boat, boat, boat, boat: this nomadic object is also metaphoric by claire scanlon

Adriana Salazar Arroyo

Boat, boat, boat, boat: This nomadic object is also metamorphic.

BA (Hons) Contemporary Media Arts Practice 2007

I would like to express my thanks to everyone who has offered places for me to stand and look. I am especially grateful to those who have also shaken those places in one form or another: Becky Beasley, Heli Clarke, RuairĂ Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor, Claire Scanlon; and of course the maker of boats: Udhayan Gunawardena.

Taking as a foundation that the methods for knowing something are unsteady, this essay proposes a structure that aims not only to reveal but also draw upon these instabilities. Although it could serve to explore the fragility of knowledge in general, its domain is the work of art. At the core of this structure is boat: ideas around this ‘vehicle’ are explored through the lines of sight offered by six pieces. Equally, ideas around these works are conditioned and instigated by the concept of boat. This concept is used as a metaphorical device but it is important to acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid it sometimes slipping towards the literal. This text makes use of the liberties offered by figurative language but it finds that at times it must return to where the figure came from, that is to say the real object. The idea of Parallax, understood as the apparent shift in position of an object due to a change in viewpoint, offers the dynamic with which this investigation develops. The works of art are standpoints from which we understand boat. Throughout the text it becomes apparent that not only is it boat that shifts, but also the works themselves. They move from being fixed viewpoints to being what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘Parallax Gaps’. This space is where oppositions meet each other but do not achieve synthesis. It is here, where different views collide, that this text finds the possibilities for creative thought.

Contents 1. Boat, boat, boat, boat: This nomadic object is also metamorphic. 2. Boat:

In Search of the Miraculous 1973-1975

3. Boat:

Dark Wave 2006 Tilted Arc 1979-1989

4. Boat:

Hand Catching Lead 1971 Rain 2003

5. Boat:

Yielding Stone 1992

6. Return:

Or simply turn

List of Illustrations Figure 1: In Search of the Miraculous (invitation card for the exhibition at the Claire Copley Gallery), Bas Jan Ader, 1973 Source: Verwoert, Jan, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, Afterall Books, London, 2006. Figure 2: In Search of the Miraculous (Part sang by Bas Jan Aderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s students, Published in Art & Project bulletin no.89 in association with Claire Copley Gallery), Bas Jan Ader, 1975 Source: Verwoert, Jan, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, Afterall Books, London, 2006. Figure 3: In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), (Detail from series of 18 black and white photographs), Bas Jan Ader, 1973 Source: Verwoert, Jan, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, Afterall Books, London, 2006. Figure 4: 122 Variations of Incomplete Cubes, Sol LeWitt, 1974 Source: Krauss, Rosalind E, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985 Figure 5: Dark Wave, Gabriel Orozco, 2006 Source: exh. cat. WHITE CUBE, Gabriel Orozco, Jay Joplin/White Cube, London, 2006 Figure 6: Dark Wave (detail), Gabriel Orozco, 2006 Source: exh. cat. WHITE CUBE, Gabriel Orozco, Jay Joplin/White Cube, London, 2006 Figure 7: Dark Wave (detail), Gabriel Orozco, 2006 Source: exh. cat. WHITE CUBE, Gabriel Orozco, Jay Joplin/White Cube, London, 2006 Figure 8: Tilted Arc, Richard Serra, 1979-1989 Source: Buskirk, Martha, Weyengraf-Serra, Clara. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991. Figure 9: View of Federal Plaza after the removal of Tilted Arc, Thomson Architectural Photographs, 1989 Source: Buskirk, Martha, Weyengraf-Serra, Clara. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991.

Figure 10: Hand Catching Lead (stills), Richard Serra, 1971 Source: exh. cat. CENTRE POMPIDOU, Les Mouvement Des Images, Centre Pompidou, 2006 Figure 11: Rain (detail), Fiona Tan, 2003 Source: www.masdearte.com, October 2006 Figure 12: Rain, Fiona Tan (installation view), 2003 Source: www.artmag.com, October 2006 Figure 13: Yielding Stone, Gabriel Orozco, 1992 Source: Orozco, Gabriel, Clinton is Innocent, Les Musees de la Ville the Paris, Paris, 1998 Figure 14: Yielding Stone (detail), Gabriel Orozco, 1992 Source: Orozco, Gabriel, Clinton is Innocent, Les Musees de la Ville the Paris, Paris, 1998 Figure 15: Photo opportunity with Yielding Stone, Gabriel Orozco, 1992 Source: Orozco, Gabriel, Clinton is Innocent, Les Musees de la Ville the Paris, Paris, 1998 Figure 16: Yielding Stone, Gabriel Orozco, 1992 Source: exh. cat. WHITE CUBE, Gabriel Orozco, Jay Joplin/White Cube, London, 2006

Boat, boat, boat, boat: This nomadic object is also metamorphic. This study works with (but is not about) the instability of meaning. It takes one word as a point of departure and development for the four main sections that comprise it: all entitled boat. Repetition allows for ‘the same’ to be analysed through a series of shifts in perspective. This introduces the concept of Parallax; according to Slavoj Žižek this is: … the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective”, due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view1. These points of view, which are more than two here, are offered by artists’ events, sculptures, photographs and films. The works are spaces from where we can stand and look at a single concept. Work is placed under a word and the word in turn becomes what is under it: work. Similarly, the work is seen under the umbrella of the word, which could be said to condition its reading and this is precisely what this written analysis deals with. It also draws upon Georges Bataille’s Critical Dictionary, which had as its task not to give words their meaning but their job. The entries in this Dictionary are explicitly fragmentary and incomplete, and by being so they attack the inheritance from the Enlightenment with its attempts at totality of signification and encompassing of all knowledge in an Encyclopaedia. The notions of an elevated and illuminating intellect are in turn put in checkmate. This text exists within the realm of translation: it uses one language to attempt to describe the equivalent of something in another language. But it is where the translation lacks that it finds its interest. When translating the following Spanish phrase into English ‘Está lloviendo a cántaros’, the ‘correct’ 1

Žižek, Slavoj, The Parallax View, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2006, p.17.

translation would be ‘It is raining cats and dogs’ but when I translate it in a literal manner it becomes: ‘It is raining to the jugful’. Whilst ‘It is raining cats and dogs’ might be effective due to its immediate identification by a native English speaker I would argue that it pacifies speech. ‘It is raining to the jugful’ might sound ‘odd’ and ‘incorrect’ but it is this oddity that doesn’t allow for a flattening out of language to occur. It also evidences the grey areas encountered in the process of translation. Sarat Maharaj points out that: …difference is never fully intelligible…translation is not an untrammelled operation that simply ferries meaning from one language to another, it is an active refashioning that leaves residues of opaqueness. …Opaqueness, Obstruction, Mistranslation…2 The previous example concerns translation that uses two similarly coded languages. This study, however, does not. It uses works of art and the written word and although works of art might at times incorporate the written word, they are part of another form of language or arguably not a language at all. Although an interesting discussion, this philosophical enquiry is not the focus of this text. What is of interest however, also in relation to philosophy is the ‘how we know’ the work of art. I am proposing that the critique of the work, this very space of analysis is an epistemological route to it. However, the effort is not focused on deciphering the work. Krauss: ‘We tend to think that the act of finding out what something is like means that we give it a shape, propose for it a model or an image that will organize what seems on the surface merely an incoherent array of phenomena.’3 Here, the effort is not placed in creating written equivalences of the respective works of art. I am suggesting that the attempt to translate differs from the process of defining. In addition, this exercise in translation embraces the cracks that it entails. It draws upon what Žižek calls the ‘Parallax Gap’: the space between two different viewpoints that reach no synthesis4. Here I take as paradigmatic that the paradigm shifts, slips; and that one paradigm does not necessarily replace 2

Verhagen, Marcus, ‘Nomadism’, Art Monthly, 300, October, 2006, p.10

Krauss, Rosalind, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1981, p.245

See Žižek, Slavoj, op. cit.

the other. This is where the ‘method’ here employed differs from the rational method, or epistemics for that matter. This journey employs a map, which is not a neutral or objective one, each section looks at boat through the works and vice versa. Thus the starting point is never singular. It is only the contact of one with the other that fills the page. Boat is an engineered object: it has shape, but through a ‘parallax’ analysis this study aims to see this shape shift. To begin I take the work of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous and his tragic journey across the Atlantic: this is boat when it doesn’t arrive, but it nevertheless travels. This is a preamble to discuss boat when it is not navigating but anchored: the work as physically hinged to its spatial context. Here I look at Dark Wave 2006 by Gabriel Orozco and Tilted Arc 1981-1989 by Richard Serra. Following this I consider the movement of images and movement in images as a drifting stage of boat. The works are Richard Serra’s, Hand Catching Led and Fiona Tan’s Rain 2003. Finally, I discuss Gabriel Orozco’s Yielding Stone 1992, which places boat at sea again and provokes the discussion regarding the delimited and moving space, as well as the nomadic.

Boat: ‘The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates’5

Figure 1 Bas Jan Ader In Search of the Miraculous, Invitation card, Claire Copley Gallery 1973

In Search of the Miraculous 1973-75: Bas Jan Ader walks from the Hollywood hills to the Pacific Ocean, at night, in Los Angeles, and documents this walk with photographs. He then writes the lyrics of a 1957 love pop song by the Coasters, line by line, as if to ‘subtitle’ each photograph. His students sing traditional shanties and the recording plays in the gallery where the photographs are exhibited. And then to complete it: he crosses the Atlantic from Cape Cod on a one-man yacht called Ocean Wave.6

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, in Foucault, info www.foucault.info August

2006 6

I am indebted to Jan Verwoert for his insightful and factual analysis of Bas Jan Ader work in

Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, Afterall Books, London, 2006.

Figure 2 Bas Jan Ader Part sang by Aderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s students for In Search of the Miraculous (Published in Art & Project bulletin no.89, in association with Claire Copley Gallery) 1975

This is a constellation of events, photographic and video documents. It is a search for the extraterrestrial on Earth, the reaching out for a dream, a kind of romantic quest. The method employed is the reification of the sublime by using the banal, possibly most apparent in the Los Angeles walk. A walk at

night is simply a walk at night, nothing grand about its enactment: neutral everyday clothes. The song by the Coasters resonates as something that comes out of the radio in the home: nothing grand. There remains however a coded idealised nostalgia: the nostalgia implied in using an old pop song about the search for ideal love, and the use of black and white photographs. The received ideas also, of the solitary wanderer, the quintessential European romantic, the outsider: daydreaming. Don Quixote de la Mancha.7

Figure 3 Bas Jan Ader In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles) Detail from series of 18 black and white photographs 1973

Here is the dream as materialised. The realisation of the Utopian, that which in Of Other Spaces Michel Foucault chooses to call ‘Heterotopias’: Places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real

See Verwoert, Jan, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, Afterall Books, London,

2006.

sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality... These places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.8 Jan Ader worked during the climax of Conceptual Art, a time when the idea as opposed to form was admitted to critical art practice. In his Sentences on Conceptual Art Sol LeWitt wrote: ‘Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.’9 The idea occupies a similar ground to Utopias: ‘sites with no real place.’ 10 In Search of the Miraculous is an attempt to materialise the idea. This is not unique to Ader’s practice. The idea also takes material form in the performance works by the Vienna Aktionists and Fluxus, and the sculptural work of Lawrence Weiner. A fine example is Sol LeWitt’s 122 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes. To quote Rosalind Krauss: ‘For almost no writer who deals with LeWitt is there any question that these geometric emblems are the illustration of Mind, the demonstration of rationalism itself.’’11 The work may continue to be a proposal, but it becomes obvious that it has found a shape of sorts, as I am able to speak about it. This where the idea takes form: as the live performance, cut out letters on the wall, or the document for that matter. This form is my point of reference, not the idea. These works become sites in themselves and to extend Foucault’s suggestion: they are heterotopian sites. The material attempt to give form to the idea.

Michel Foucault, op. cit.

Sol LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ in

www.erg.be/multimedialab/doc/citations/sol_lewitt_sentences.pdf October 2006 10

Michel Foucault, op. cit.

Krauss Rosalind, LeWitt in Progress, first published in 1977, reprinted in The Originality of

the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1986, p. 246

Figure 4 Sol LeWitt 122 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes 1974

Ader’s work was in some respects a critique of pure rationalism, however. He does this through the incorporation of sentiment and tragedy. In Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, Jan Verwoert speaks of Ader’s work as the ‘making of scenes’12. The scene of crossing the Atlantic on his own on a little boat, for instance. He seems to be asking the immensity of the sea existential questions. This could be seen as the making of an unjustified drama and an excess, but only for the artist himself. And it is as if by putting the ideal to test, by doing it ‘for real’, by it not simply being a mind game, that Bas Jan Ader brings it down and makes it an actual ‘space’. In Search of the Miraculous (boat) forgets about the desire to keep the idea for a place of purity. It takes the dream and puts it to test within the world; it engineers it with the human body. This reminds me of Bataille again, of his emphasis on the horizontal and the low. It could appear as an irony that I 12

See Verwoert, Jan, op. cit.

should be able to think about low Bataille when I am talking about the miraculous. But the miraculous can only happen on the lowness of the sea or earth. If it happens elsewhere then it is something else, not a miracle. Michel Foucault: The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic developmentâ&#x20AC;Ś but it has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination13

Michel Foucault, op. cit.

Boat:

Figure 5 Gabriel Orozco Dark Wave 2006

Dark Wave 2006: Three sets of wires fix the monumental cast of a whaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skeleton to the ceiling of the new White Cube gallery in Mason Yard, London. This gargantuan structure pierces the cleanliness of the freshly painted downstairs gallery. It cuts through space, much like ink on a page, much like a whale jumping out of the water, or an anchor in the sand. Boat as a stain in the immensity of the sea. It appears to float or fly, but it becomes impossible to ignore the prominence of the armature that holds it in place. The skeletonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s structural integrity and spatial presence is determined by its relationship with the ceiling, which is physically established by the engineered structure.

Figure 6 Gabriel Orozco Dark Wave (detail) 2006

The anchor provides the boat with the possibility of stopping. The possibility of stopping changes its relationship to the sea. 17

Figure 7 Gabriel Orozco Dark Wave (detail) 2006

The armature momentarily interrupts the neutrality of the White Cube. It also punctuates the suspension of belief that would make the viewer consider the whaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skeleton to be freely floating. It is less that this metallic structure stops the whale from being a whale than the fact that it acts as a Brechtian device to remind us of where we are in relation to it. There is an

implied temporality in the encounter with Dark Wave, this is partly related to its scale: it takes some time to walk around it, through it and under it. There are also different voices that speak to the viewer at different times. The seabed is part of boat when it is anchored. The metal structure acts differently to the plinth. Instead of separating the object from its context, it makes the context inherent to the work. Although the skeleton is still defined by its form, the form of the gallery is added to it and it is added to the form of the gallery. The limits of what it is that constitutes the work are thus blurred: where it ends is undetermined. There is a similarity between the plinth and these wires, namely the function that they have to elevate the sculptural object. The plinth is arguably part of the neutrality of the white cube, there but not to be seen. It comes up to meet the work and does not admit of the gap between the gallery and the work. The metal structure, on the other hand, is contingent on the work and thus part of it (the decision to show the work in this way being fundamental to our experience of it), yet is manifestly an expression of the gap between the piece and the space. The gallery:The harbour. Stillness allows for detailed observation of the object: The structure of a whale’s skeleton as marked by the natural world. There are indentations within the ‘bone’: the skeleton is a fossil. The original bones that it was cast from were buried in sand on a beach in Southern Spain for over two decades14. According to the artist’s assistant it is possible to identify the reason for the whale’s death from a dent on its skull15. Its stay on the beach has also left several marks on the bone, indentations: stopping allows for such events to occur, it allows for fossilization. The prints made by the real on the 14

Hoare, Philip,‘Tatooed Leviathan: Gabriel Orozco’s Inscribed Andalucian Whale’, Modern

Painters, October, 2006, p.72 15

Ibid, p.74

real are also evidence of time passing, of one thing touching the other for a long time. It is a document of the phenomenon that makes two things press against each other and stay together until one disappears and allows for its image to become visible on the other. There is a trace of its existence, an evidence of its previous presence and current absence. Casting is a copy of the object, a repetition of an event, an extension of the fossil. The mould freezes the object and is able to then reproduce it. Casting replicates the object’s volume; they have a 1:1 relationship. This cloning however, is not of a living creature but of inert skeletal matter. The bone is, as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh puts it, a readymade and Gabriel Orozco further teases it as being a readydead16. Dark Wave, is as much of Orozco’s practice, a game with the detritus of the world. He has also used calcium carbonate, which is an active component of bone furthering the relationship between the cast and the illusion of the real.

The casting of the bone can only occur when the whale has become still. This is also the case for the graphite drawings on the bone, which could not have been performed on the original skeleton. After so many years buried in the sand, the skeleton became too fragile to undergo further interventions. Contrary to the cast, the drawings are not indexical. They are intricate and predominantly circular geometric patterns. These patterns have more of the ritualistic qualities of tribal drawing on skin than a systematic Lewittian drawing. However, it soon becomes evident that the drawings are rigorous and that they describe what Orozco has called the ‘topography of the object’17. Several pivotal points are taken along the extension of the spine, head and ribcage to form concentric circles that overlap. It appears as if an imaginary sea has inscribed the whale. The question of the fossil appears again, because here the drawn mark on the bone is evidently not only a result

See Benjamin, Buchloh interviews Gabriel Orozco in New York in Orozco, Gabriel, Clinton

is Innocent, Les Musees de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 1998, p.27-165 17

Hoare, Philip, op. cit., p.72

of mapping of the pattern offered by the bone, but also a result of the mind as mediated by the hand. The relationship here established is not that of the real on the real as with the fossil, but the idea on the real. Drawing is in this case not an index of the world, but an attempt to translate that which resides in the mind. There is a connection here with Russian Constructivism: ‘For the Russians the logic of construction, with its symmetrical building outward from revealed centres, was a way of presenting visually the creative power of thought, a mediation on the growth and development of Idea’18. However, it is key to clarify that the surface is not a smooth, white page. It is not a blank canvas. The surface is not neutral; it is already ‘spoiled’, that is to say, marked. The idea has already taken into account, and been ‘biased’ by, the geography and conditions of its territory; it adapts but also plays. Although the drawings appear not to form an integral part of the object (and unlike the calcium carbonate they could be erased from the surface they occupy) at a closer inspection it is evident that the graphite has actually penetrated the porous surface. The drawing on the cast bone is not only a process of adaptation, it is also an active transformation of this skeleton that now dwells between being an object and being an image; an object that contains both the real and a translation of the imagined. The whale becomes a point of collision between idealism and rationalism in the material, or as Benjamin Buchloh puts it: the reification of the cosmic.19 Here the question of the beautification of the natural arises. It is as if the bone and the marks on it are not enough. It is such a human form of proceeding, to decorate, to make beautiful things more beautiful. It is as though the mark of nature were not enough, as though the reproduction of the

Krauss, Rosalind, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1981, p.253

See Buchloh, H.D. Benjamin, Cosmic Reification: Gabriel Orozco’s Photographs, in Orozco

Gabriel, Gabriel Orozco, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2004

natural were not enough. It is as if the artist had to touch the object, follow its shape, play with it and behind this act there was a trace left: an excess.

Figure 8 Richard Serra Tilted Arc 1979-1989

Tilted Arc 1979-1989: Pedestrians walk around the protuberance in New York’s Federal Plaza: A protuberance that will no longer be found in this, or any other location. Tilted Arc’s presence in the plaza was controversial: a campaign for its removal was instigated by Edward D. Re, Chief Judge at the Court of International Trade (located at 1 Federal Plaza) and Richard Diamond, the regional administrator of the city’s General Services Administration at the time20. Richard Serra stated that this work ‘was conceived from the start as a site-specific sculpture and was not meant to be ‘site-adjusted’.21 He made it clear that the relocation of the work would be its 20

See Buskirk, Martha, Weyengraf-Serra, Clara. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents,

MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991. 21

Ibid, p.11

destruction22. A Public Hearing, which the artist qualified as manipulated23, took place in March 1985. Its outcome favoured Tilted Arc’s removal and thus: it was destroyed. Serra sought total stillness for the piece. He wrote about its installation as an anchorage ‘into the existing steel-and-concrete substructure of the plaza’24 In the photographic documents it is evident that the object is disruptive not only of the architectural and aesthetic layout of the site but also of what happens on it. Tilted Arc interrupts the utterance of the Plaza’s speech. A speech formed by human traffic. It enquires, it protests against the normal happening of things. Its presence is incongruous; there is not a point at which it blends in with the space around it. It is made of steel: incredibly solid matter. Although there is movement at an atomic level, steel reveals itself to the passer-by as stationary. This produces, together with its scale, an unapologetic presence in the heart of New York’s Federal Plaza. Boat as a stain in the immensity of the sea. Tilted Arc may be an antonym of Boat. It was conceived to be immobile. It was made for one place and one place only: ‘The specificity of site-orientated works means that they are conceived for, dependent upon, and inseparable from their locations… Based on the interdependence of work and site, site-specific works address their context, entering into a dialogue with their surroundings’25 Site-specificity is a reaction to the problem inherent in the autonomous, hermetic and mobile modernist sculptural practices. The stillness and permanence of Tilted Arc goes against the dynamics of the exchangeable commodity and the marketable product.

Ibid, p.6 Ibid, p.15 24 Ibid, p.4 25 Ibid, p.12 23

This steel curve26 as Serra called it, may not have been intended to move but it was aware of the movement around it. Furthermore, its marked presence must have made pedestrians aware of their travelling from one part of the plaza to the other. The context is no longer neutral, its scale and architectural features are made evident by this curve that sticks out, that, as seen in the photographic document, goes against the other curves of the plaza. It is one could say para-architectonic. Serra: …There are sites where it is obvious that an artwork is being subordinated to/ accommodated to/ adapted to/ subservient to/ useful to…. In such cases it is necessary to work in opposition to the constraints of the context, so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of the questionable ideologies and political power. I am not interested in art as affirmation or complicity.27 It becomes evident that Tilted Arc works in opposition. As stated above it questions its surroundings. In order to do this it has to retain a degree of autonomy. It is a space within a space. Additionally, this work is not indexical and was not made with materials that already exist in the Plaza. This was unlike many site-specific land works, that changed the order of already existing elements in the site, moving things around but not adding to the area materially. Tilted Arc implied not only a change in the order of things but also the addition of a foreign body to this context. The steel on the Plaza acts in a similar form to the graphite on the cast of the whale. This add-on was ‘anchored’28 after having been made somewhere other than the site of installation. The artist chose for it to stop in this square. It is thus that, much like the whale’s skeleton, the boundaries of what constitutes the work begin to blur. Tilted Arc is full of points of collision. Serra worked within minimalist concerns, which divorced sculpture from being a metaphorical vehicle of

See Ibid Ibid, p.13 28 Ibid, p.4 27

expression for the ‘private, inner self’29: ‘Serra’s aim is to defeat the very idea of this idealism or this timelessness, and to make the sculpture visibly dependant on each passing moment for its very existence.’30 At present Tilted Arc does not exist without the Plaza but the Plaza exists without the steel curve. However, it is inevitable that for those who learn about this sculpture, Federal Plaza will always be linked to it. Here the document acts as the structure that does move from one place to the other and enables debate and criticism to happen. The photographic document below evidences a moment where the object goes and the Plaza still hasn’t returned to its ‘normal’ state. The plaza becomes fossilized, if only temporarily. The ‘add-on’ has left a mark. And the site has marked the ‘add-on’.

Krauss, Rosalind, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1981, p.269

Ibid

Figure 9 Thomson Architectural Photographs View of Federal Plaza after the removal of Tilted Arc 1989

When boat moves we see behind it the expansion of ocean marked for some fractions of time. Anchoring boat is sometimes impossible.

In contrast to this notion of the statue as a frozen, immobilized body, cinema was at the beginning of the “moving image,” a dead image which miraculously comes alive – therein lies its spectral quality. What lurks in the background is the dialectical paradox of the phenomenology of our perception: the immobility of a statue is implicitly conceived as the state of a living being frozen into immobility…; while the moving image is a dead immobile object which magically comes alive – in both cases, the barrier which separates the living from the dead is transgressed. Cinema is a “moving image”, the continuum of dead images which give the impression of life by running at the proper speed; the dead image is a ‘still,’ a “freeze-frame” –that is a stiffened movement… the animate and the inanimate seem to presuppose each other. They are held within a relation of reciprocal presupposition. What we have here, then are two models which are in fact dialectically related31 Boat:

Figure 10 Richard Serra Hand Catching Lead (stills) 1971 31

Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, New York and London, 1997, p.87 cited in

Leach, Neil, Camouflage, MIT press, Massachusetts, 2006, pp.165-166

Hand Catching Lead, 1971 is a fragment that is composed of fragments. A film that is less tautological than it is elliptical: it is more concise than it is redundant speech. It is so minimal that it almost refuses semantic deconstruction. A Barthian denotative analysis32 of the image is negligent: A hand and part of a forearm that come in from the right fill the space as defined by the cinematic frame. The hand attempts to catch the pieces of metal that fall from the top left of the image. Sometimes it succeeds and very soon after it lets go of the metal. Sometimes it does not catch the metal. The film is black and white and three and a half minutes long. It is possible to consider its will to silence, its refusal of speech and of the literary, as well as its resistance to interpretation. I could focus the connotative on it being a film about the formalist enquires on the sculptural process which concerned Serra’s practice; and which he takes a step further when, as Benjamin H.D. Buchloh proposes, he moves it from the spatial to the spatio-temporal continuum: If the temporal field as a mode of experience is linked in this way with the spatial field of perception – and once this is recognized to be constitutive both of the plastic phenomenon and of its perception – the technical formal necessity of the step from process sculpture to sculptural film becomes evident, since the perception of a spatial-temporal field is the very mode of film, and the viewer’s simultaneous observation can be seen to be uniquely appropriate to its continuity.33 Connotatively, I could also connect this move towards film to the political ideas of artists like Serra, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, amongst many others, who believed in the need for the dematerialisation of sculpture and the de-commodification of the art object. However, Hand Catching Lead is a visually striking and, I would even dare say, seductive work. Although it is austere in its means and non-

See Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, ed. Heath, Stephen, Fontana Press, 1977

Buchloh, Benjamin, H.D., Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra in

Foster, Hal, Richard Serra, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2000, p.13

narrative, the action that the hand carries out is agitating in its physicality and involving even though nothing really happens. It is almost as though one had arrived in the middle of it all. It is an extract from a modern dance piece. A performance in front of the camera. And it is as a result of the use of the camera that the viewer experiences movement and object minimalised: cut out. ‘The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea’34 Not only is the action fragmented, so is the object. The Barthian analysis, which looks at the photographic image as having different voices,35 is appropriate here. I want to focus on the voice of the two black lines at the bottom and top of the image, which act as reminders of the division between every single photogram on celluloid. They emphasize the cropping and squaring that is in front of us. They highlight the image as a division, a fragment of something that exists externally. Hand Catching Lead is less elimination than it is a selection of what surrounds it. The arm being cut is a reminder of the fact that there is ‘the rest’ which, whilst we look at ‘this’, still exists, even if it is not contained within the image. By fragmenting the body and only showing the part that carries out the action there is a call for the erotic. The hand becomes sexualised. Furthermore, this fragmentation permits dilution of expressivity. This film is very different to the films of Jackson Pollock painting: we don’t see the artist working; all we see is an action. Buchloh: On the one hand, the reduction of the cinematographic segment, showing, for example, only the hand and arm of a person as the veritable ‘actors’ of the film, points to the essential element of the 34

Michel, Foucault, op. cit.

See Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000

process to be visually represented. On the other hand, defining the segment according to Ernst Mach’s diagram of the visual field, it delimits the subject’s boundaries of self-perception. Therefore no subject-object relationship is established between viewer and actor; the viewer experiences the bodily activities in an optical frame that remains within the limits of his own self-perception, which seems extended by the filmic image. Fragmentation here means the deliberate abolition of the separation between subjective perception and objective representation. From this abolition, however, results the elimination of any narrative or dramatic quality in the representation of a sequence of actions, reducing it to a self-referential activity, a self-evident representative function without any “meaning’’ whatsoever36 Self- perception is waiting to happen as soon as the film begins. This is the action of the Lacanian gaze. This is what happens when we are in front of this reflective object, that allows for our perception to bounce back towards us. The image is formed in our eye, and not only is it in us but we are in it: ‘Lacan mortifies this subject in the famous anecdote of the sardine can that, afloat on the sea and aglint in the sun seems to look at the young Lacan in the fishing boat “at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated” Thus seen as (s)he sees, pictured as (s)he pictures, the Lacanian subject is fixed in a double position, and this leads Lacan to superimpose on the usual cone of vision that emanates from the subject another cone that emanates from the object, at the point of light, which he calls the gaze’37 Hand Catching Lead is an open vessel but it is not an empty one. Whenever exposed to light celluloid is marked by the world. Here the world is an orchestrated act, with carefully chosen objects. Although not emotionally overpowering or manipulative, this action and orchestration still conditions what the subject reflects back. It is not simply a white page to be filled with the viewer’s emotions. It is not a matter of the object being passive and the subject being active. They are both activated.

Buchloh, Benjamin, H.D., Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra in

Foster, Hal, Richard Serra, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2000, p.14 37

Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real, MIT press, Massachusetts, p.139

Hand Catching Lead provides a stained surface, fossilized by light. It is a tattooed body that contains something that happened in the past. It is an engineered object with a function, however directionless, storyless or unspecific. This film is a floating piece of space. An intermittent place. It is intermittent movement through materiality. This is boat adrift. Not stationary and not purposefully moving. Allowing for light to bounce off it at the same time as it absorbs it. Drifting is a period of time when boat has no destination, no sails and no anchor; it is not rooted or uprooted. Boat may drift for a short or a long time, but either way this is a period of transition, a division of time. Hand Catching Lead is movement that negates narration, and thus direction. It is agitated drifting, not at ease with moving or stopping. It is a fragment of time.

Figure 11 Fiona Tan Rain (detail) 2003

Figure 12 Fiona Tan Rain (installation view) 2003

Rain 2003: Somewhere between the still and the moving is Rain a video installation by Fiona Tan. It is still moving:moving still. Still: although there is a lot of action the image is almost the same throughout. Moving: there is a downpour occurring in it and a dog that wanders in and out of the frame. These two elements work as evidence of time passing. One thing occurring after the other. It is a story that has no end and no beginning, it is a still story. Like Hand Catching Lead we are placed in the middle of it all. There is no introduction and no conclusion. We are in the middle of the ocean. No anchor and no sail. Not moving image and not still image but drifting image. There are two identical blue buckets one next to the other and two identical monitors one above the other. It is repetition where, as Donald Judd put it in 1964 â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The order is not rationalistic and underlying, but it is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;38 According to Krauss this sameness results in a ruling out of an official meaning as imposed by the artist.39 This is a remainder of DADAist poetry. In addition, Rain follows the Duchampian spirit of the readymade. 38

Krauss, Rosalind, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1981, p.244

Ibid

Rain could be a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;found imageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, it may be that the artist placed the two blue buckets one next to the other by the doorstep, but it is also as likely that someone else did; and that the buckets are there to fulfil the purpose of collecting rainwater. In either case, the intervention of the artist becomes more of an orchestration of the already existing elements. Elements that like the bucket are mass-produced and could not be said to be an expression of the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inner-self. Much as in Hand Catching Lead, we are being gazed at as much as we are gazing. The surroundings are fragmented which allows for the piece not to be read as a work about this specific place. Its name does not matter. All we know is that it is a place where it rains. I will speak about the rain later. I want to focus on this place for a moment and to remember that it is reproduced and repeated and that in being so, it loses its uniqueness. This place is in focus but it is not elevated or sanctified. It is a fragment of the everyday, which is not amplified and beautified. At the same time it stays there, where it is, on the floor. We see it from a single perspective: our gaze is directed towards this fragment where the natural phenomenon meets the man-made low. It is the dog that makes a fissure in the image; it acts as the Barthian Punctum40 that takes the image somewhere else. It is most likely that the appearance of the dog is much more of a coincidence than the buckets, but it is the element that opens up the image. The animal appears as a wandering creature both unperturbed by the presence of a camera and by the relentlessness of the rain. This dog incites the appearance of yet another timeline. Drifting is indifferent movement that happens outside of durational preoccupations.

See Barthes Roland, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000

Rain is a phenomenon, which much like the sea cannot be controlled. It will last as long as it will last and it will move in whatever direction it will move. It will be a storm or a drizzle. Rain is infinite, the buckets are there to measure it, but in Rain their inability to catch it all is explicit. So much water falls outside of them. The buckets are fragments within a fragment. Rain is also point of collision between the controlled environment and the external and uncontrollable. It is also a point of encounter between the object and the image. Hand Catching Lead was a move towards the dematerialisation of sculpture; Rain evidences a concern with the image becoming an object through the incorporation of the television monitors into what forms the work. Thus time becomes space too, or another fraction of it. Drifting becomes a place of collision of dimensions, which are usually seen as dialectically opposed: Still time, Moving time, Space and Time, Object and Subject. Collision does not imply their fusion. It implies that, although touching, there is still space between them; this is what Žižek designates as the Parallax Gap.’41 However, here there is no need for a shift in perspective to create a gap, repetition performs this function. Serra speaks about site-specific works which, …unlike modernist works that give the illusion of being autonomous from their surroundings, and which function critically only in relation to the language of their own medium, site-specific works emphasize the comparison between two separate languages and can therefore use the language of one to criticize the other.42 I would like to extend Serra’s concept of site by proposing -with Boat as a premise- that the site (the sea) is not static and it moves and so do the continents and the tectonic plates. This movement is not smooth; it is a tremor that leaves a mark. Drifting boat is a point of collision where immensity is local 41

See Žižek, Slavoj, The Parallax View, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2006

See Buskirk, Martha, Weyengraf-Serra Clara, op. cit, p.12

but also the local is immense43. It is the fractioning in time that allows us to perceive these works as momentarily there, with the possibility to challenge themselves and to challenge the site, but only if they were engineered to do so. There exists the nomadic absolute, as a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space44 in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage, which in nomad art merges in its manifestation. Here the absolute is local, precisely because place is not delimited.45 Boat:

Figure 13 Gabriel Orozco Yielding Stone 1992

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari expose the tensions between what they term

Smooth Space and Striated Space. Smooth Space is the space of haptic or close/tactile vision and Striated Space is optical, distant vision. These spaces communicate with each other and constantly become the other. At present they mostly exist in the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence. The writers specify however, that these transitions and interactions are not symmetrical and for this reason they propose different models in which different aspects of the spaces can be observed and understood. These are the Technological Model, The Maritime Model, The Mathematical Model and the Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art. 45

Deleuze, Guilles, Guattari, FĂŠlix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

Continuum, London, 2004, p.545.

Yielding Stone 1992 presents itself as something that has fallen from space. It is an Unidentified Rolling Object —U.R.O. Apart from being a large ball of plasticine, it appears to be nothing else: only its title. It does not so much invite optical but haptic contact; that is to say, touching with the eye: close, tactile visual contact. This is because it refuses to be an image: it seems to simply be. This is boat when it has been engineered to roll or rather to be rolled. It has to be driven. It is not the elements that make it travel but the engineer: the maker, the artist. Sisyphus? Christ? Or perhaps just the man playing with an extension of himself, the sailor with the boat, the pilot with the plane; this prosthetic which allows him to do what his body alone could not. Boat is out at sea, navigating. When boat navigates, the journey becomes inherent to its being. It is not only mass, it is also movement, and not only its own movement but the movement of the sea. This nomadic object is also metamorphic. To consider this plasticine ball as a space-ship on earth, the landed meteor, cosmological matter that has been taken by gravity, is to see it as the elevated (the ideal, the sublime, the otherworldly, the universe) that has fallen. This sphere – essentially matter and form – is dented by the marked space of the city and penetrated by its debris. In his analysis of Orozco’s use of circles and spheres, Benjamin Buchloh notes that throughout the history of art these forms have been rejected; because they are impenetrable: The hermetic and perfect form of the circle was apparently perceived for the longest times as a blockage to formal invention and artistic creativity. Its form is to parthenogenic, there is an

excess of self enclosure that seems to exclude artistic interventions of any kind.46 Buchloh moves on to see the circle as47 …a radically alternate model (to the rectangle, the square and the stereometrically corresponding forms) of spatial organisation [that] dialectically abolishes perspectival directionality; it equates horizontality and verticality… The almost autistic form of the circle is non-linear and lends itself neither to the task of measuring and quantificatory delineation, not to the task of temporal tracing48 This ball of ‘pure’ matter, this form par excellence is disturbed by the rolling action. It is both the trajectory and the physical contact that provoke the piece’s constant metamorphosis, the penetration of its formal limits and the loss of its material purity. It is in this way that it gives itself up to the conditions of the space where it finds itself.

Figure 14 Gabriel Orozco Yielding Stone (detail) 1992

See Buchloh, H.D. Benjamin, Cosmic Reification: Gabriel Orozco’s Photographs, in Orozco

Gabriel, Gabriel Orozco, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2004, p.94 47

I believe that this also applies to the sphere, which is the stereometrical form of the circle.

Buchloh, H.D. Benjamin, Cosmic Reification: Gabriel Orozco’s Photographs, in Orozco

Gabriel, Gabriel Orozco, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2004, p. 94

This does not imply that Yielding Stone is inherently bound to a specific location. It is however, bound to the road and the floor. There are elements of the low in this work: ‘Its domain is the sprawl, it addresses itself to horizontality much more than to history.’49 Horizontality calls back Georges Bataille’s voice, the idea of the Formless50 with its interest in the sublime touching the low (declasser51) and the pairing of the universe with a ‘gob of spittle or an earthworm’52. There is additionally, the lowness of plasticine as an art material, more often found during children’s play. Plasticine is unstable form: it is a medium that is vulnerable and that is constantly changing53, even if untouched, it turns harder in the cold and oilier in the heat. This is not an object being dependant on the site, but it is the site becoming part of the object and the object being site itself. The object is a place without a place, or an object-specific site one could say. It does not bring with it nostalgia for locality either. It moves much like the business traveller, it is rolled in Monterrey and then in Manhattan as facilitated by the globalised economy. This movement is not fluid, however. Yielding Stone is more a migrant than ‘a liquid modern’, to paraphrase Marcus Verhagen in his 49

Criqui, Jean-Pierre,‘Like a Rolling Stone: Gabriel Orozco‘, Art Forum, New York, April,1996,

p.91 50

In Bataille’s Critical Dictionary the entry for Formless (translated into English from the

French Informe) is as follows: FORMLESS.—A dictionary would begin as of the moment when it no longer provided the meaning of words but their tasks. In this way formless is not only an adjective having such and such meaning, but a term serving to declassify (declasser), requiring in general that everything should have a form. What it designates does not, in any sense whatever possess rights, and everywhere gets crushed like a spider or an earthworm. For academics to be satisfied, it would be necessary, in effect for the universe to take on a form. The whole of philosophy has no other aim; it is a question of fitting what exists into a frockcoat, a mathematical frock-coat. To affirm on the contrary that the universe resembles nothing at all and is only formless, amounts to saying that the universe is something akin to a spider or a gob of spittle.’ Bataille, Georges et al, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, trans. Iain White, Atlas Press, London, 1995, pp.51-52 51

See Ibid

Ibid, p.52

Benjamin Buchloh interviews Gabriel Orozco in New York in Orozco, Gabriel, Clinton is

Innocent, Les Musees the la Ville the Paris, Paris, 1998, p.31

article ‘Nomadism’: Yielding Stone ‘presents travel as a tissue of interruptions.’54 The relationship between the traveller and the place travelled, the migrant and the land, is obviously not frictionless. The object is marked by the limits of place, marked by its striations, by its divisions. There is paradox here, as it could be said that the rolling action (as performed by the artist) not only provokes transformation but re-formation of the spherical shape. Had a different action been persistent enough the sphere could have turned into more of a disk, or it could have disintegrated during this journey.

See Verhagen, Marcus, op. cit., p.10

Figure 15 Gabriel Orozco Photo opportunity with Yielding Stone 1992

Boat remains a delimited space. Its giving itself up to the sea does not imply drowning. Here, there is a dialogue created between the hermetic modernist object and the location-bound site-specific work. This ball of plasticine is a container of events and leftovers of the city, one could say that it contains the site. In spite of this, it remains maybe not so much hermetic (as the material that it is made of allows for penetrability) but differentiated and mobile: nomadic. Its arrival on earth could be seen as a stop, but its continuous change in position is apparent. Even the still image: the photographic document (which does to light what gravity does to objects) evidences that regardless of this fall, this stone still moves. It does so bound to the earth, but it does so. It is also possible to understand these photographic documents of the journey not as frozen movement but as fragments of movement. They are the object as displaced again and again. Moved from one plane to the other. Not (uni-)formed but serially de-formed. The arrival in the gallery after its journey could be seen as a photograph in time or simply navigation in a different dimension: yet another space with yet different travelling conditions: Even after it was apparently ‘finished’ and left in the exhibition space, the lump of plasticine was still active as a map open to events. People were drawn to feel the material, to mark their fingerprints and push on the surface. And even if the exhibition place was closed, the ball was still deforming by the very force of gravity, so that the lump was collapsing on itself.55 Yielding Stone is a performance: it is dance. There is a relationship with Deborah Hay’s performance in 1976. Where she, a dancer, explains to her audience that instead of dancing, she wished to talk… The aspiration to dance to which she had come, was to be in touch with the movement of every cell in her body; that, and the

Gonzalez Virgen, Miguel, Hutchinson, John, Of Games, The Infinite and Worlds: The Work

of Gabriel Orozco, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2003, p.97

one her audience was witnessing: as a dancer, to have recourse to speech.56 Her refraining from usual routines does not stop movement. Movement occurs in any case, even when the dancer chooses to stand still, even when the Yielding Stone enters the exhibition space and the gallery is closed. Plasticine is a material that allows for this game to become visible. Yielding Stone allows for instability to occur. It is a place of instability. Movement is unstable; it is with movement that difference occurs, where collisions between the marked and the unmarked happen. Here I am thinking of Deleuzeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Guattariâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Smooth and Striated spaces passing the other, in contact with each other: crashing. What occurs is the engendering of an earthquake. The earth moving the earth, pushing it, making it collide against itself, fragment against fragment, things moving within this rolling ball. This is the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shifting crust: tectonic movement. The sea moves boat. Boat moves the sea. This earth, this floor is immense. We see the marks that the exterior leaves on the sphere; they are large, they cover its diameter several times. The straight lines of drain grates form circles on it. Not only does it collect but it also transforms the shapes that it encounters. The marks are not objective and neutral documentation of the drain grates, these indexical marks are predetermined by the topography of the object.

Krauss, Rosalind E, Notes on the Index: Part 2, first published in 1977, reprinted in Krauss,

Rosalind E, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT press, Massachusetts, 1985, p.210

Figure 16 Gabriel Orozco Yielding Stone 1992

Boat:The Body 132.2 pounds of plasticine: the equivalent of the artist’s weight in 1992. Boat:TheBody. A body that is inorganic and is ‘industrially produced, completely artificial and that’s why it is called stone, because it’s not, it’s a fake stone. It’s pure dust and oil.’ 57 It is a fake body that does not comprise an organism. A Body without Organs58, that allows for things to happen that could not happen in our body full of organs: all this rolling and stone-eating, debris-eating. A body that is not organised, it swallows everywhere and it

Benjamin Buchloh interviews Gabriel Orozco in New York in Orozco, Gabriel, Clinton is

Innocent, Les Musees the la Ville the Paris, Paris, 1998, p.65 58

See Deleuze, Guilles, Guattari, Félix, op. cit.

excretes everywhere59. This acquiescent and yielding stone, allows for a different kind of play to occur, that could not for instance happen in Deborah Hay’s performance. This body is not only a body. Some how Yielding Stone acts as interlocutor between body and earth as if it was both; I have also called it a site, a container, a stone, a fake stone, a meteor, the universe, a lump, a nothing, the migrant, the travelling businessman, a dancer and a dance. This thing is many. Here I am confronted with the polysemiotic field, the field of multiplicity of meaning. However, I have to return to Žižek to realise that this thing that is many is between two: the artist and the site. Thus, I conclude with Yielding Stone as a gap where the difference between these two takes place, allowing for several interactions to happen. I see Yielding Stone as a ‘Parallax Gap’. Not two becoming one in synthesis, or one becoming itself with process, but a place of difference, a place where things collide not where they blend.

Ibid

Return Or simply turn: The solid status of these pages seems to become liquid as soon as I put boat on them. As soon as I try to gather it within the limits of the rectangle, it slips. The works of art here cited refuse to be contained. However, it is in these pages that I have been able to construct ideas in relation to the boat that Michel Foucault speaks about. In this critical analysis the ontology of boat has shifted. The naval model reveals the process of construction of meaning and knowledge as something that fluctuates and is unstable. It is this instability and this uncertainty that keeps us looking. Carefully. It does not allow for the imagination to stop. The effort has been made to show that wanting to get to know something does not imply a need to totalise it. This is clearly not the totality of boat, this is not all there is to it: these are fragments. There are not an infinite number of places where we can stand and look at it but there are certainly many more. I have looked at boat from six different stances. These places have revealed a great range of possibilities for how to understand this one thing. The conditions that Rain provides are very different to those provided by In Search of the Miraculous. These differences are not simply contrasting opinions, the six works have provided already established markers which condition the way in which we look at boat. Thus, the discrepancies are not simply a result of the imagination, but a result of an encounter between the imagination and what is already there: to borrow Orozcoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words, the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;topographyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; offered by the works. Trying to look at one thing from such different positions results in a revelation of contradictions: for instance, Tilted Arc was made to be permanently placed in a single location and I find a way to designate it as boat, just as I do with the archetypical nomadic work: Yielding Stone. This is possible not only because boat is a cathartic model, where paradoxes and seemingly impossible quests take place; but also because these sculptures, films and events, although already constructed, are 45

also always incomplete, waiting —as Duchamp puts it— ‘[to] be refined as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator.’60 The device boat has given a new line of sight to look at the works. I have employed a process of translation, which is biased towards this singular concept. What is more, the translation has relied on this bias, which is explicit, and it is here that my voice becomes obvious: this is the voice of the author/spectator. This process makes use of this voice that orchestrates and brings together these translations, theories and insights about works of art. The result is not conclusive but open-ended. This open end behaves in a similar way to Serra’s Hand Catching Led: it wants as much as it gives. This singular concept has brought to light emphatic points of noncorrespondence amongst and within the works. These differences are never reconciled and it has not been the intention of this study to reconcile them. They create another space that is concurrent with Žižek’s Parallax Gap. Yet it is with the points of correspondence that difference becomes clearer. In this text both Yielding Stone and Hand Catching Lead are called ‘a dance’. However, when I look back at them with the idea of dance in mind, I begin to see dance change in appearance. I choose to end this study with Yielding Stone; this place where the Parallax Gap comes alive, where things are constantly shifting. It is a place where un-synthesis can occur within one thing. Here I see critical thought, arising from this place of earthquakes and non-reconciliation; a place that is radical rather than diplomatic, generative rather than pacifying.

Duchamp, Marcel, The Creative Act. A paper presented to the convention of the American

Federation of Arts. Houston, Texas, April 1957. Extract from Audio CD Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act, sub rosa, Brussels, Belgium.

Bibliography Articles in Journals Baker, George, ‘Photography’s Expanded Field’, October 114, MIT Press, Massachussets, Fall, 2005, pp.120-140 Criqui, Jean-Pierre,‘Like a Rolling Stone: Gabriel Orozco’, Art Forum, New York, April,1996, pp.89-93 Darwent, Charles,‘Something old, something new’, The Independent on Sunday, London, 1st August 2004, p.25 Hoare, Philip,‘Tatooed Leviathan: Gabriel Orozco’s Inscribed Andalucian Whale‘, Modern Painters, October, 2006, pp.68-74 Hubbard, Sue,‘Where there‘s waste, there‘s art‘, The Independent, 6th July 2004, p.12 Searle, Adrian,‘The player of games‘, The Guardian, London, 6th July 2004, pp.12-13 Verhagen, Marcus,‘Nomadism‘, Art Monthly, October, 2006, pp.7-10 Books Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000 Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, ed. Heath, Stephen, Fontana Press, 1977 Bataille, Georges et al, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, trans. Iain White, Atlas Press, London, 1995

Bois, Yve-Alain, Krauss, Rosalind, Formless: A Userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide, Zone Books, New York, 1999 Bullock, Allan, Trombley, Stephen, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2000 Buskirk, Martha, Weyengraf-Serra, Clara. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991. Caigar-Smith, Martin, The Epic and the Everyday: Contemporary Photographic Art, Penhurst Press, London, 1994 Deleuze, Guilles, Guattari, FĂŠlix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum, London, 2004 Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real, MIT press, Massachusetts, 1996 Foster, Hal, Hughes, Gordon, Richard Serra, MIT press, Massachusetts, 2000 Foster, Hal, Krauss, Rosalind, Alain-Bois, Yve, Buchloh, H.D. Benjamin Art Since 1900, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004 Gonzalez Virgen, Miguel, Hutchinson, John, Of Games, The Infinite and Worlds: The Work of Gabriel Orozco, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2003 Hollier, Dennis, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, MIT press, Massachusetts, 1989 Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul, Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, 1992 Krauss, Rosalind E, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT press, Massachusetts, 1981 48

Krauss, Rosalind E, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT press, Massachusetts, 1985 Kwon, Miwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. MIT press, Massachusetts, 2002 Leach, Neil, Camouflage, MIT press, Massachusetts, 2006 Lee, Pamela, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, Gabriel Orozco: Triunfo de la libertad No.18, Tlalpan, C.P. 14000, Oktagon, Italy, 1995 Orozco, Gabriel, Clinton is Innocent, Les Musees de la Ville the Paris, Paris, 1998 Searle, John R, Mind: A Brief Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004 Verwoert, Jan, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, Afterall Books, London, 2006. Ĺ˝iĹžek, Slavoj, The Parallax View, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2006 Exhibition Catalogues ARTS COUNCIL OF GREAT BRITAIN, Films by American Artists: One Medium Among Many, London, 1981 CENTRE POMPIDOU, