. However, it has a strange side effect: the aeration and subsequent reinvigoration through nitrogen of the garden, and from that the flourishing of the crops.

With these interpretations in mind, perhaps our world has so little immediate value to us precisely because it is so useful. The overlays of speculation, exchange and abstraction are constantly masking the terrain on which we stand, speculating on changes in systemic heat loss, and intimating areas for exponential gain with extraction rather than direct experience of labour and use. To save the thing from our sons must we make the matter of it ornamental again? To return to the complexity of widespread representation? To confuse the map with the territory? We have found no solution in the meta-aesthetics of form, and they now bear striking resemblance to the complexes and industry that have built them. Neither has offered us a more fruitful relationship with the earth. Perhaps we can hide in our perception of the wilderness such treasure, and in such a secretive way, that the activity that is undertaken within it, in the pursuit of accruing capital, is cohesively productive in tending to its growth, renewal and persistence. 5

1. Konstantin Malley, Ravneet Singh (UCD), Tianyu Duan (UCD), “Second Law of Thermodynamics.” https://chem.libretexts.org Libre Texts. Last updated: 5 Nov 2016

2. Sharlin, Harold I., and Tiby Sharlin. Lord Kelvin. Page 112. University Park: Pennsylvania State U Press, 1979.

3. Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Page 54. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 1994.

4. Three Hundred Aesop’s Fables, Tr. Rev. Townsend, Geo. Fyler. Page 66.  Routledge, London,1891.

5. If this strategy sounds too convoluted, perhaps a system other than a capitalist one would offer a solution that is more direct.

Published in a catalogue for the exhibition of Victor John Penner's photographs, District* based on a true story at the West Vancouver Museum, Mar 29 – May 6, 2017

Victor John Penner’s photographs of urban and suburban spaces, all marked by human interaction, create a sense of unease. Past series documented abandoned grow-op houses and empty gymnasiums. Penner's new series of works, District* (based on a true story), creates a mise-en-scène of West Vancouver, offering a counter-narrative to landscape/nature based art through photographs of seemingly discordant scenes.Through the new series, Penner reflects on formative aspects of how his early influences have informed his practice.

“I cannot stroll around the outskirts of my neighborhood in the solitude of night without thinking that night is pleasing to us because, like memory, it erases idle details”

-- Jorge Luis Borges

Much of adolescent memories are made in darkness, or outside of view. The spaces in which you have, at this self-discovering age, the most agency are the night and your room. The night being an illicit escape, the room being a hermetic fortress. Adolescence is remembered as a decorated incubator, a lone walk. Anyone who has grown up in the suburbs has some recollection of this, and the District of West Vancouver has its own beautifully specific mysteries. The presence of a wilderness presses in, and expands the city space towards the north and the west with pockets of forest, ocean, and mountains. The architecture and culture responds in kind, exerting control in some areas, and embracing its lack in others.

These images that Victor John Penner has constructed to colour an environment of influence are of spaces outside the regular flows of the city.  They are protected back eddies housing elements that resist a movement through time. They depict a darkness that houses an interstitial time: the time of night, of hibernation, of incubation, a womb-like, adolescent time, a time that features the bizarre.  The photographs take the shape of chrysalises, metamorphic, surrounding that which defies consequence and causality and in which a structure of meaning liquefies, gathers potentiality, and emerges with new signifiers.

A photograph itself is adolescent. It ties a present moment to a past one. A photograph contains the existence of both, simultaneously. Amphibian, it exists in the past as a vestige, and the present as an object. These scenes operate structurally in the same manner as the photograph. Their content is equally outside of time.

I use the metaphor of the adolescent broadly within this work, to speak about its intention, its content, and its structure. The artist utilizes the persona of an adolescent as a critical eye. The artist, the work itself is not adolescent as such. I would like to use the impressionable years between childhood and adulthood as a method of looking at the development of an identity of place, as a character that has a particular way of interacting with their surroundings, and as a medium that, for all its accomplishments in this particular region, seems poised on the verge of adulthood internationally and historically. I argue that this position is a vital one, full of tumultuous love affairs, unrepentant rebellion, a deep affinity and sensitivity to beauty, and an acute awareness of death.

Jeff Wall describes photography in his essay “Marks of Indifference,” as being unable to “participate in the adventure it might be said to have suggested in the first place.” This remark is in reference to the annihilation of depiction in art over the course of the modern era. However, the language he uses implies a further anthropomorphization of photography into a character full of its own existential angst, one that may be caught pouting, or damaging public property. Photography becomes someone who is complaining of exclusion by claiming ownership over the activity from which they are being excluded. Like a teenager, this character of photography is able to criticize the mechanics of its existence while having remarkably little control over its resolution.  

