“Such hermeneutic interpretation is required when there is neither a rational method of assuring the “truth” of a meaning assigned to the text as a whole, nor an empirical method for determining the verifiability of the constituent elements that make up the text. In effect, the best hope of hermeneutical analysis is to provide an intuitively convincing account of the meaning of the text as a whole in the light of the constituent parts that make it up. This leads to the dilemma of the so-called hermeneutic circle–in which we try to justify the “rightness” of one reading of a text in terms of other readings rather than by, say, rational deduction or empirical proof. The most concrete way of explicating this dilemma or “circle” is by reference to the relations between the meanings assigned the whole of a text (say a story) and its constituent parts.

Bruner, Jermoe. “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry vol. 18 no. 1 (1991) pp. 7 -8

The same process that erases showerheads with mouths appends pictures with reasons. Looking inward the arrangement repeats itself, so that on my torso are orifices lined up in circumference–drains, vents, windows, a doorway–the way tattoos are strung together on the skin. I pull my head inside my body like a turtle and watch this room spin around like a zoetrope lit by the incandescent light of organs, the neon swimming of veins and arteries, the fluorescence of bones.

Down the street a dozer cuts asphalt and this whole house trembles. I quiver the floor. I provoke leaves off of rooftops. I bring together and also rend. I pause in an interstice between two sheets of drywall presenting of a flat division its sonorous interior. The vibrations move like waves at times and then like particles, triggering simultaneously one tile in this bathroom and another above a stove further down the street as if to arrange them side by side on some greater plane. How far in extension is this dirt on which this house stands, how far is this dirt from being liquid, how far from being atmosphere, that waves of pressure are felt from movement, endeavors into the surface so far away?

Rumor has it that Elvis died on the toilet, mostly, and a little on the floor.

I fall into the tub.

A giant falls lengthwise across this house and pulverizes it. Dust lifts into the air and is emulsified. Obscure walls rise where walls once were and windows blow out one after the other like jets from an abalone. The giant fits the dust print like a circle in a square. From above the dust falling as much as rising makes language on the ground—forms and demarcations. Doorways drift down like horseshoes shackling this enormous (and growing) vigorous, living thing to this small plot until it dies or fades and only dust remains. A giant fell here once and on all the houses radiating outward from here. How long now before the dust settles, the emulsion fades, the suspense becomes unintelligible, and the intimate portrait slackens back to its semi-original form, again undeveloped, again opaque.

“In phase space the complete state of knowledge about a dynamical system at a single instant in time collapses to a point. That point is the dynamical system–at that instant. At the next instant, though, the system will have changed, ever so slightly, and so the point moves. The history of the system time can be charted by the moving point, tracing its orbit through phase space with the passage of time.

How can all the information about a complicated system be stored in a point? If the system has only two variables, the answer is simple. It is straight from the Cartesian geometry taught in high school–one variable on the horizontal axis, the other on the vertical. If the system is a swinging, frictionless pendulum, one variable is position and the other velocity, and they change continuously, making a line of points that traces a loop, repeating itself forever, around and around.

A little realism, in the form of friction, changes the picture. We do not need the equations of motion to know the destiny of a pendulum subject to friction. Every orbit must eventually end up at the same place, the center: position 0, velocity 0. This central fixed point “attracts” the orbits. Instead of looping around forever, they spiral inward.” ²

1 “chaotic attractor.” www.thefreedictionary.com. 2013. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chaotic+attractors. May 14 2013

2 Gleick, James. Chaos. New York: Viking, 1987. Print. p.134

We crossed state lines moving westwards and the uninterrupted spray of kudzu high along the interstate signaled us forward. Its vines, shot spooling into the trees from a tractor trailer bed in our near future, preceded us and explained, like ancient waterways, human stewardship in a word–empire.

Kudzu smothers and shapes programmed contours like hot vacuum-sucked plastic. It dithers, throwing careful noise into the crevices of raw forms, producing a rich and undulating fabric that, if not for its capacity for unstoppable encroachment, is distinctly pleasurable as an effect in passing.

I turn to the documentary evidence and find no picture or proof of interest in kudzu, or empire for that matter. Instead this trip from five years ago hovers in my library of photos, monopolizing the gut of it with a twitching block of selfsame images. To scroll through is to give the single hour or so I spent at Marfa, inside Donald Judd’s minor paradise, undo fact and possibly even faith. Though I wonder, at the moment, how this works.

We had been camping out on our trip, fumbling with tents at midnight on roadside clamshells of hard dirt and scorpion-shaped rocks. Or so I thought, being from New York, and always finding something deadly or murder-ish about the outdoors at night. The darkness saturated the air and pestered my sense of continuity. I remember once walking from the tent to an outhouse not a hundred yards away and then turning back to see the bottom of the night sky standing vertically in front of me. Above were all the stars, but to no effect, for it seemed impossible that in some direction and not so far away sat our tent at the foot of a pitch black tree, alongside a pitch black stream running through an even darker forest.

