Filaments Sensitivity and Connection in the Work of Dario Robleto
Jennifer L. RobertsIt’s well after midnight, sometime in 1997, and Dario Robleto is slipping quietly through a dark street in the San Antonio neighborhood where he grew up. He carries a step stool and a package of 120-watt light bulbs. Crossing up to the front porch of one of the modest two-bedroom houses, working with surgical stealth, he unscrews the existing porch light and replaces it with one of the higher-wattage bulbs. Over a series of nights, he secretly exchanges all the porch lights on the street. We cannot know whether any of these furtive transplants were ever noticed by the residents of the neighborhood. But here’s how I imagine it might possibly have happened: A woman arrives home, exhausted from working her usual late shift. Clutching her purse, keys in hand, a car-radio song still echoing through her head, she begins walking numbly toward her front door. She suddenly stops at the edge of her driveway. Goosebumps rise on her arms; the hair stands up on the back of her neck. Something is different; she can’t put her finger on it. But she’s wide awake now, senses at attention, standing stock still, listening, scanning the block around her. After a long time in this state of heightened sensitivity, she begins to notice something odd about the light. The objects around her that would normally withdraw into nocturnal indifference — the fenders and flowerpots, mailboxes and trash cans — loom forth now in some mysterious luminescence. They have taken on a faint touch of color even in the dark, and their edges bend around in a way that suggests they have been subtly re-sculpted, remodeled, by an inexplicable force. Is it just that her eyes have adjusted to the dark? That must be it. Puzzled, she continues up to her porch, and after she unlocks the door she turns back and looks at the house across the street. It seems to be somehow closer than it was before — leaning in toward the glow of her own house, whereas yesterday it was floating remotely in a gulf of darkness. She stares up and down the street at
Fig. 2.1 Dario Robleto, You Make My World a Better Place to Find, 1996–98. Lint, thread, various debris and particles, and the artist’s grandmother’s wooden spool. Dimensions variable.
For the past two years, I have been secretly collecting lint, thread, etc., from other people (for example, a piece of lint on someone’s shoulder, a hair hanging on a forearm). I connected all this debris into one long thread, which I then spooled. From this spool of debris, I repaired a blanket and a tiny pair of mittens, sewed buttons back on, repaired tears in clothes, and stitched various other things.
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College Collection, Gift of Peter Norton, 2014.7.18.
the spreading pools of light around each house. On a night that would otherwise have sunk into routine oblivion, this constellation of porches will now be forever anchored in her mind. If “dim lights bring forgetfulness” (to quote Patsy Cline from “Lonely Street”), something — for just a passing moment — has turned up the light. And the street feels a little less lonely.
This luminous intervention was one of a series of anonymous “actions” Robleto performed in 1996–97. They were the first works he made after finishing his art degree, and they were all performed covertly in spaces far removed from museums or galleries. As Robleto would later explain, he wanted to “test how art could seamlessly blend into the world while injecting a subtle sense of mystery and wonder into the daily routine of life. My only criteria were to use my imagination and the existing materials around me.”1 All the actions involved exchanges or alterations that were subtly generous or reparative — ameliorating, by some tiny measure, some instance of harm, loneliness, or disappointment. He bought used trophies from thrift stores and exchanged the brass labels for second, third, or fourth place with first place, and redonated them to the stores.2 He purchased Ouija boards, changed the “No” answer in the corner to “Yes” so that every question posed to the spirits would have an affirmative response, and returned them to the stores.3
Many of these exchanges, like the threads of the porch light bulbs he unscrewed and replaced, involved the reversal or replenishment of coils and spirals: “Purchased and unpackaged fax paper, unwound, turned inside out, ends reversed, rerolled, repackaged in reverse order and returned to the store”;4 or “I purchased an old mattress from a thrift store, re-coiled it with the best and bounciest springs available and re-donated it to the thrift store.”5 Some of these coils were spools of thread, the first in his career-long engagement with needlecraft. He secretly collected stray pieces of lint, hair, and thread from people’s arms and shoulders, painstakingly spliced them together, and spooled the resulting thread to use for repairing damage to other fabrics (fig. 2.1). Among those early coils, too, were the grooves of records and the whorls of seashells, reeling into one another: he put a large seashell in his pocket, stood next to a jukebox for the duration of a Patsy Cline single, then returned the shell to the shore.6 Most of the spirals and coils that would become central to Robleto’s future work — the spool, the shell, the record — had their debut in these meticulous interventions.