Many of the works included in District depict some kind of borderland, a discrete wildness that leaks out of its walls. Some, like Breach, are quite literal, others less so. Redacted and In Chambers echo the literal reference with their curving formal compositions, but carry more subtle narratives of control within the design of their spaces. In these images, control is framed as desperate and impractical; this attitude seems to be on the side of the wildness, its inclusion is hopeful.

The images of the archive speak of this same spillage, but of their objects’ significance. The mask of Pierre Trudeau’s implication in a bank robbery constitutes a reclamation of a celebrity persona for criminal means, and our current prime minister recontextualizes his father’s image yet again. BC Binning’s small yet precise radio, sits unheard on a shelf. The irony of space used to store No Parking signs speaks for itself. Cry wolf hints at a similar history of reinscribed meaning, one which has ravaged the body of the beast to which it has been assigned. The meanings are breathing and stretching inside their signifiers, growing stories too big for their given names. If these objects have lifespans, have they reached adulthood yet?

These complex signifiers that deny, defy, trouble or mutate their direct signification exist in the landscape as well as the archive. Penner photographs interior and exterior spaces that are on the edge of those with proper names, and resist them with their narrative ambivalence; these are places where the light bleeds into the forest, or out of the interior. Markedly, these spaces are empty of figures. They imply an eerie outsider, perhaps the artist, perhaps the artist as teenager. A shadow figure that, like the meanings in the photographs, doesn’t quite fit in, and exceeds the space the district has allotted for it. More so than language, a landscape, an era, a person resists these brittle, stark qualifications.

The works are full of names which are contested by their current circumstances. Penner is playing with culture as well as language here; the playful puns in the titles reference art history, the narratives within the municipality, and his own personal stories as well. They often have an exchange with the text in the photographs themselves. The character of the adolescent sees the emptiness of these unquestioned municipal emblems, but doesn’t accuse emptiness of a negative quality. Adolescence points out its absurdity, its radical meaninglessness, and celebrates it.

Familiarity functions in these works as a weapon, like sarcasm. Penner has an incisive ability to recognize and isolate that difference, and claim it as not negative, but absurd. As if it was previously used on the artist himself, these pieces are a reckoning of difference. The familiarity of these spaces, their interaction with a cultural nostalgia, allows the viewer to insert their own personal histories. As yet more meanings enter the works, the expanded, stretched, abraded membranes of their signifiers grow thin. The friction of this difference within the sign, the stretched and crowded meanings, evinces with it an acute pain. The adolescent, oft-criticized for self-pity, has in its capacity a raw sensitivity for empathy. Tender from this abrasion, everything is simultaneously excruciatingly beautiful and painfully dark.  

Rather than quash this pain, the adolescent revels in its phenomenological feel, explodes with its jouissance, ridicules it in the most humble and uproarious of ways, is silenced by its small interior pitfalls, eats its words under its beauty. These photographs use adolescent strategies of sabotage: springing leaks, letting in contaminants, packs of feral creatures, countercultures, exploiting weaknesses, constructing double entendres, tagging the walls with pseudonyms.  

These strategies in the works are given a gravity of maturity by Victor John Penner that the adolescent is often not allowed. They recommend that the viewer sit comfortably within the inbetween spaces they encounter, to view the differences in light and space, in language and landscape, that they may not have considered since their own pubescent transition. He recommends the position of the adolescent as a critical yet generative one, not to be derided as nostalgic or sentimental, but one which may be necessary to inhabit in order to grow. The adolescent’s ability to inhabit both the spaces of childhood and adulthood, its ability to expand to contain multiple narratives, to be flexible between them, and to be full of both self and other, makes it a character of empathy, transition, and metamorphosis. Far from being dismissed as juvenile and frivolous, this is a character to which a community can aspire.

Borges, Jorge Luis. "A New Refutation of Time." Selected Non-Fictions. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. Trans. Esther Allen and Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. 323. Print.

Wall, Jeff. "Marks of Indifference." Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975. By Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995. 260. Print.

I Just Want To Talk About How I Just Want To Dance With You is a pamphlet series that Jacquelyn Ross has compiled specifically for An Exact Vertigo 2016. Initiating  individual correspondence between herself and Jane Ellison, Deanna Peters, Alexa Mardon, and Brynn McNab, the ensuing e-mail conversations on dance, movement, poetics, and criticism have been edited together in neat little packages. 

What is the boredom trying to hide?