I remember picturing Judd’s kitchen at night, with the house lights cutting straight lines across the concrete porch. The strange abundance of mortars and pestles I had seen on our tour, neatly arranged on a low shelf, had morphed into something essential. In a form of knowing somewhere between rumor and reverie Judd re-entered the place at an earlier time, impinging on twilight dinner parties with obtuse pronouncements regarding the superiority of straight-up mortar-to-pestle grinding. I imagined him standing on one side of his rotating door yelling “Not in my name!” into the darkness, watching the churned up clouds of dust as they migrated in and out of vision.

It would be a stretch to say that Judd’s residence and studio, La Mansana de Chinati, channeled these ruminations or even encouraged them past the simple pleasures indulged by every historic house museum. Theatrical moments of untidiness here and there form the lexicon of history’s affect: a dented pillow in a cordoned off room, a bar of horn-hard soap, a book dropped and turned on a table or a riled up work space that now seems tragically ordained. These overactively frozen moments stand temporally tiptoed: either poised and ready to touch down upon a revelation of the past or posed and not quite settled in their placement.

As a fan of historic house museums, an American post-war phenomenon which peaked in the 1970′s around our bicentennial and has been on a dire path of decline since the 1990′s, I often wonder how it is that sites like these circulate what they are said to capture–namely a time and place through the lens of a life.

Unlike traditional museums, which transfigure the personal into the impersonal for the sake of broader historical arguments, historic house museums preserve personalities first and foremost. Their particular pageant of history, an admixture of fact and facsimile, is welcoming yet fugitive. It steps out of rooms as you enter them. It snaps a velvet rope into place as you climb a creaking staircase. It silently closes the front door as your heel hits the driveway and releases you back into the inertial flood of everyday life as if shedding a kind of skin.

Once inside I often do little but record these novelties, which are themselves kinds of recordings, in hopes of capturing something to take home. I want to see how exactly the lives and events they represent are enshrined that, like oracles, we can expect to call them back into form, back into relation with seances of untouched furniture. I was therefore surprised to learn, that the caretakers of many historic houses are its actual inhabitants, living long periods of their own lives in cordoned off parts of the property.

One particularly eccentric guide, whom I had met at the Thomas Hart Benton house in Kansas City, evoked the Pythia, living as she did in her temporal hermitage and speaking about its qualities not from her own experience but from Benton’s. Benton, she would say, liked to sit in this chair or work late into the night sometimes. He hated the sight of that house there from this window. He spent much of his time in this spot, in this room, at this time of day. She spoke of Benton as if he were a cat, or an emanation–alternatively weak or strong in areas–but with such intuitive force that not only did he come into focus but so too did his qualities become the qualities of the house, and his values the values presently experienced.

In fact it seems that this kind of transportation mostly takes place at a distance; I am not transported from proximity to lofty planes but instead from a thing’s oblivion to its re-creation in startling detail. I think here of Minimalist sculpture in my own experience, and how much closer I feel when I am far away from it. In some squat room curled into a worn couch I read the documentary evidence, the polemics and the eyewitness testimony, and this historical encounter supersedes the standing, stark, white-cubed one, so much so that like sheet music played aloud the one mode of encounter and the other seem not like equivalent accounts of the same thing but different stages of its existence.

When I return to the work again, in person, the discourse follows. One could say that the Pythia has returned not as a historian but as a text. Like the person of the deceased in a historic house museum, this phantom is no more invisible than any organizing force, which is to say that its mechanisms take investigation to experience while its effects do not. It is a hermeneutic experience, where call and response impersonate each other, as do cause and effect.

My thoughts turn here to a biography of Wittgenstein and a later essay, Life Without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding, by the philosopher and biographer Ray Monk. Monk brings together moments in Wittgenstein’s life and his philosophical writings in a way that elucidates connections between the two, describing shifts in his philosophical investigations simultaneously in terms of events personal, political, and professional.

Monk’s stance on biography, as philosophically interesting because of its non-theoretical nature, shifted my perspective as a sculptor away from the unreliable dichotomy of making or thinking, pursuing a materialized or de-materialized art practice. He recalls an image devised by Wittgenstein in which a person, unaccustomed to the game of catch, is thrown a ball and instead of throwing it back she puts it in her pocket and walks away. He connects this image with Wittgenstein’s comments on aspect seeing, often associated with the duck-rabbit phenomenon:

‘What would a person who is blind towards these aspects be lacking?’ Wittgenstein asks, and replies: ‘It is not absurd to answer: the power of imagination.’ But the imagination of individuals, though necessary, is not sufficient. What is further required for people to be alive to ‘aspects’ (and, therefore, for humour, music, poetry and painting to mean something) is a culture. (Monk 531)

To know which game is being played, as a viewer of art, if the ball is to be thrown back and forth as far as interest allows, or caught and pocketed–to be revisited at times or forgotten entirely–requires a cultural understanding.

