Cataphasis, Cuts and Biological Flow

Dan & Nandita
Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism
University of Western Ontario

review of ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query) — World Record Attempt
January 12, 2012
Artlab Gallery, London, ON

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We arrived in time for Sean’s ‘Grand Entrance’ into the Gallery as an Apparently (and/or ‘App’-parently: i.e. hardwared) Patriotic Cyber-Hoser, with Hoses and Cameras and Gadgets duct-taped to his Low-Tech Cyber-Suit apparel. Cyber-Sean then proceeded down the Visual-Arts Entrance through the Main Hall and into the UWO Art-Lab, where he clicked on an Internet Countdown (set at Twenty Minutes Forty-Six Seconds) and then Proceeded to Perform a Hose-and-Camera-and-Gadget Striptease on an Exercise Machine using Blades (knives) of Various and Increasing Sizes — enacting a kind of Low-Tech Hacker-Manifesto.

Since the Countdown was Projected on a Wall to the Right of his Exercise Machine, Cyber-Sean had to Turn his Head to the Right Repeatedly in order to Keep Track of the Countdown and Keep to its Time. When the Countdown reached Zero and its Screen then Flashed Red, Cyber-Sean was still engaged in a Gadget-removal, and only noticed that his Twenty Minutes Forty-Six Seconds had Elapsed a Minute or so After-the-Fact (Enacting the Having-Become-an-Historical-Object). Seeing the Flashing Red Screen, Realizing his Time was Up, he Dismounted the Machine and Departed.

Actually (hearkening back to our very first statement): we arrived Very Much Earlier than this Entrance and subsequent Performance, allowing us time to take-in his Art-Installation. On the Floor at the Left of the Art-Lab Entrance was a pile of Plastic-bound Print-outs from the ‘THX 1138’-inspired ‘Department of Biological Flow’ Web-pages: 59 Black-and-White pages ‘Toward a Kinoderm Aesthetics’ (the Latter being the Title of this Text). The Art-Installation consisted, for the most part, of pages from this Black-and-White Catalogue (i.e. Print-outs of the ‘Department of Biological Flow’ Web-pages) taped to the Walls of the Art-Lab — the Message, here, being the Medium (the Text being the entire Context). The Writing was on the Walls: Read the Catalogue or Read the Art-Lab Exhibition — the Catalogue is the Exhibition and the Exhibition is the Catalogue; Cataphasis. Both the Lab and the Book, the Exhibition and the Catalogue, Constituted the Cataphatic Epiderm, the titular ‘Kinoderm Aesthetics’; or so we suspected until the Performance, until the Appearance of the Cyber-Hoser, whose Hoses and Conduct were the Conduit toward which the titular ‘Toward’ Cataphatically Conducted the entire Exhibit/Catalogue.

Cyber-Sean, in the End, as the And, was the ‘Kino’ of the Cataphatic Catalogue/Exhibition’s Epidermal Aesthetic, and the Double Display, the Pair of Particulars in Play, were Precisely the Out-of-Time/Having-Become-Historical aspect qua ‘Glitch’ of his Gadgetted Kinetic and the ‘Original Accident’ of his Having-Been-Cut: his Monty-Cantsin-style cut Drawing Blood, which in the End, as the And, was the Ultimate Drawing (the ‘Original Accident’ as ‘Ultimate Drawing’): an Actual and Enacted ‘Biological Flow’.

top left:
August 8, 2011 - Fragility (Notebook Study)

top right:
October 1, 2011 - ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query) - Nuit Blanche/Toronto

bottom:
January 12, 2012 - ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query) - World Record Attempt/D S NFORMAT ON

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i didn’t know it was going to happen … right?

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“If you recall Hegel in the Phenomenology speaks of the disappearance of the scar altogether: He writes: ‘The wounds of the Spirit heal and leave no scars behind’ (¶669). Such is transcendence. I think that this is a very dangerous idea. And in response to it, I am obliged to say: What we have to live in is our scars. But I’m emphasizing Living in, not just borderlines, but Living in our scars. Not with our scars, but in them.”

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Victor Vitanza, “Design as Dasein: Scar”, University of Texas keynote lecture, October 2007.

this is the way you used to tie my hair.

Sean Ripple
Privacy_A Lunch_Break_From_One’s_Public_Identity
2011
performance and text
(part of the show Relational Transgressions)

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Gilles Deleuze: “When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer … then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. When language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent. Style—the foreign language within language—is made up of these two operations; or should we instead speak with Proust of a nonstyle, that is, of ‘the elements of a style to come which do not yet exist’? Style is the economy of language. To make one’s language stutter, face to face, or face to back, and at the same time to push language as a whole to its limit, to its outside, to its silence—this would be like the boom and the crash.”

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“He Stuttered,” Essays Critical and Clinical, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 113.
— also see Walking with Lygia (2009) by Department of Biological Flow.

Department of Biological Flow
ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query)
[World Record Attempt]
forthcoming, 2012
performance

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Becoming-Insect

If contemporary explorations in the arts and sciences are increasingly turning to the insect world for inspiration, then we must inquire after the particular types of relations that we are describing in this valorization. Put differently, with the thousands upon millions of insect species currently flying, crawling and swarming over the earth, the non-human turn in art and philosophy can pretty much locate any metaphor it wishes in order to explicate a particular form of expression.

What are the particulars? Insects, in toto, offer very different tempos, life expectancies, modalities of movement, moments of articulation, et cetera, than we humans — perhaps we turn to them too readily to find new models for living? In our valorization of the insects and the corresponding non-human turn are we simply abdicating our responsibility for the capitalist regime that only we humans have created?

Do we seek to simply represent insects, or do we seek a becoming-insect towards a new consideration of ethics within the contemporary ecologies of the electric?