Parataxis? The callousness of purpose?

The room is a hard sponge. It absorbs and exudes everything that lives on it. The air is rich with whatever evaporates

in the sun. It is oily, fecal, sweet.

We snuck in behind the curtain of the typhoon. I thought the pattering sound was the rain on the roof

but it was the whirring of the air conditioner and its subsequent dripping on the vanity.

Outside, there are no climaxes or antebellums, just rhythmic undulations dotted with trees.

The eye snags on the english, the sound of

sea children, school gulls.

Lightning is diligent, but thunder

is lazy, riding on lightning's coattails.

From above, it appears as if

ergonomic electric lace;

a bi-species creature derived from flight regulations

and the altitude of the viewer.

He steps in, takes off his flannel jacket,

lands within a void. The skyline

above, nothing but darkness below.

His fronds wave across the city.

There, palpable

like a rod or a blade or this one potential problem.

How do you phrase how your touch is developing? Eyelashes, long, and trailing

at the waist net the room. Stick to wet skin. Heads are pillars, unmarked under the roof.

It is barely felt, it can't analyze its success your body seems

and is futile. But the breath is

an absurdist critique of proto-analytic poetics, repurposed and divested

of the complexities of their original root, taking solely their popular

(or singularly poetic) connotations and repurposing as:

Neutralization of acids.

Rhombohedral cleavage.

Twinning.

3 on Moh's scale.

Oolitic limestone.

Light is split into slow and fast beams (like water).

“There is nothing more tentative than an established order.”

We must abandon nothing to the world.

2 tbsp of butter

2 cups chopped onion

1 cup chopped apple

1 tsp thyme

1lb chicken livers

1/4 tsp pepper

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup brandy

1 cup heavy cream

In large pan, saute butter onion apple and thyme with lid on until apples soften.

Remove lid. Increase heat, add livers and cook until pink inside.

Remove from heat and allow to cool.

Add pepper, salt, brandy and puree. Cover and chill.

Whip cream into soft peaks and fold into liver mixture.

The room is on your mind. You are on the room's mind.

The room is inherently isotropic. Each piece is contained

in the familiar structure of the frame. In fact, the show is all 3's and 4's. It amounts to 12.

The child is not sure why she is screaming at her mother.

Our toes are in the mud, with the fishes. We have 4 legs full

of strength and dexterity and

balance. As innovative as a biological wheel.

Our breath whistles in each others' mouths just as

the crystalline form

stands off the skin against the curves of muscles

setting the once sibylline and delphic form

against a strict and rigid edge.

The 4 shapes interrupt the images 4 times.

4 different ways each time. Interrupt yourself 4 ways. Enjoy it, subsume yourself.

All that is left of this supposed evil

wakes the image of a tangle

of snakes.

There are 3 positions for your feet. You must rotate between them, roll your hips

for full momentum, twist your waist and let your arms fly loose. You will become a screw, the air in a liquid rollicking in a tube, that space within the centrifugal whirlpool. You float upwards, becoming less pointed as the waters calm.

The movement stays inside the body, flicking quietly to certain areas, showing me around.

The sensation dug and found a key and unlocked a shelf to stand still which we could climb.

The body is a 3 dimensional torus. Everything is outside and there is

no firmament, only strange animals from somewhere else. A litany:

Night F, Night A, Improvised Poem.

From the sound of it, a tray full of icewater,

Tinkling like chandeliers.

You see the baby? A whole lineup of people

staring openly. Half smiles on their faces,

wondering.

The woman in black – she is tall and above societal reprimand as well – disappears

under the water. It is a dust-up until she emerges.

4 raw whales under her arms, their fillets trying to re-enter

the sea. The scream. It is a comfortable tangle of you and me and him,

sharing certain things with neither of you. Or at least not so you'd believe it.

She speaks as if it has happened to her and me both, closed and cruel and stating the obvious

you would not have thought of.

Your mouth is a nest and does not hear.

Later, the hands turn yellow as they stretch

And there are minute lines in slightly unnatural places, like inaccurate

topography or surgical colour-by-numbers.

My cup calls me Nathaniel for now. It is drawing me a bath

though at the indistinguishable temperature of the weather

and its surrounding histories.

I'm going to play you a portion of this film, called Le Revelateur, directed by Philippe Garrel in 1968. And while the film plays I'm going to tell you the story of how I came to think about this work. And as I tell you this story, and play this film ( and film is intrinsically narrative) I ask you to think about not story. I mean, not to not think about story, but to think about the opposite of story, which means you will, by extension, be forced to think about story as well.