This kind of understanding, which consists in seeing “family resemblances” does not focus on accurate explanations but accurate descriptions. There need be no effort made to unify the range of phenomena via an initially invisible underlying principle, as is the case with concept-based theoretical modes understanding.¹ In description the limits of bodily perception are a meaningful and important boundary as opposed to an arbitrary one, stultifying to the discovery of stronger explanations.

Ironically to work with and within the sensible, as a framework, one cannot accept, as firsthand, divisions between the material and immaterial aspects of bodily experience. Unfelt boundaries and secondhand resemblances crowd out the apprehension of quieter distinctions, pre-conceptual relationships.

What endures in deeply hermeneutic experiences like a good biography or a well-appointed historic house museum is the diversity of connections, not their strength. It is the overlapping descriptions, the wealth of signal and noise, the search for an underlying principle and not the opportune adoption of one that make for an “intuitively convincing” account.

Above is a still from Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s multi-channel video installation and projection, Le Baiser/the Kiss (2000) filmed at Mies Van de Rohe’s Farnsworth House.

The video oscillates back and forth between interior and exterior shots of the artist cleaning the windows. When the action is filmed from outside the house, looking in, the audio is that of the squeegee “kissing” the glass. When filmed from inside, looking out, it is overlaid with electronic sounds that seem to evaporate. These sounds, the artist tells us, are created by stretching “a single moment from a guitar solo by the band Kiss.”

From start to finish the video does not move towards resolution but instead explores the filmic events created by the work’s conceptual framework, such as the abstract patterns made on the glass by streaking water, the unexpected intrusions into the framed landscape of the artists’ face or laboring hand, or the gaze of the woman inside, enclosed in music, that penetrates out past the glass, past the lens of the camera, and into the installation itself.

To some extent this video is about access and the act of enclosure. Architecturally, the transparent barrier between interior and exterior creates a strange and exciting concatenation of public and private, organic and planar, inside and out. Practically, however, property is property and the idyllic views framed by its floor-to-ceiling windows are just as emphatically owned as the furniture and the dinnerware.

My proof here is personal: It was 2010, South Hampton, NY, and I was canvassing on foot for the mid-term elections. I was part of a slapdash team of eight volunteers varying greatly in age, political experience, and quantity of regular employment. I shared a small room with Bob, a District Attorney, and a thick Vote Builder packet that we worked door to door like a pair of antiquated farriers or travelling scissors sharpeners, such was the mixture of puzzlement and disbelief we encountered through fence-mounted intercoms.

In one particularly cinematic scenario, I walked suspiciously through the open gates of a sprawling waterfront estate to find worker after worker pointing anxiously in the same general direction. I walked towards the water. I rounded a corner and an enormous glass wall greeted me with sudden indiscretion. This god-like window cut the house like a stage set and exposed all the rooms to an uninterrupted view of the ocean.

Looking out towards the landscape behind me was a man on the other side of the glass enjoying the view. Embarrassed, I raised my hand towards him as if to a high ranking alien and pointed to my literature. Without shifting the focus of his attention he attempted to move me with his hand, mechanically dozing my image to the side like a carnival coin game. I watched him for some time with curiosity but then I left, confused and acutely aware of my two feet on the shore and my image in the ether of his parallel dimension.

Having been thus abstracted I can empathize with the complicated relationship Manglano-Ovalle creates between himself and the Farnsworth House. In an interview for PBS’ Art 21 series, he explains that cleaning the building, this “shrine of modernism,” was a way of working around the restrictions surrounding it, and actually getting to touch its entirety.

This gesture then is a mixture of genuine appreciation and of parody: He is both the supplicant dutifully washing an elder’s feet and the miscreant making motions at the sanctimonious scene. And that is not all, by taking on the role of insider and outsider Manglano-Ovalle recapitulates the Farnsworth’s overmodest offer of acceptance with denial, both in the structure of his work and its presentation.

The all-encompassing window panes of the Farnsworth house represent a kind of unrealizable access that the Le Baiser/the Kiss, as a hermeneutic text, mirrors. To be clear the house is not simply the video’s setting but the text through which the video expresses its meaning. The building’s architecture dictates the video’s. The building’s history affects our experience of its form.

The choice of the band Kiss for the stretched guitar riff announces, albeit in the hidden language of the artist’s process, a pun that ties the auditory, the filmic, and the narrative effects together. In using this pun as a structure Manglano-Ovalle has created a thoroughly justified edifice of decisions that anticipates a discursive evaluation. This anticipation fast-forwards the evaluative and/or appreciative process past the initial descriptive experience.

As Sianne Ngai puts it in her recent book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting:

In recognizing how it diverts our attention from feeling-based judgments (quick/instantaneous) to concept-based justifications (slow/ongoing) and thus how its relation to justification connects to its relation to time we can see what most significantly sets “interesting” apart from other aesthetic evaluations…it inevitably diverts attention away from itself so as to throw the spotlight entirely on the question of its own legitimation. It is a judgment that shoves us from judgment to justification, that hurries past the first moment in its eagerness to arrive at the next. (Ngai 168-9)

I agree with Ngai that a focus on justification as opposed to judgment hurries past the ostensible experience of a work in order to address all of the non-appearing measures one uses in sizing it up. Judgement, however, in addition to its instantaneous nature also suggests a temporal range that is ultimately much longer than that of interest.

Like a meter stick that one must check every so often to see what time has wrought, my judgement returns again and again to the same works of art and is itself measured by the passage of time. In fact it is time and only time which informs it. New experiences, concepts, ways of seeing, organize the phenomena that inform my judgment but they do not give rise to it, for with my judgment I cannot rewrite the beginning, as with an argument. I cannot start differently.

Looking back at the concepts that interested me in the past and fueled my sculptures–the economics of saving vs. spending, the Morris water maze, the philosophy of games, humiliation technologies of the public square–nothing seems to connect them better than their temporary usefulness to me. Ultimately it is this that scares me as an artist when faced with interest, first and foremost. For interest, by way of discourse, seems to approximate the much longer passage of time that judgement requires to be trued.

The audio and video in Le Baiser/the Kiss are connected by a theme–the artist’s process–that, more so than any phenomenon, negotiates my experiential passage from one to the other. The “Kiss” pun legitimates Manglano-Ovalle’s aesthetic decisions by creating theoretical resemblances between the video’s disparate elements. However, I must shift from my experience as a viewer to Manglano-Ovalle’s experience as an artist in order to see these underlying connections. It is Manglano-Ovalle who has now become the hermeneutic text through which I must read the video and it is my access to Manglano-Ovalle himself that regulates my success or failure in this endeavor.

While confusion and the admitted suspension of judgment in lieu of concept-based justifications characterize my current relationship to Minimalist works, it is a statement made by Rosalind Krauss’ in a retrospective appraisal of the Minimalist period, that me makes anxious to experience an outburst of greater hermeneutics in sculpture–an iterative, strange-attractor kind of intertextuality as opposed to a logical one. Not the look of mind, but a dynamic system of call and response:

For LeWitt’s generation a false and pious rationality was seen uniformly as the enemy of art. Judd spoke of his own kind of order as being “just one thing after another.” Morris and Smithson spoke of the joy of destruction. For this generation the mode of expression became the deadpan, the fixed stare, the uninflected repetitious speech. Or rather, the correlatives for these modes were invented in the object-world of sculpture. It was an extraordinary decade in which objects proliferated in a seemingly endless and obsessional chain, each one answering the other-a chain in which everything linked to everything else, but nothing was referential. (Krauss 258)

Historic houses, like biographies, present working models of richly hermeneutic experiences. They are good in so far as they communicate the fullness of a person, not just their genius but also the diversity of contradictory descriptions which together constitute the phenomenon we call life. A life not in the sense of a transcendental subject, but an incidental one: a subject formed by an otherwise unnecessary chain of events.

1 Allen, Richard, and Malcolm Turvey, eds. 2001 Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (London: Routledge).

2 Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.

3 Monk, Ray. “Life Without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding.” Poetics Today Vol 28. Issue 3 (2007). Print.

4 Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Print.

In concluding the passage above in a 1978 essay on Sol Lewitt, more specifically on the discourse surrounding Lewitt’s work, Rosalind Krauss objects to an assertion that Lewitt’s work is about “the look of thought” or of “Mind” and writes, “To give accounts of this kind of art that misconstrue its content, that entirely misplace the ground of its operations, is to invent a false justification of the work which traduces and betrays it. Aporia is a far more legitimate model for LeWitt’s art than Mind, if only because aporia is a dilemma rather than a thing.”

This conclusion is enlightening in its shift in focus from the “false and pious rationality,” that Lewitt’s generation opposed, to the “false justification” which Krauss takes issue with and considers a betrayal of the work. False rationality is the province of poor or misguided judgement. It is a way in which a person perjures his or herself. False justification, on the other hand, more acutely involves one’s interlocutor(s). It is a way in which two or more people contest each other’s points of view.

It is important to see how Krauss’ use of Aporia dovetails with Wittgenstein’s use of Aspect Blindness, because the topics that they are addressing, artworks which dislocate authorship from the perspective of the viewer, and optical illusions which meld figure and ground, are functionally quite similar.

Of the five panelists, all were distinguished professors of philosophy and three were specifically focused on the philosophy of music–a specialization that I did not, until then, know existed. The discussion had piqued my interest because Arnold Davidson, the Foucault scholar and English language editor of Foucault’s Collège de France lecture series, was one of the participants and also giving the keynote address.

