by Apostolis Artinos
The work is always coming, in the locus of a Real, which is elicited in its materiality and contemplated in the constellation of its signs; a deposited material, constituted in the event of its linguistic exemption, of a secret discourse that raises both the order of things and the horizon of their linguistic diversions. But how does the polyvalence of this material become manageable? How the fuzziness and the uncharted character of its expressivity are controlled? Andwherethecreativeintentiongetsinvolved? Theorderoftheworkshop? Its gestures? The creator is the representative of this order, yet of this disorder too. A borderline delivered to mental work and the disclosure of the material, to its dark origins, to the night that tests it. The status of creation is always tested in the claims it raises on this material, no less than in their subsequent failures; for it is the Real of the material that exhausts the creator’s intention, diverting her to the trend of her singular truth. The material always speaks by itself, i.e. it speaks a language that lies outside the perspective of the work, when the work is the fixation of the material, its structural and formal outward show.
The work is a perversion of the thing, but the Real of its materiality defies its perversion. Materiality is a naked experience, the “thing in itself”, not an elsewhere but a here and now, an imperative immediacy imposed on space and delivered disproportionally. An internal unity that also constitutes its metaphysical purity, since it is difficult to be circum-scribed outside the conditions that it itself raises and preserves; a singularity indifferent to having its temporality historicized/formalized, persisting in its own unhistorical horizon and repressing any possibility of its conceptualization. A thus non transparent totality, which is also inscribed as a wound inside language, a wound that the metaphorical and metonymical function comes to heal on the repoussé body of its modulated surface. Yet we are already inside the metaphysics of materiality, which also brings its morphological difference; a difference disposable and available to the other, since it also takes in her own gestures, her own trace, her desperate effort to invade the core of this structure. Thus, materiality not only preserves its interiority but also opens up to the allocation of its meaning, to a desire not belonging to its original conscience, but it is a movement coming from the outside and excites the internal testing of the material; a testing that exhausts it, bringing it to its limits; but also, simultaneously, it is a praxis that reveals it, inscribing it to the finality of its meaning; to a meaning that does not belong to but is inscribed, delivered. Matter as a linguistic event that disposes and opens up to its own weakness. This gesture is a gesture of technicality that delivers the relief of the world to its constructive truth. Yet those inscriptions are not the violence of the work, they preexist. They do not consume the materiality of the Real, its singular integrity, they just open up its stylistic character. An opening up that we could also recognize as a natural reception of the other. An oscillation, in the Hegelian sense of this term, which extends the dimension of materiality to the uneven size of its ideas. Thus, the otherness of materiality is not only recognized in its tautological inclusion but also in the minimal void of its rupture. A traumatic surface, the way all identical surfaces are, which wells out through the dismantling of its continuity, a desire for those autographic writings of the other. Thus, materiality, remaining in the Sameness of its locus, is disposable in language, in its metaphors and its metonymies, in what Levinas would call exteriority, available to the other that envelops the locus of the same. The otherness of the material is not an irreducible otherness but an interiority breached by the workings of the Outside. Otherwise, it would be an indisposed matter, an unlivable world, violence beyond experience; yet it is a body opposed and at the same time disposed and available, interiority breached in the limits of discourse and lived experience.
The defending yielding of the material establishes an environment of relations and workings that defines no sovereignty but only a merciless dialectic. A dissymmetry of signs recognized in their repressed position and their resumption in front of the threshold of the other. The loss of sovereignty inside this status of repression also raises a series of events that make desire go astray and divert its discourse. There is an event lurking in every structure and remains non-localized even in this instantaneous and unanticipated moment of its manifestation. A moment generated in rupture, which perturbs normality and its established meaning. The center that is usually hit is the expressivity of materiality, its established type setting. A fixed perception that also prescribes the horizon of our gestures. Of those gestures of the work coming not so much to ram the core structure of materiality but to open up its naturality, in the possibility of another eccentricity, of another moment of reference. The clarity of the work confronts the considerations of the sensorial and the imaginary. Sensory approaches having to detect a field that constitutes doubt, is the very core of doubt. This parasitic nature of the thing, which diverts language to more and more improbable situations. An error inscribed integrally in the locus of narration and the scene of the poetic. Thus, the material “becomes” work, since it is attained in the discourse of its creator. Previously, it is the non-interpreted, the empty sign of creation, the impossible foundation of its reflection. The creative process evolves when the silence of this material is left to the illuminating principle of the creator, when it is inscribed in the scene of meaning and unfolded in its historical structures. Yet the enclosure of materiality does not allow the artist to have a universal perception of the thing, that’s why the artistic intention is a blind gesture, a game with the dark matter of the world, with its indisposed meaning. In this null horizon the signs of art are signs that exhibit their nudity, their semantic weakness; for that, they are signs of an origin, of an original, inaugural and thus impossible conscience. Therefore, all become language, disposable in language, momentary excursions, morphological weaknesses, all of them products of this event crisis, its apparentness, the work that shows crisis, its signs, its semiotic depth; hence the unthinkable of its meaning and the otherness of its expression. For it is the work of a borderline game, the meaning of non meaning, the expression of the non-expressed, the discourse of a natural duration that silently comes about as discourse, the surplus discourse of the work, a discourse that predominates, that is not of this world and, for that, it testifies for the world, exhibits its silence, which is no longer silence but an internal experience, another language, a language inside language and thus a chief stratagem, a secret announcement of simulations. The more the material resists, the more the expressive language of the work deepens, for it accumulates a sign on top of another sign, a super-exhaustion where the tracing goes deeper and the trace of the thing becomes an illegible trace. Nonetheless, it is there that the work suddenly loses its power and becomes a refined form of the loss, oblivion of its original field, even if this presence, at the very end, is nothing but the impossible trace of its retreat.
Assuming its material, the work also carries this very material, yet it stocks up the otherness of its idea. It is the operation of a mutuality, by all accounts difficult, which perforates the two structures, the one of the creative intention and the one of the material, composing the example of an intermediate in the void of this hole, a form of void in void. This hybrid thought-form of the work, a form between sky and earth, as Heidegger would say, aestheticizes its groundbreaking genetic gesture. Already since the beginning of the 20th century, the world of art assumes what Claude Lévi-Strauss would name “bricolage” in The Savage Mind. An ocular opening up, at first, which localizes and also assumes its technical surroundings in a game-like disposition. An instrumental perversion, which perverts the uses of means and retraces the horizon of things. A juncture where the artist exhibits not so much its initial intention in her expressive praxis, but her chancing upon her materials. A borrowed discourse that carries out language, its signified circulation, and loses the centrality of its reference, its intellectual bearing. The work, in all its contortions, assumes now its elations under various names. Metonymies that are not recognized anywhere but in the traces of their original names. A centri-less ec-centricity that communicates different sources of meaning and shoulders their operation. A synthetic gesture that recomposes the unity of the mythological and the intellectual, deposing its formal weakness. The very core of structure being not menaced, it is the language, this all-of-the-sudden of the world, which perturbs its limits and exhibits their endurance.
Thus, the sovereignty of the work is a sovereignty that commands nothing, yet it is not commanded. An imperceptible writing that carries difference, the differing and escaping trace of the thing, which is no longer its own will, but its negligence, its attracting trend. The chaining of those shifts deposits a reserve of morphological co-motions, which also becomes the original zone of the work, the archaeology of its laboratory. The more this reserve is accumulated, the more powerful the gestures of the work become. This operation, uncharted and always non-interpreted, constitutes an interior that mixes the creative intentions with the event raisings of the material. A field of flashing maneuvers that articulates meanings and silences, decreases and developments, reductions and inductions. The environment of an economy of ruptures that innovates inside the body of materiality, carrying not the absoluteness of a meaning but only the praxis of its possibility. In this praxis where the far-reaching writing of the work is not linear but passes through many strictures and many twists. A blind writing - yet writing it is - which is invited and passing through its finality. Attributedtochance, though, nottotechnique. A creative intention is established in its material referentiality as long as it retrieves its apathy, its in-transparence in the empire of things. Here too, the rule of the game is proven to be the game itself. The repressed returns, in other form, the challenges invite and withdraw, signals emerge and submerge, thought-forms are prefigured and escaping. Yet nothing is saved in the evolution of this cosmic desolation, only the availability of the form, its passage from one to another, a minimal conscience of life that does not fall asleep. A wandering from meaning to non-meaning and back; it is there that the philosophical meaning of art, its unfounded foundation, its non-localizable trace in the evidence of the world gets recognized.
At the very end, nothing rests in the world; only a palimpsest, an exhausted surface of inscriptions that recomposes and rips off its text. On the other hand, this text always remains a mute text, captive of its original fixations. Nonetheless, what initiates this story is something beyond that story. An indomitable beyond that watches over all the gestures of the world and all its secret totalities. It is the moment of its desire that becomes the moment of creation. A beyond inscribed and pronounced in its earthen trace. This carving on the rock by P. Celan. The tracings are always deep tracings, captive of their desire and, for that, lost markings. Tracings that do not mark, that do not possess but only pass through, transfuse emptiness, slide, and leave their traces. The trace does not divert, the trace is diversion itself. An instantaneous, flashing moment that traverses the body of the Real and envelops in its materiality all the otherness of the world.
Artwork: Amie Dicke