When I looked at Dault's work online, before the show opened, the phrase “Zombie Formalism” surfaced first. My initial reaction was that yes, the work falls into this category. It has a lot of the signifiers that are often in work described this way. It works with aesthetic and formal guidelines that were used in minimalism. I see a lot of Stella, Judd, Flavin, and Morris in her work. Dault herself says that she likes and tries to emulate that aesthetic. However, she also denies theoretical connection to the movement. How then, are we meant to think about the work?

I'd like to talk about this initially dismissive term coined by Walter Robinson in a more generous framework. In the essay in which he introduces “Zombie Formalism”, he asks “Do I need to prove that formalist abstraction is a walking corpse?” Rather than initiate the term as one to describe a movement, he uses it as a straightfoward metaphor for work that he feels is empty, aping modernist abstraction, a “simulacrum of originality”. Even though it has an “ism”, this term is a perjorative adjective, not a useful way of looking at a trend that is currently sweeping in its volume. This type of work is happening on a huge scale. And it is being made by artists who are art-school educated, and painfully aware of modernist art history. This work cannot and should not be entirely dismissed with a mere adjective.

The next word that came up for me was “Skeuomorphia”, which is a beautiful word, describing a complex relationship between stages of technological progression. In a way, it describes the same thing in design that “zombie formalism” is attempting to describe in art history. When I learned the term, formica was the first example of it that I was given. So I found it highly ironic that this is also the primary material that Dault uses for her sculptures. The “marble” formica bench in the next room is a perfect example of this term, especially when compared to Shannon Bool's piece outside.
 

Now I'd just like to wax poetic a bit about zombies. I have noticed that monsters have come up often in recent philosophical texts. They elucidate the concept that the world is full of ideas of terror that we cannot name, cannot even conceive, and that these therefore do not affect us, are only hints of darkness on the edge of our existence. Lovecraft is the herald of these texts, and his oft-cited monster, the Chthulu, exemplifies this approach. “Dead but dreaming”, the Chthulu is only really described as humanity's most basic nightmare. Zombies, everpresent in popular culture, speak to me of this same concept, but one that exists inside each individual. I wrote an email to a lover a few years ago, defending the zombie, and I'd like to read a selection of the argument.

what i like about zombie movies is the feeling that there could always already be the undead arriving on the scene. that at any moment the space around you could be overwhelmed with these carnivorous blockages. The danger in them is a weird variety, the enemy moves so slowly and their condition necessitates that they cannot be cunning as individuals. It is a biological danger. they are slowmoving viral amoebas. The "infection". When you die, the disease reactivates your brain. only life and the thin boundaries of skin can prevent you from its harsh takeover. once you have reached the unknowable, the metonym of your existence is used to destroy those you hold dear. Is this A terribly trite metaphor on loss or a beautiful atomization of the idea of decay? There is something pretty happening on the razor suspense of these movies, beyond the simple plotlines which consist merely of societal examples and extremes. Surrounding you are the spectres of humanity, reanimated by another species, a virus whose motives we cannot understand. There is no known evolutionary endgame. We give them faces and bodies, marked but still real, to mask this remote creature consisting of many colonies, which are coordinated, cooperative; are amassing for a reason that is never elucidated. but it amasses nonetheless. it is amassing all around us, and we could be caught in the tide at any moment. do not let the drama distract you.

Aesthetically, I find Dault's work very hermetic. The eye has no line of flight, there is no escape from the tableaux that she has set up. This seems very purposeful to me. The double mirror and its infinite regression in the hallway speak to this. She has literally hung her work up in a space that has no horizon, that infinitely gets more and more inside of itself. This gesture is one of the escape. Escape being a state of mind set in motion by fear. Separated from a larger narrative, it is precursored by an unknowable terror, and has no destination in mind, no solution to a state of emergency.

Now, we come to this film. When I first encountered it, I was immediately seduced. My film professor at the time chided me that I only liked the film because of its style, that the politics involved in its making were of no concern to me. I actually tend to agree. Athough it was made to be a reaction to post-war politics in France, and the student riots in Paris, ( a reaction against the vichy regime, the what I like about this film (other than its obvious beauty) is the palpable state of escape that it portrays. The object of the fear is never stated, and there is no resolution, no place of safety presented, just an endless flight.

I think, in the end, I have to argue that work deemed “zombie formalism” is a gesture of the same. It is an escape from the story of the avant-garde. From the story that consists of the emergence of the new in rebellion with the current state of the art. It posits no new solution, it empties past forms while denying even the act of revolution. But it is aware of the pervasive radiation of fear, and in the act of its existence it does provoke further examination of the prevailing conditions of the moments and environments in which we find ourselves. It is an escape without the story that surrounds it, because it implicitly denies continuing that narrative, either in rebellion, or in resolution. 