I was an ardent reader of Foucault at the time, but mainly of the above lectures that, unlike his mitochondrially dense written style, read almost rhythmically and with a less constant acceleration of ideas. I had marked this talk on my calendar some months in advance and began inventing conversations with professor Davidson, always stopping and starting with some alarming question I might pose. These inquiries, stirred up in me on long dinner-less subway rides from Morningside Heights to Fort Greene, had left little room for reality when the evening finally came.

Davidson’s speech began fluently and proceeded to draw connections between Foucault’s theories and the demands of an artistic practice in a manner alternately methodical and expansive.  The focus of his argument was on what he called “the improvisatory attitude,” and the specific relation to oneself that such an attitude implies:

With respect to the ancient care of oneself Foucault said, ‘To concern oneself with oneself is not a simple, momentary preparation for life. It is a form of life. One has to be for oneself, and throughout one’s existence, one’s own object.’

Here I might also cite Foucault’s famous remarks in the preface to the second volume of his History of Sexuality: ‘But what therefore is philosophy today, I mean philosophical activity, if it is not the critical work of thought on itself? And if it does not consist in undertaking to know how, and to what extent, it would be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what one already knows.’

With this last part Davidson shook his finger in emphasis bringing attention to the sling and orthopedic glove partially immobilizing his left side, both of which, it is said are a kind of principled self-mutilation and as such permanently installed on his person.

Davidson continued:

More often than not the quotation of these remarks regarding the possibility of thinking differently avoids taking seriously the difficulties of exercise, of askesis, of the modifying test of oneself; as if thinking differently were not a matter of slow sustained and arduous work. To bring into effect the practice of thinking differently, to modify oneself through the movements of thought, we have to detach ourselves from the already given systems, orders, doctrines, and codes of philosophy for example. But we have to open up a space in thought for exercises, techniques, tests, the transfiguring space of a new attitude, a new ethos, the space of spiritual change.

That is why Foucault’s relentless pursuit of knowledge revolves not around the mere acquisition of knowledge but around ‘The value of losing one’s way for the subject of knowledge.’ A losing one’s way which is the price of self transformation.

What I remember most from this event was not actually this address, nor the hour-long discussion that followed, but a rude interjection by a man who turned out to be the Jazz musician and inventor of conducted improvisation, Butch Morris. I had no idea who he was at the time and judging from the reaction of the panel neither did they.

I remember him walking in somewhat absurdly late accompanied by a man who would latter introduce himself as Velibor Pedevksi, a.k.a. Hardedge. There was a small arrangement of food and drinks at the top of the auditorium that Mr Morris helped himself to, uncovering the vegetables and dip and preparing himself a plate, while the discussion below proceded undetered. I glowered back as he and his companion took a heavy seat behind me, eating and snickering until Mr. Morris stood up and addressed a question directly to the panel, breaking up the attempt at a definition of ‘freedom’ that was taking place.

“I have a question.” he said, “How can we actually talk about Music, if Music has only ever been talked about in terms of metaphor?” With that Mr. Morris sat down and the panel found a way to graciously ignore the question.

It was, in fact, the first thing I had understood all night. I looked back again to make sense of what had just happened. At the end of the event, as people started filing out, I introduced myself and asked Mr. Morris what he meant by his question. He explained that calling Jazz a kind of freedom was no different than calling a song spicy or a style flat-footed. “These are all metaphors,” he said, from which I gathered that the sophistication of a metaphor is no promise of its aptness, or descriptive potential.

Reviewing this experience today, I am struck, firstly, to find video recordings of the entire event readily available, and secondly, to see that the documents bear no trace of Mr. Morris’ question.

Thirdly, in returning to the records it became clear to me that one of the participants, Lydia Goehr, voiced a concern that I had since attributed to Mr. Morris, namely that some metaphors serve to describe a viewer’s narrative, while other’s a performer’s with no necessary overlap.¹

When in January, I heard on the radio of Butch Morris’ death, I thought back to the first concert of his I saw, at The Stone, a month or so after our meeting. It was a small venue with thirty or so seats tightly packed and almost as many musicians on stage.

I use the term musician lightly as some of the performers were reading texts, while others were making sounds with everyday objects. There were traditional instruments and notes staged between machine sounds, voices, non sequiturs and a handful of noises that matched nothing I could see.

Looking around I knew no one but Mr. Morris, who stood with his back turned warming up his instruments. At what point exactly this transitioned from the preparation of music to the playing of it was unclear to me. I was lost, in fact, and it was Mr. Morris who had shown me how to get there.

1. Furthermore she made the very good point that aligning ethical or political values with specific creative processes falls prey to a “social categorization of music,” whereby, to use Goehr’s example, Classical music is seen as authoritarian and Jazz is seen as democratic, when in reality one can be improvisatory or conventional in either form.