It is as if each of these spirals were a dial on the control panel of some cosmic transmitter — each one a knob that Robleto turned just enough to send the faintest imaginable signal and make the most tenuous imaginable connection. Indeed, the actions were tuned to the everyday world in such a way as to balance on the very limit of perceptibility. They were so exquisitely subtle that even if someone did notice them,
it would not be possible to determine whether they were caused by an intentional human agent. If they carried anything like a signature, it was not so much an artist’s signature as it was the kind of technoor bio-signature that an astrobiologist might just barely detect in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet. Or like an array of ancient markings on a rock that seem potentially decipherable as messages but might also just be random natural patterns. A signature that wavers between nature and artifice, signal and noise, in which it is not clear whether there is even anything significant to read.
Robleto insisted that these actions were supposed to work — they were meant to make a meaningful change in the world. It’s difficult to square this insistence on impact with the extreme smallness and apparent futility of the gestures he used to achieve it. And yet it is precisely because the work sits just so, on the very threshold of apparition, that it holds out hope of having a profound effect. Returning to the neighbor in her driveway: she detects something just beyond her range of perception, a sense that there is something else to be sensed, and she stretches her sensibilities to locate it. If the hair on the back of her neck stands on end, it is because the subtlety of Robleto’s intervention evokes a filamentary response, a kind of sensory incandescence to match the heightened glow in the coil of the replacement bulb. The genius of Robleto’s brightened light bulbs is that they do not perform what we would call an enlightenment. They do not make everything clear; instead, they generate a state of charged uncertainty that dials up the instinct for acuity and attunement, a desire to gather more wavelengths, capture more vibrations, to turn oneself into a more sensitive instrument.
This strange and delicate form of catalysis cannot be fully described from within art history, nor indeed from within the traditions of any single academic discipline. Art historians might note that Robleto’s actions combine multiple twentieth-century avant-garde strategies, including defamiliarization, authorial withdrawal, and site specificity that soften the boundaries between art and everyday life. Anthropologists might size them up with gift theory: in diverting objects from stores and investing them with sentimental labor that throws their market value off balance, Robleto’s anonymous acts of fastidious generosity interrupt the abstraction of commodity exchange. His interventions quietly signal the presence of latent social connections that can lurk even within seemingly anonymous objects. Literary scholars might turn to the traditions of classical rhetoric to help make sense of Robleto’s unique style of persuasive understatement. Perhaps the closest match they would find in the annals of rhetorical strategy would be the near-obsolete category of the noema, a form of obscure and subtle speech, described by Henry Peacham in his 1593 Garden of Eloquence as that “in which the speaker signifieth something so privily that the hearer must be faine to seeke out the meaning, either by sharpnesse of wit, or long consideration.”7
But the strange conjunction of subtlety and profundity in Robleto’s work resonates beyond the arts and humanities, and in fact it may well be scientists who can best appreciate it. Consider astrophysicists: they
spend their days seeking the most expansive cosmological truths with the sparest and gentlest and most delicate of means, straining after the tiniest imaginable perturbations of matter, at the very edge of detectability. The biggest mysteries at the largest scales send us only the most tender and tenuous signals. The Big Bang trickles into our telescopes as a pale wobble of relic radiation, an insinuation carried on feeble background microwaves. The celebrated first image of a black hole, released in 2019, was made with an enormous telescope array that spanned the entire Earth but gathered up so few photons that their combined energy could not even pop a soap bubble.8
And the same goes for scientists of the living body — physiologists, cardiologists, neuroscientists — watching and listening for flickering signals from the dark spaces of the heart and mind. Robleto’s recent research has focused intently on the history of physiological recording, which required the development of high levels of instrumental sensitivity. The first recording of a human pulse wave, made in 1853, was literally “hair raising”: it used a single human hair as a stylus to trace an oscillating white line on a paper surface covered by a microthin layer of soot from a candle. Fetal heartbeats were captured by the vibrating surfaces of bubbles casting shadows of silver-coated quartz threads onto photosensitive paper. Bubbles, shadows, hairs, flames — the story of reading the body is a story of harnessing the properties of exquisitely sensitive materials, each balanced on the very boundary between ephemerality and form that it is being called upon to describe. Today, there are even finer oracles to consult. Neuroscientists, for example, measure tiny fluctuations in voltage emanating from within neurons or observe the microrotation of individual atomic nuclei in response to a magnetic field.