Introduction(or mise-en-scene): 

1: Travel to an initial site of meaning for a work. Provide a dissection of the act of travelling to the site. Think about space and time, and their relationship to objects.

2: Objectively describe the map of the site. Objectively describe the populist representation of the site. 

3: How is the site represented? What is called attention to? Form a sentence that compares your own personal narrative to that representation.

4: Informally invent your own god. Find them in history, botany, geography, anything arcane. Name them. Name what they command. Have them comment on the site.

5: Show that there is a poetic violence that all these things imply.  How has it been recontextualized? What is being misplaced?

Talk about the actual work:

The 1st piece:

Describe it objectively, simply, but imply a purpose. 

e.g. “supported from above and below by the scorched earth alone.” 

Form one sentence on what is being acheived. 

The 2nd piece:

Objective description only. The purpose and activity are already implied. Invoke your god again. Back him up with a metaphor found on the site. Now, talk about that metaphor in a completely abstract manner. What are the implications of this in the site? 

The 3rd piece:

Launch into a poetic anecdote with no preamble. Describe objectively the third piece. Describe the transformation from the site the work entails. Describe how this relates to the anecdote, how it encompasses it.  In terms of material and medium, take apart what is happening here. What is metaphysical about these objects?

e.g. “Space is the remains or corpse, of time. It has dimensions. Objects are sham space, the excrement of thought and language, Objects are phantoms of the mind, as false as angels.”

Provide a scientific fact that relates to your anecdote. Relate it to your god, and the “coincidence” at hand. Speak in the god's voice about a contemporary reference. Have the god disappear in front of your eyes. Describe this performance. 

The 4th piece: 

Describe a failure of the medium. Describe how the experience cannot be described. What are the implications of these two failures? 

e.g. Surd 1) Voiceless. 2) Incapable of being expressed in rational numbers. Irrational. 

The 5th piece: 

Describe and dissemble the essential qualities of the pieces. Become confused and enthralled. Take apart matter. Question the existence of everything and/or anything. Suggest future possibilites of making. 

The 6th piece:

Bring your own narrative into the work again. Describe your experience of moving through a place and in the same way describe a piece. What is the speed, disorientation, and perimeter? 

The 7th piece: 

Talk about the history that is being drawn from; not only what is being referenced, but also what subject is being addressed by both the present work and its referent. Speak about how complexity incites dematerialization.  Relate this to a past work. Theorize as to their relationship.  Find an unlikely viewer for the work. Tell their experience.

The 8th piece: 

Question the ability to write and talk about the work. Question your ability to look at the work, to understand it. 

e.g. “ Oh, for the happy days of pure walls and pure floors!”

Question the efficacy of a narrative memory. 

The 9th piece: 

Analyze the form of the site and how it is reflected in the work. Claim that the site itself is a work. Have your god propose a work. 

Conclusion:

1: Talk about the discrepancies of metaphor. 

2: Talk about the invented memories of a place where you have never been. 

3: Talk about the hypothetical inexistence of an experience.

e.g. “vacant memories constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinites. It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found. The expunged colour that remains to be seen. The fictive voices of the totems have exhausted their arguments [The conversation is over]. Yucatan [the site, the jungle, the garden, the desert, the conservatory, the museum] is elsewhere.”

Published in ISSUE Magazine Vol 3 No 3

Published in ISSUE Magazine Vol 3 No 1

Something White is a chapter excerpt of a novel-length fiction project which was published in The Swedish Dance History, Volume 4, in 2013.

Originally published here:

http://www.spectermagazine.com/fourteen/mcnab/

Writing installation in the Emily Carr University Library in May-June of 2012. 

A fiction project which was structured on a 1990's PC with narratives on both desktop and MS-DOS, Rifle sought to examine a particular technological nostalgia, and illustrate the manner in which the support of the text affects the form and experience of the content. 

Catalogue here.
 

Self-Published, Parts I - V

An editorial project mining harlequin romance novels for the erotic. 

The text was replicated in its original place on the page, but edited to change tense to present, female pronouns to you, and male pronouns to I. All text that did not insinuate an erotic exchange was not included. 

An excerpt was published in Woo Magazine

Published as a catalogue entitled Remains/Contains for "Let's Show them Yellow Light!" exhibited at the Lion's Den, Vancouver, BC