How many slates, plaques, or strange scales were pulled from the roof and paraded around the yard in the form of an eternal pilgrimage, resting here and there while awaiting some revelation whose reception seemed perpetually jammed by the particular atmosphere of the present.

We spent one whole summer straddling the roof alternately harvesting its pelt and receiving direction from below for the enactment of some newly concocted ownership pageant. Now the slates envelop the empty pond and elsewhere conceive a wall which, dividing nothing and bringing to mind a stack of ingots, are made functional solely by their murmuring of possibility.

Sometimes lifting one slate off another would expose two interlocking entirely flat ecosystems. Sometimes a slate would shear or crumble unpredictably like a piece of forgotten chocolate. Once in a while, some unwilling chip or sliver would become a proving ground, drawn and quartered by four whitening thumbnails pivoting across an unseen diamond formed momentarily by two brothers, four crashing knuckles.

A pile on everything.

This present recipe demands past ingredients; the product is nothing digestible—air burgers, air cheeses, air casseroles.

Memories congealed within break off and slide across transparent windows with such sudden entirety that both sides are startled and confused. A tiger passes a child in amazement. Never has it been this close.

Will it ever happen again that a waterlogged Frisbee, a hat, three rattling pinecones, and a sweater pulled by friends off a squirming sibling’s back will all be considered apt for the concept of a base. Or that a game will occur around these things until a ball is sent high into a tree whose trunk when kicked reacts with nothing and then, years later just as likely pulled down by memory as fallen from an insubordinate tree, a ball.

A pile on everything. A pile on this patio, this desk, this grass, that particular tree. A bb gun, a fountain pump, a carved mistake, and a pile for everything that did not happen. The chimneyed grill, brick and mortar all together the size of a banquet chair, used in parents’ absences for the burning of leaves, action figures, deflated basketballs, imposters ripped out of magazines, once a bible, and then, in hasty repentance, a yarmulka. The tools in the garage never fit for the task at hand that looked and weighed as if they had been stolen from a museum. Pikes and spades, rock barrows, enormous lances made of pig iron, wooden clubs with which to pound the dirt while wailing, two headed shovels connected by a single shaft like barbells, rakes less constructed than eviscerated, gauntlets made for digging like a rodent. Their densely ringed shafts would bend like hoses and sweat, needing to be rested more often than their users. They hearkened back to a time when the earth was less a quaint provider than an enemy from whom every morsel and grit had to be procured by way of duel or melee. The sand pit from which golf balls were to be chipped at a wooden fence not to be confused with the sand pit from which golf balls were chipped over a wooden fence on a town’s main thoroughfare. How fast the world becomes with the sudden sound of breaking glass. How strong that feeling from the couch in the living room with the television as an alibi of the weight and position of the evidentiary club below hovering ever so slightly off the wall, above the ground, as if crime changed an object’s chemistry in some nakedly observable way. The pond with everything but never fish. The pond with shame and permanence, frustration, bitterness and regret but never fish. The envelope of which we experience only the folded contents and not the destinations, the to and from, unless some outside force holds the whole thing up to light or, as is more often the case, we simply learn to read backwards.

Today I dropped off my models to be sandblasted, primed, and powder coated (sprayed with a colored, dry polymer that is baked on at 390 degrees Fahrenheit). The powder coating is necessary to protect the steel from rusting.

Rust, amorphous in color, texture, and pattern, has been my nemesis lately. I’ve been noticing it on train tracks and pock marked banisters, the former a burnt shell and the latter a blistery cherry dermis. Imagining what will become of my pristine steel surfaces is simply a guessing game. The futility of this game seems retribution for my earlier ignorance of the difficulties of this challenge.

Gourds of various breeds and sizes will be grown and trained by the models. The models, in preparation for being sent outdoors to withstand a growing season, call for weatherproofing, regarding which there are a few options: a) electroplating b) powder coating c) galvanizing d) the use of a sacrificial anode and e) forgoing protection entirely and simply letting the steel rust. My first choice was the sacrificial anode, likely explained by the three-quarter portrait of Jesus Christ that greets from the doorway of my childhood home. Next to Jesus, a crooked shoehorn and a jocular if palm-sized Korean mask twist frozenly in my mind, hung on nails unevenly in the drywall, as if communicating the undeniable nobility of an a priori rust messiah.

However, like most first choices, this theoretically charmed solution proved impossible in translation.

Electroplating proved too costly, and galvanizing, though very cheap, scumbled the tight steel lines with an uneven chalky texture. Moving forward by a process of elimination I made friends of two enemies, one new and the other old. I set aside an offering of cages to render unto rust and then prostrated myself anxiously toward the color wheel.

As a bricoleur, or rather a hoarder who has read some Levi-Strauss, I find questions with too many answers daunting and incomprehensible. When choices surround each other, differentiated not by type but by degree, like the thin lines of color on a spectrum, I get easily disoriented. I tend to unload time, shuttling back and forth in drug stores, agonizing over After Bite or After Bite Gel. Yes, calamine lotion would definitely work but in making such a purchase would I not be valuing nostalgia’s palliative effects over those of Benzocaine and Benzethonium chloride, or Diphenhydramine, or Dimethicone and its naturally occurring inorganic oils derived from sand.

No, I cannot find comfort in calamine lotion. I simply have not done the research to make that kind of a statement.

Marketing, clearly, is orthogonal to the truth, or rather what I want to know, about a product. What I ask myself is, which of these ointments, gels, liquids, or cremes will make me not scratch myself to the point of dreadful scarring? What I find in response: an inordinate array of almost identical products, an understanding that the information printed is all but meaningless, and a hosiery of soundless, wordless itches.

This is all to say that as a sculptor, one who rarely sculpts and more often rearranges, I find the color inherent in objects, even mass produced objects, compelling to work with. Inherent color denotes a certain level of abdication, which in turn can foreground not only the ever-presence of formal connections but also the working processes that frame them as manifest. The sculptural use of found, bought, or repurposed color can be, among other things, conspiratorial,  alchemical, anarchic, indexical, painterly, unpainterly, irreverent, or in the case of Jessica Stockholder’s work, all of the above.

While an undergraduate (2000 – 2004) I spent much of my time in Yale’s old Hammond Hall Sculpture building, attending the weekly round of Wednesday night critiques that Jessica, the chair of the department at that time, organized and participated in. The critiques often lasted one or two hours per student, and were bounded by few rules except for Jessica’s strong expectation that the work speak for itself; The artist presenting work assumed no obligation to introduce it, defend it, or answer any questions.

At times Jessica played the role of instigator, interpreter, or critic, but overwhelmingly, she spoke from the authority of her consciousness. She was conscious of what was in the room: how it was constructed, where it began and ended, what materials were used, what gestures, forms, narratives, relationships were present or absent. Wednesday nights were never in short supply of graduate students or visiting artists with outsized personalities or palpitating agendas, but none made as strong an impact on me or, I believe, the conversation as Jessica and her outsized attention.

When I think back on the hundred or so critiques I attended, I find myself unable to remember some moment of insight or reparte that would typify Jessica’s contributions. What comes to mind is a certain exhortation, “Get messy,” which some students repeated to caricature her admittedly meager aptitude for advice. Getting your hands dirty, literally, was all she had to offer in response to the question–What should I be doing? In response to the question–What have I done? (or less cinematically, What are we looking at?)–her capacity to delve was indefatigable.

I remember her once saying that motivation is a strange force; You could do something for some reason today and then, years later, recognize that the actual force that motivated you was outside of your purview. Looking back you see how you some unfocused field oriented you, and how its values more accurately represented the shape of your perambulations. This difference does not demand a crisis. Motivation is a living thing:

I have faith that all actions have significance. It is impossible to act without reason. Consequently, it is always possible to discover something of interest through action, through making. It might take a while to find the thing with sparks. The mind is big and complicated. The things we make are just as complicated. It’s not possible for our conscious minds to be in control of all the meanings generated by what we make. Having faith that that is the case, art making is an opportunity to explore the nature of the mind. If you come at it from the other direction, insisting that it all makes sense, you miss an opportunity to really take advantage of the bigness of what we are. (Stockholder 20)

In the end I chose a beige, a redish pink, and a bright magenta as a way of moving forward with my constraints, my models, and not despite them. I chose these colors because at the time they seemed flexible, stretchy, and soft. They felt like indoor colors and pretty ones. I chose these colors because they were available at no extra cost and because I could comfortably see them framing a body. These colors I imagined could trammel a gourd but never overpower it. These cages, I have realized are as much for swaddling as binding. In their constriction they differentiate, albeit cartoonishly, anthropologically.

As an artist I have always been attracted to ‘truth’ as a material. Reading about Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages was one of my first personal experiences with conceptual art–a kind of cognitive surge. To make the sculpture Duchamp conducted an “experiment” using 3 pieces of ordinary thread, one meter long. From the height of one meter he let the threads fall at random and recorded the shapes they made. He used those shapes to determine 3 wooden slats, shaped like wooden stencils, which he would later use as tools to create other works like Network of Stoppages, 1914.

Like many of Duchamp’s works, Network of Stoppages derives from a self threading process that both is linear and whimsically (or infuriatingly) knotted. This painting has been traced backwards as a Frankensteinian amalgamation of previously separate bodies of work, most notably a version of the painting Young Man and Girl in Spring, 1911, which comprises the yellowish green landscape in the background, turned from vertical to horizontal, the aforementioned stencils, and a sketch for the Large Glass.