Here, as in astrophysics, the fainter and more elusive the phenomenon being measured, the more expansive are the implications. As their instruments become finer and more sensitive, as they follow ever narrower and more delicate empiricisms, scientists of the body enter into larger and larger questions. Questions shared by all cultures and disciplines, all ways of knowing and wondering, questions asked by surgeons and priests and playwrights and poets and soldiers and mothers: What is the nature of consciousness and memory? What is the meaning of love? Where exactly is the line between life and death? In these hair’sbreadth spaces of attentive delicacy, the act of measurement cannot be separated from the search for meaning. These are the places where every discipline has always been — and should always be — pointing its most sensitive instruments.
Robleto’s work soon moved from the thrift shops of San Antonio to galleries and museums throughout the United States and the world, expanding into new themes and media. And although his work has become considerably more visible (in every sense of the word) over the past twenty-five years, he has continued to experiment with the role of sensitivity in discerning and reshaping the tenuous boundary between the known and the unknown, the self and the other, the past and the present. He is best known for his work that explores these
Fig. 2.2 Dario Robleto, Untitled (Patsy Spool), 1998. Vinyl record, iron pyrite (fool’s gold), glue, and Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” 45 rpm vinyl record, slowly sliced along outer rim until reaching center, then connected into one long thread and spooled. 1 1/2 × 1 × 1 in.
issues through the theme of sound recording, especially through his sculptural manipulation of vinyl records and cassette tapes. Sound recording (a late nineteenth-century technological innovation) is synonymous with sensitivity; recording instruments must be delicate enough to detect the fleeting passage of sound waves and translate them into a fixed material. Once recorded, sound forms a more durable, if still delicate, trace; it partially repairs some of its own original ephemerality. Robleto’s early vinyl-record sculptures often suggest that recording can spool back together what has passed away or fallen to pieces (fig. 2.2). His recent work extends these concerns by engaging with historical pulse-wave recordings from the heart and brain, many of which were captured using instruments developed in parallel with early sound recording. Robleto’s physiological research culminates in his ongoing study of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (EKG) recordings engraved on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record (see pp. 113ff.). These waveforms, currently hurtling beyond the edge of the Solar System more than fourteen billion miles from Earth, are the ultimate test of the connective power of recording, spanning physiological and astrophysical scales of inquiry. The reparative sensitivity of Robleto’s early work — all that subtly spun thread — now stretches across generations, species, and stars.
In order to make sense of all these threads in Robleto’s career, we might observe them as they weave through a single work: Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens of 2012 (fig. 2.3), a digital collage based on the Hubble Deep Field images that revolutionized modern cosmology. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope peered into a tiny area of space, about the size of a pinhead held at arm’s length, for ten days’ worth of observation time. It was “a random area of sky not known for any particular features or objects” (as the mission director put it), and it was a risky,
Fig. 2.3 Dario Robleto, Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens, 2012. Digital inkjet print mounted on Sintra; a collection of stage lights taken from the album covers of live performances of now-deceased gospel, blues, and jazz musicians. Triptych: 31 × 31 in., 46 × 46 in., 31 × 31 in.
extravagant experiment because no one knew what — if anything — was lurking in that empty sliver of darkness.9 But when the image was processed, it was found to contain an astonishing three thousand galaxies, some of them over ten billion light years away. The 2006 Ultra Deep Field (an image exposed for a million seconds, fig. 2.4) and the Extreme Deep Field (2012) soon followed, revealing as many as ten thousand galaxies stretching back from similarly point-sized areas of focus.
Beyond the sheer fascination these images held for Robleto as a lifelong NASA fan, they also validated his sense of the importance of sustained, sensitive observation.10 What better example of the advantages of attentive commitment than discovering ten thousand galaxies in a single pinprick of night? Alluding to the devotional connotations of such practices, Robleto arranged his own version of the Deep Field into a triptych, framing it in the format of a Christian altarpiece that opens onto scenes of revelation or salvation. Robleto suggests here that at the observational limits of the universe, scientific and religious forms of meditation become enfolded in a shared vocabulary.