Department of Biological Flow
Friend, Louis. (2011). ‘Lament for Asger Jorn’.
performance
in process (current running time: approx. 35 mins.)

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Daniel Kunitz: “Original as these strategies are, a few artists put written narrative to an even more inventive use. If stories operate through seduction, finding compelling ways to maintain intercourse with the reader, then the result of such couplings is, inevitably, the production of offspring. Several of the artists mentioned literalize this trope. For them the story is a means of generating new art objects. Mellors’s Rabelaisian tale ‘Giantbum’ was written to provide the scenario for various video scripts he subsequently made and also as a vehicle for the creation of animatronic sculptures. For the past decade or so, everything produced by the artist Mai-Thu Perret has sprung from ‘The Crystal Frontier,’ her ongoing written tale of a utopian, all-female feminist community in the southwestern U.S. desert. Composed of discrete fictional texts in various genres — expository prose, diary entries, letters, daily schedules, and so on, parts of which she sometimes displays and sometimes publishes — the narrative creates a world that Perret then fills with objects. ‘The story was imagined at the beginning,’ Perret says in a 2009 interview, ‘as a kind of machine that makes the art.’”

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“Texting: The Artist as Writer as Artist,” ARTINFO: Modern Painters, June 2011.

So, you’ve got a broken TV that Wii induced and you want to turn it into an art project, eh?

OK.

Some thoughts on process:

1. What are the anatomical elements of the technology that you wish to explore, if any?

2. What is it about the technology’s “broken-ness” or “error” that is of interest?

3. What are the notable visual elements of the crack, materially and aesthetically?

4. Are there any other senses engaged by this crack?

5. How do we understand the cracked image in relation to the “edge of affect”?

6. How is the gesture that Wii produced and its resultant crack a cut through the skin — or better, a skin tectonics?

Department of Biological Flow
ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query)
2011
performance (x2)

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Un-nude ascending a staircase

Program:

1. Plug kinoderm tail appendage into faux kino-gait transcribing device.
2. Begin walking staircase. Ensure a steady rhythm.
3. Using surgical devices at hand (scissors, small garden shears, Japanese band saw, large BBQ knife), cut away from kinoderm while walking up stairs.
4. If gait slows down too much, cease cutting and resume steady rhythm.
5. The performance ends once the artist has cut free from the kinoderm and fled the gaze.

Michelangelo
The Last Judgment (detail)
1537-1541
fresco

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Subjective skin

In Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, painted on the front altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, there is a detail of the fresco in which Saint Bartholomew holds a rough knife in his right hand and his own flayed skin in the left. Bartholomew’s gesture is at once a turn toward the Lord and a recoil from His presence. And of particular interest to this essay, the skin he holds in his left hand is meant to be a portrait Michelangelo painted of himself.

Scholarship has varied about what Michelangelo intended by introducing his self-portrait into the skin of Saint Bartholomew. The violent flaying of the skin, both an act of homage to the Lord and a punishment for his refusal to endorse paganism. The knife wielded by Bartholomew himself. All variables that complexify the “intent” of the artist, one from so many centuries ago who represents a story that originates centuries earlier.

It matters little to our present discussion which interpretation of Michelangelo’s intent is the “correct” one. Instead, we draw our attention to the fact that in the time passed since the mid-sixteenth century, the “knowledge” that Saint Bartholomew’s skin bore a self-portrait of Michelangelo was known, “forgotten” for centuries, and then “rediscovered” by the Italian physician Francesco La Cava. We draw our attention to the fact that a primarily oral tradition (knowledge of Michelangelo’s self-portrait) was rendered extinct — before its eventual rekindling by the physician’s visual capacity. We draw our attention to the very fact that a collective audience could imagine the artist representing his subjectivity by inscribing or revisioning a skin that was already known as belonging to someone else.

It is the American art critic and historian Leo Steinberg who questions the lengthy interval between those eras that understood Saint Bartholomew’s flayed skin as portraying Michelangelo himself. Why this temporal gap or disconnect? Why was it a physician, La Cava, who “rediscovered” the self-portrait? Was it simply, as Steinberg suggests, that as a physician he was immune to the discursive boundaries of art orthodoxy and thus more free to discover?

Or can we resist this simple negation and suggest that as a physician La Cava was likely already aware of the body’s medicalization via technical imaging processes? Aware that it was the gestural moving body that was captured by the varied forms of kinematic visioning? Or that the cinema constituted a plastic art and science of the skin (pellicule) long before such techniques moved from the flat surface to the contoured body? That the “rediscovery” of Michelangelo’s self-portrait entered art discourse in 1925, scant decades after the emergence of popular cinema in many areas of the world, is perhaps not surprising.

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excerpted from “Pixel to Pellicule to Projection,” sportsBabel, March 2010

Department of Biological Flow
Walking with Lygia
2009
performance and text

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Working in the spirit of William Burroughs and Lygia Clark, we create a text using the cut-up method. However, this project uses the “Fly Fusion” pentop computer, a writing technology marketed to children that “has a built-in camera next to the writing tip. When you write, the camera sees tiny dots on the [special] paper, which are printed with reflective ink in a very subtle pattern. The camera takes a series of fast snapshots of the dots, reads the pattern, and finds the action assigned to those dots.”

Rather than the first text being cut up to form a second text, as with Burroughs, in this project the cut-up takes place first to remix the gridded pattern of the special notebook paper and the accompanying camera-stylus. Only thereafter is the first text written to form a second text in the shift from analog to digital.

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yasunao tone:
“to fight with smart machines you have to be very primitive.”

keywords:
lygia clark, walking, striated space, camera, moebius, intersubjectivity, bodies, cut, plastic surgery