The turned portrait becomes a landscape, and the landscape, blacked out above and below becomes a negative on a strip of film that extends horizontally past the frame. A string, dropped from the height of one meter, falls on the surface of the painting which has pivoted yet again to catch it, and is recorded from above like life in a microscope.

At the bottom left of the painting a female figure’s supine extension draws an outline from fingertip to hip joint to thigh. The thigh is shown as a segment, described simultaneously as flesh and as line. The figure’s branched arms mirror the superimposed cartographic form that maps no territory but instead a network of endpoints, a fluting shuffle of outcomes. There is a desire to map the flow of becoming or at least to enumerate its possible paths.

As I was first encountering these works by Duchamp, I was making sculptures that I hoped were ‘true,’ or at least, potently indexical. In 2001, I made an installation that used the form of a shopping cart to visualize the rate of savings (MPS) against the rate of spending (MPC) in the U.S. over a twenty-five year period (1976 – 2001). In retrospect, these carts may have proved more insightful had they instead been houses, for they were illustrative of the “irrational exuberance” first highlighted by Robert Shiller, the Yale economics professor who ironically may have taught many of the individuals who brought his dire predictions to bear.

The wooden pallet, standing vertically, conveyed penciled calculations of savings and spending year by year on each slat, and the bamboo curtain, on the floor, provided a counterpoint to the pallet’s shifted orientation. The shapes of the two “carts,” savings (in the foreground) and spending (behind it and to the left), were derived by taking the form of a shopping cart, breaking it down into twenty-five structural lengths, and then multiplying those lengths by the MPS and MPC for the corresponding year (1976 – 2001). The progression in time went from the bottom to the top so that the increasing discrepancy in spending versus savings bore out in a blossoming spending structure and a small bashful form given over to lengths of string that were used to denote negative savings, debt.

Why I was trying to make sculpture with this information and not policy, or at least news, was a question I did not know to ask myself. I was hungry for art’s undeniability and dismissive of the mysticism I perceived in aesthetic choices. I also had no clear definition of sculpture in my mind when I began making it in college. Nor did I have many encounters with it in my past. The first slide lecture I saw in Hammond Hall was on Duchamp and I remember how his name flooded my mind with invisibility. Whenever it was invoked something phantasmagoric happened to objects, though really to the people around them, and I would peer in from outside the trance like a child peeking down a pew during prayer.

The readymade as a gesture seemed nonsensical to me but its connection to the scientific method seemed abundantly clear. They were tied to each other by repetition and its fidelity. A string dropped again and again draws meaningless patterns, or rather meaningful patterns upon some obscure plate. This silly data, empirically drawn, shifts and budges in my consciousness as the result of that irrepressibly creative process by which a line is drawn with only the aid of points. By what alchemy but the characterless passage of time.

A measured string, a string of debt, a train of thought and fabric, a knot of steel, the line of my life ties these points in restless formations. Thinking back to motivation, I draw blind contours of my time, connecting point to adjacent point then jumping past others, snaking back. I draw knots in lines around moments of ramified time. If it seems that the shortest paths take me nowhere, then certainly the longest cross me with so much hidden distance that they seem hardly worth the guessing or the travel. And yet there is no living in the privileged moment only in this fluted one, this envelope of which we experience the folded contents and not the destinations, the to and from, unless some outside force holds the whole thing up to light or, as is more often the case, we simply learn to read backwards.

I chose three colors and the name of this blog, Tabletop, instinctually. And yet, pulling back along this length of string, now ten years postponed, I find these colors looped and tied to so many memories of New Haven, and Tabletop, the name of an idea I most likely encountered there and a show I never saw, though the dots connect. Before I began to shape it, Tabletop, was something else entirely, a platform to connect Joseph Cornell and Marie Curie. Tracking forward I find a conversation with my friend Sam, in Hannah Arendt on Kant,

…if you proceed conversely from the many tables which you have seen in your life, strip off them all secondary qualities and the remainder is a table in general, containing the minimum properties common to all tables. The abstract table..You may meet or think of some table which you judge to be the best possible table and take this table as the example of how tables actually should be-the exemplary table…This is and remains a particular which in its very particularity reveals the generality which otherwise could not be defined. (Arendt 272)

In deciding what color to paint these models I am looking for some exemplary of which the general does not yet exist. “Getting messy,” or having the faith to “discover something of interest through action, through making,” is about making decisions with time, not against it. In those cases when I do not have enough examples and work from instinct to advance a few, I do not create from whole cloth but instead unweave myself, for instinct is at its core a form of remembering.

 

 

 

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978. Print.

Jessica Stockholder, Kissing the Wall: Works, 1988 – 2003, exhibition catalogue, September 18 – November 21 2004, Blaffer Gallery, Houston, TX. February 13 – May 8 2005, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC.