by Daviel Shy
Editor: Sofia Leiby
I.
When you are among the Ones
Who Have Been Erased, “knowing” is insisting that we exist. The artist Cauleen Smith said recently
that we know that when we look, we have to know what we’re looking for: the
knowing precedes the finding. She was talking about research, about looking
into the past, making acts of discovery that are actually recovery.
Continuing on as if we exist.
Knowing that we are and we are not as we’ve been described. And so we are
looking for what we already know
Within the language there was a silence
What is kept folded in*
A crease is a mark of
assurance that the creased thing has touched itself. The felt facts felt facts.
A debt that should never be paid because it is the gap that reminds us of our
interdependence, our unforgiving context.
Example: What happens when
you come to the word man in a
sentence you were really feeling? You’re ripped out, you’re called out, you are
excluded. Forced to translate to make excuses, to say you “know what they mean”
Within the language there was a violence
A tear
The language I am called when
summoned to their symmetry is describing itself, a rip, a gash, a lack.
I am a fold. The choice was
one or none, I am neither, I am a fold. Insisting.
II.
Getting at the monster in
demonstrable.
DEMON
Demonstrait demonstraight demon STRATE de-monstrate
[is a demonstration an exorcism?]
The red and blue,
demonstrably the flowing in/out of blood. The diagrammatic code for
circulation, the sides of a heart.
A(nother) visual false
cognate.
looking at a
heart 3-D whip
brain cunt
grave dildo
III.
To take them one at a time.
1. The graves are the entry
point. Grey graphite rubbings that look like graves enact a proposed symmetry
across a line that denotes a fold, but the graves are not all alike. Looking at
them, one’s eyes go blurry, one’s mind gets caught. A line of symmetry with
minor violations. The outgrowths and bends in the drawings, the curves and wiggles conspire to suggest
something else. What you expect to see and what you see have been separated.
Optic tricks- turning
death into sex as the gravestones morph into dildos and then instantly regain
their somber pose. Images that move. Images doing all they can.
2. The tables teach us the language. Laid out below
the rubbings are two tables of seemingly
incongruous objects: medical antiques, diagrams, essays, hand-made pellets, twigs,
ordinary tools, implacable instruments and wire drawings…together making an
index. If | than \ when / then ___. The rules laid out beside their limits. The
brain is on the table. Associations made literal, made formal. How things work,
not how they look. Indexicality is a trace of a thing, but for once it’s a
trace of the whole thing, the real
thing. For example: BRAIN not the organ but the function. The table is not a
demonstration, but an action unclothed. And then for wink’s sake, the brain is also on the table. ( Yellowing old Rorschach tests
and prints of bifurcated clay molds in variations of grey). But even these
slide away, point instead to the expectation: to get inside your own (brain) so
it touches itself, makes a joke twice removed. Filthy mind. I know you know I
know. Here we can safely say we and the wink is complete. (a wink is the
eyelid, touching itself. But I could go on forever…)
3. The ropes. Three long
ropes of heavy black felt hang gracefully and foreboding down the wall. One
makes a hook shape on the floor. A hook like the end of a cane. Burned into my
memory, the image of Joseph Beuys, covered in felt, hook of a cane protruding
from the blanket, coyote looking on. Beuys
used felt as a symbol for healing. Felt. How it is made, how it is touched, it
becomes heavy and dark: saturated with what it was made to carry. The weight of
associations, these associations. Hair. Whip. Noose. And I wonder if it made her
lighter? Are her hands freer/to touch her loved ones/having spun out the
poison?
4. An essay is an open heart.
a speech of another and more particular order*
Judith Leemann’s essay in the
exhibition companion text, Imperfect Symmetry: A Compendium is an act of modern-day parrhesia. We can say that parrhesia
is defined by a statement uttered when the speaker is putting herself at risk
for the sake of truth-telling. Parrhesia
is characterized by its directness, clarity and criticism. One who uses parrhesia speaks because of a specific
relationship to herself: a fold. She
forfeits the security ensured by silence to answer her own pleas because she
cannot abide the asymmetry of her held belief against the code or the tyrant,
the interlocutor or herself – any target of her criticism. Parrhesia is therefore an act of self-care.
Imperfect Symmetry: A Compendium
Curated by Sara Black and Karsten Lund
Curated by Sara Black and Karsten Lund
Exhibition runs October 3-November 7, 2013
A+D Gallery, Columbia College Chicago
619 S. Wabash Ave, Chicago, Il 60605
The ideas on parrhesia are paraphrased from Michel Foucault’s 1983 seminar, Fearless Speech.
Luce Irigiray introduces the
idea that a woman is always already touching herself in This Sex Which Is Not One, 1977.
I am indebted to the writings
of Monique Wittig, who split all her pronouns as a reminder of woman’s
alienation in language.
*Quotes from Leemann’s essay, “What for is a better question than why.” in Imperfect Symmetry: A Compendium exhibition companion texts, 2013.
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