What kind of spirituality does Robleto detect in this Hubble heaven? If we practice what the Hubble preaches, looking long and closely, we will find a clue in the fact that the galaxies in Survival do not quite look like galaxies. And in fact they are not galaxies; they are concert spotlights. Every single glimmer of light in the triptych, down to the most distant pixel gleam, is a spotlight from the cover of a live concert album of a deceased jazz, blues, or gospel musician. Robleto spent two years searching through record stores collecting the albums — hundreds of them in all — from Billie Holiday, Jimi Hendrix, and Dizzy Gillespie (fig. 2.5) to Duke Ellington, Sam Cooke, Lena Horne, and Johnny Cash. As he has explained, these live album covers “generally all share a similar vocabulary: the artist performing . . . usually
Fig. 2.4 The Hubble
Field, captured between September 24, 2003, and January 16, 2004. NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team.
Fig.
sweating . . . hopefully being passionate. . . . And more than likely they’re being illuminated by a concert spotlight. . . . For some reason I was always mesmerized by those lights.”11 He scanned each album cover and, over months of painstaking digital craft, extracted, processed, rescaled, and stitched the spotlights into the Hubble Deep Field, in the place of galaxies.
In Survival, in other words, Robleto was at it again, quietly switching out light bulbs. And just as the replacement bulbs in San Antonio enhanced the image of his neighborhood block, we might see these concert lights as a form of enhancement of the original Hubble image, one that brings out latent qualities of the Deep Field that NASA’s original image-processing techniques were not designed to reveal. Astronomers routinely adjust color and luminosity in their telescopic images after the fact in order to bring out certain kinds of information; Robleto simply takes this a step further. It is as if he were poetically reprocessing the Hubble data so that it would reveal a broader and more finely rendered spectrum of implications in its light.
In particular, the lights in Robleto’s universe are shot through with spectral traces of melancholy. The vast new horizon the Hubble opened up was not just a mathematical expansion; it also brought with it whole new ranges of longing and loneliness. In filling this cosmic chamber with musical light, Robleto gives it a specific soundtrack, a particular kind of resonance, that reveals this melancholic dimension. Of course, the nature of the cosmos has long been associated with music, and on one level, Survival recalls the ancient Pythagorean “music of
the spheres.” But this is no abstract mathematical harmony; it cannot be described with pencils and protractors. This is a passionate light. Corporeal, emotional, aspirational; it is full of the noisy thrum of glory and sweat, desire and despair, a jostle of rising voices emanating from the flesh and blood of living hearts and mouths. This is a full-throated light, an incarnate light, a light from the lungs, not a pure immaterial essence. And, crucially, this is light that reflects from gospel and blues, musical traditions born from sorrow and loss. This heaven is a vault raised by voices of struggle and redemption, suffering and faith, call and response. It’s a space made of seeking and sounding out salvation, rather than securing it.
These are songs offered in the distant hope of being heard; of recognition; of connection, whether divine or human. Robleto extends the stretch of that hope to the very edge of the universe. As he has explained, by putting these live-concert lights out among the galaxies, the work imagines the luminous remains of human musicians arriving, after having traveled over vast cosmic distances, in the eyepiece of an alien telescope. This is a monumental inversion, essentially turning the Hubble around, showing us a reciprocal universe in which something just might be out there looking back at us. Robleto emphasizes that the Deep Field did not just extend our sensory sensitivity out to a point near the edge of the known universe; it also turned us inside out by giving us a new center of observational gravity. Tracy K. Smith (the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet whose father was a Hubble engineer) put it this way: “We saw to the edge of all there is — / So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”12
For Robleto, this perspectival flip is an essential quality of observational sensitivity — it decenters the viewer and creates an inherent capacity for empathetic reversal. As we become more sensitive to phenomena outside ourselves, we become perceptually enmeshed in such a way that we can see ourselves from an external perspective. We must stretch ourselves in order to imagine the other end of that connection in the distance. Robleto has long practiced this cosmic-empathetic flip. Throughout his career, he has explored various techniques of inversion, and he has often connected this interest in “turning and turnover”13 to his early exposure to DJ culture. “It was residual from watching really skilled scratch DJs, the way they flip the records,” he observes. “It was all about flipping something over, seeing through it from the other side.”14 Survival, with its heaven-sent records flipped back to us by alien telescopes, does all this at the scale of the cosmos.
So maybe this universe is not so melancholy after all. Indeed, it is comforting to think that as Robleto’s vinyl concert lights flicker on in the deep distance, the performances they carry will be experienced as if they were new, even though all the performers died long ago. As Robleto puts it, “To me the beauty is that a light ricocheting off of Jimi Hendrix’s body is just now arriving somewhere.”15 There is something comforting in the idea that everything we think we have lost to the ravages of time will someday be found in the stars. Billie Holiday is not really dead; someday she will arrive at a midsized rocky exoplanet, where perhaps
there will be a life form stopping still on the edge of its alien lawn, noticing a strange, slight brightening, a few photons out of place, and turning to look. Maybe survival does lie in the heavens after all.
But at these intergalactic scales of transmission, there’s always a catch: every light is always already dead on arrival. When we look at stars or galaxies, we are not seeing them as they are; we are seeing them as they were. The light from our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, for example, has taken 2.5 million years to reach us, and for all we know the entire galaxy has been destroyed in the meantime. When we see another galaxy, we are looking at the tip of a long string of fossilized wavelengths, threading back toward a source that may no longer even exist. What Emily Dickinson said of fireflies we might just as well say of the Hubble’s galactic light: “A speck of Rapture — first perceived — By feeling it is gone.”16 Any view into the heavens is a kind of waveform archaeology, pulling at the ends of strings of light from the cosmic depths of time.17 Another way to put this is to say that there is no such thing as “live” light in the cosmos. All the stars we see are really only recordings of themselves. Or perhaps we should say that they are all “live recordings” — like the very records that came in the album covers Robleto scanned and imaginatively sent to space. Robleto has long been interested in the paradox — indeed, the oxymoron — of the “live recording.” It expresses something about the condition of the cosmos itself: life across the universe can never be “live”; it’s always on a delay. It must submit to traveling belatedly along filamentary waveform pathways of energy.
In other words, the cosmos is held together by recordings. And barely so. This is what Robleto calls “the melancholic structure of the universe” — the fact that space-time is built to keep us apart.18 This is
Fig. 2.7 Dario Robleto, Your Lullaby Will Find a Home in My Head, 2005 (detail).
Hair braids made from a stretched and curled audiotape recording of Sylvia Plath reciting “November Graveyard,” homemade paper (pulp made from soldiers’ letters to mothers and daughters from various wars, ink retrieved from letters, sepia), excavated and melted bullet lead, carved ribcage bone and ivory, mourning-dress fabric and thread, silk, mourning frame from another’s loss, and walnut and glass vitrine. 23 1/2 × 16 × 13 in. with vitrine. Collection of Carlos Bacino, Houston.
as true of relationships on Earth as it is off planet — the distances are shorter, but there is always some separation between partners, whether across the globe or across generations. For Robleto, the worst part of it is that the universe is not just expansive, it’s expanding, at an accelerating rate. Astronomers describe this expansion observationally in terms of redshift: redshifted light is a sign that the object emitting it is speeding away from us, because this literally stretches out the wavelengths toward and beyond the red end of the spectrum. The wavelength strings holding the universe together, in other words, are stretching. And there is a point (the edge of the observable universe) at which all those lines simply snap. Robleto’s recent film The Aorta of an Archivist wrestles directly with the existential implications of this boundary that no information, not even recording, can cross (fig. 2.6).
In the face of all the forces tearing us apart, at least we have these thin wavelength threads. All we can do is to find them and hang on, even though we know they will never stop stretching and slipping and snapping. You can hear the sadness of this in many of Robleto’s earlier sculptures. Beginning in 2005, he developed a technique for pulling magnetic audiotape into long hairlike filaments. He stumbled on the idea accidentally, when his old boom box mangled a David Bowie cassette, and he realized after respooling it that he could hear the stretched part of the tape in the deepened pitch and slower speed of Bowie’s voice.19 Like the Doppler effect (the sonic version of redshift), the voice seemed to be receding into the distance. Robleto became an artisan of magnetic stretch. Slowly, over months of constant practice, he developed a feel for the tensile strength of cassette tape and taught himself to stretch it into thin filaments that could then be woven, threaded, braided, and looped into sculptures. For the 2005 work Your Lullaby Will Find a Home in My Head (fig. 2.7), he used a recording that was especially meaningful for him: a tape of Sylvia Plath reciting her poem “November Graveyard” (which ponders the disappearance of meaning from the world). As he stretched it, he imagined “her super-sloweddown, distorted vocals” all the while.20 Given that he would always warm up the tape before stretching it, he must also have felt her voice cooling off in his hands as he pulled it apart, away, out across the attenuated “untenanted air.”21
Robleto has frequently incorporated stretched audiotape in his sculptures, working it into forms that simultaneously create connections and acknowledge their precarity. Stretched and pulled audiotape of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” forms the antennae of the butterflies in American Seabed (fig. 2.8; see fig. 10.8). (The butterflies light upon fossilized cetacean ear bones that cannot hear them.) Or there is Lunge for Love as If It Were Air of 2008 (fig. 2.9). Suspended in a mason jar is a pair of feathers made
Fig. 2.8 Dario Robleto, American Seabed, 2014 (detail).
Fig. 2.9 Dario Robleto, Lunge for Love as If It Were Air, 2008. Vintage mason jar, feathers made from stretched audiotape of two now-deceased lovers’ recordings of each other’s heartbeats, nylon thread, and willow and Plexiglas vitrine. Jar: 9 1/2 × 4 1/2 in.; with pedestal: 61 × 17 × 17 in.
from stretched audiotape of two deceased lovers’ recordings of each other’s heartbeats. The span and stretch of their love is sealed in the jar like a black moth. Or like the cold filament of an inverted light bulb. Or perhaps like a dark firefly, a speck of rapture once perceived.
There is something devastating about these silent antennae and darkening feather-filaments. The song has gone silent and the light has gone out. But this is where the question of sensitivity comes back in, because there is always the possibility that some further signal, hidden deep in the apparently disorganized material of the object, might still be detected. That some faint light is still being emitted, even if at an invisible wavelength. All of Robleto’s recording sculptures have a quality of waiting about them — waiting for someone or something to recognize that there is something to detect in them, that they still harbor messages to decipher. Waiting to tell them that they are not alone.
It is impossible to understand the importance of sensitivity in Robleto’s work without acknowledging its relationship to devastation. Compelled partly by the events of 9/11, Robleto has unflinchingly confronted war, extinction, and loss in his work, especially by using materials (including sound recordings) that have been placed under such stress that the meaning and memory held in their structure might no longer be recoverable. Along with melted, dissolved, and powderized recordings of the voices of the dead, he has worked with materials like trinitite (glass formed from the sand of Trinity Site in the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, by the heat and energy of the first atomic bomb test) and the bones of extinct prehistoric animals. Common to all this is a compulsion to probe the absolute limits of the survival of artifactual memory: Is there a threshold beyond which meaning can be permanently stripped from matter and no further signal can be detected? When does a recording (an arrangement of matter that has been
Fig. 2.10 Dario Robleto, The Abstractness of a Blown-Off Limb, 2002 (detail).
Fig. 2.11 Lower left: Dario Robleto, The Abstractness of a Blown-Off Limb, 2002. Handmade clay and lead marbles used by soldiers from the Civil War, AmericanIndian Wars, and Mexican-American War; and human and dinosaur dust from femur bones. Diameter: 14 in. Right: Dario Robleto, Nowadays I Only Look Up to Pray, 2002. Custom-made kaleidoscope, wood, brass, mirrors, hand-ground trinitite (glass produced during the first nuclear test explosion, ca. 1945, from Trinity test site, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), and antique wood and brass tripod. 55 × 28 × 28 in.
impressed with the trace of an ephemeral meaning) become simply a pile of meaningless dust? Robleto steps right up to this line. For example, in a pair of sculptures titled Nowadays I Only Look Up to Pray and The Abstractness of a Blown-Off Limb (figs. 2.10, 2.11), Robleto presents us with a scene of aftermath and what looks like a permanent failure of hope, an end of memory along with its techniques of observation. In Nowadays, a “telescope” is actually a custom-made kaleidoscope with chips of trinitite tumbling in its fragmented lens. It points down rather than up, looking blindly toward a pile of dust. Studded with marbles made by nineteenth-century soldiers out of the bullet lead and bloodsoaked clay that surrounded them in the trenches, the dust is made from the ground femur bones of humans and dinosaurs. We will return to this work in a moment.
Robleto famously accompanies his sculptural work with detailed lists of its constitutive ingredients (in fact, he often writes the lists first, then makes the sculptures to match them).22 These lists are poetic litanies of incongruous materials that read as if they had been swept up from the shattered remains of bombed- out science museums and funeral homes. Words Tremble with the Thoughts They Express (fig. 2.12) includes lampblack, cuttlefish sepia, volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens, and the last recordings of certain extinct birds. A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing (2008) includes “sound of glaciers melting” and a “million-year-old raindrop,” as well as velvet, silk, leather, and ribbon.23
Critics have routinely questioned the sincerity of these lists. The specified materials (a million-year-old raindrop?) often seem fantastical, and there is no way to verify them by just looking at the works.24 But Robleto’s engagement with matter is radically sincere; to make false claims about it would not only be uninteresting and unethical to him, it would also be simply nonsensical within his entire system,
which is based on the possibility that specific forms of meaning might always be lurking within apparently mute, indiscriminate matter. It matters a great deal what a heap of dust is made of, because different dusts will release different memories. That really is a million-year-old raindrop.
Robleto’s goal is not to sow doubt about the sincerity of his materials but rather to open up a decipherment gap that emphasizes the fragility of our capacity to retrieve meaning from matter. His materials lists put us in the position of postapocalyptic archaeologists coming upon a mysterious artifact and trying to interpret its meaning by taking spectroscopic readings of its chemical makeup. Or of aliens trying to read a human book; they sense there is meaning in the inscriptions (they sense the words trembling) but can’t quite get at that meaning by analyzing the molecular structure of the inks. The sculptures alienate us from our own habits of understanding and present us with the specter of meaning as an unintelligible archaeological murmur. But just as an empty area of the night sky is only empty until someone approaches it with a space telescope, a meaningless heap of dust is only a meaningless heap of dust until someone approaches it with a sensitive enough instrument, a delicate enough sentiment, to detect the memory captured invisibly in its structure.
For Robleto, art is exactly that: an act of sensitive translation that can pull signatures of memory from soot and shards and shrapnel, string them together, and repair the connections that bind us through time. This is why his most important artistic models are not the painters and sculptors of the past but more often people like the nineteenth-century widows and daughters of dead soldiers, who developed elaborate forms of mourning hairwork, skillfully turning the hair of the dead into flowers and filigrees. Or (to return to the sculptures in figs. 2.10 and 2.11) like the soldiers who made marbles from the lead shrapnel around them, turning death-dealing materials into instruments of play and connection. Robleto arranges the marbles like new planets spinning up from the dust of exploded stars. Or like the scientist who invented kaleidoscopes, which find patterns in broken optics and shards of color. Or, for that matter, the scientists who designed the new James Webb Telescope, the most sensitive ever made, which has a certain kaleidoscopic quality, raking the cosmos for blasted wavelengths and gathering them up in a complex array of fragmented mirrors. An artist is anyone who can detect intricate signatures of meaning in the chaos or the void and work them into a knot or a braid that is strong enough to carry them forward. Anyone who is willing to do that hairwork.
These questions of devastation, sensitivity, and repair also run through all of Robleto’s recent work on pulse-wave recording. In a lecture at the Space Telescope Science Institute in 2015, Robleto suggested that recording the human heartbeat is analogous to detecting the light from ancient galaxies. Both, he said, involve sensitive instruments that see the invisible and deepen our access to the past; the cardiograph is like a reversed Hubble turned inward across the horizon of the body.25 That body, like the bone dust that Robleto’s own inverted telescope
Fig. 2.12 Dario Robleto, Words Tremble with the Thoughts They Express, 2008 (detail). Feathers made from stretched audiotape of the last recordings of now-extinct birds and now-extinct languages, glass inkwell, homemade ink (lampblack, ground fulgurites [glass produced by lightning strikes when heat from the blast melts surrounding sand], cuttlefish sepia), homemade paper, volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens, ink-dyed willow, brass, and typeset. 63 3/4 × 25 1/2 × 24 1/2 in.
Fig. 2.13 Dario Robleto, Methuselah in Her Cradle, 2019 (detail). Earliest waveform recordings of blood flowing from the heart in newborns to 10-year-olds (1886), rendered and 3D printed in brass-plated stainless steel; ebonized mahogany; and 23k gold leaf. Box (closed): 2 1/2 × 22 × 25 in.; with pedestal and vitrine: 45 × 52 1/2 × 31 in.
observes, is always in danger of devastation. We live in an age of rapidly advancing medical technology and an expansion of the data sciences so explosive that it resembles the exponential expansion of the universe. These snippets and threads from the body are in imminent danger of becoming a kind of intimate shrapnel, disconnected from the human beings who bequeath them; so many broken threads; so much broken tape. Mere data, stripped of its origins and thus open to exploitation of all sorts. This is a danger that has shadowed the graphic science of the body from its inception, and this is why, for Robleto, it is essential that empathetic counterforces, from whatever disciplinary quarter, accompany the development of these technologies. In his research, Robleto has retrieved thousands of anonymous pulse-wave pieces from their printed oblivion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century physiological archives (fig. 2.13). If he once collected stray pieces of lint and hair that gathered along sleeves and shoulders (see fig. 2.1), now he assembles snippets of nineteenth-century thoughts and emotions — similarly delicate threads gathered from the surface of the body by cardiographs and other pulse-reading instruments. His sculptures, prints, and films splice these shards and shreds together into a new spool, a new reel, that can be taken up in the future. What is the tensile strength of love? Of care? Of memory? Robleto, drawing equally from the traditions of science and sentiment, is working toward a reparative technology that can feel these limits, and maybe, if its instruments are sensitive enough, can find a way beyond them.
N OTES
1. Dario Robleto, We’ll Dance Our Way out of the Womb, 1997/2008, from the series Oh, Those Mirrors with Memory (Actions, 1996–1998/2008) (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). Quotes attributed to Robleto in notes 1, 4, and 5 come from the explanatory caption that accompanies each work in its textual form. Images and texts related to works cited in subsequent notes can be found on the artist’s website, http://www .dariorobleto.com/.
2. Dario Robleto, If I Could Change, Maybe I Would, 1997.
3. Dario Robleto, Is It Good for the Soul to Love Something You Can’t Control?, 1997.
4. Dario Robleto, Untitled (We Get Along Like a House on Fire), 1996.
5. Dario Robleto, We Are Special in Other Ways, 1997.
6. Dario Robleto, I’ve Chosen You to Make This Covenant, 1996.
7. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Jackson, 1593), 180. It is appropriate that the word noema is not only an obscure rhetorical term for Robleto’s style of subtlety but also the acronym for an extremely sensitive radio telescope — the Northern Extended Millimeter Array, or NOEMA.
8. Michael Johnson, “Photographing a Supermassive Black Hole with the Event Horizon Telescope,” lecture, Harvard University, April 27, 2019.
9. Robert Williams, “The Hubble Deep Field: Shot in the Dark,” in Hubble Deep Field and the Distant Universe (Bristol, UK: IOP Publishing, 2018).
10. Robleto’s views on this work were discussed with the author in an interview on January 3, 2022.
11. Dario Robleto, from a recording of panel discussion at Artpace, San Antonio, Texas, January 25, 2015, http:// www.dariorobleto.com/media/24
12. Tracy K. Smith, “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” in Life on Mars: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2011), 8.
13. Dario Robleto, interview with the author, July 12, 2021.
14. Robleto, interview with the author, July 19, 2021.
15. Robleto, panel discussion at Artpace, San Antonio.
16. Emily Dickinson, loose poem, ca. 1879, in Christianne Miller, ed., Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 619.
17. Indeed, when the Hubble Deep Field images were released, astronomers frequently referred to them as “core samples” in order to convey the temporal shape of the long, narrow images, stretching back into time.
18. Robleto, interview with the author, July 12, 2021.
19. Robleto, interview with the author, January 3, 2022.
20. Robleto, interview with the author, January 3, 2022.
21. Sylvia Plath, “November Graveyard,” in Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 56.
22. On Robleto’s use of language as a prompt for sculpture, see Ian Berry, “Medicine on the Spoon: A Dialogue with Dario Robleto,” in Alloy of Love: Dario Robleto, ed. Ian Berry (Saratoga Springs, NY: Tang Teaching Museum, 2008), 260–61.
23. Dario Robleto, A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing, 2008.
24. For a discussion of this critical doubt, see Berry, “Medicine on the Spoon,” 263.
25. Dario Robleto, “Insights into the Interplay of Science and Art,” Space Telescope Science Institute Public Lecture Series, March 3, 2015, http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=77B4PAW9qGM&t=1s.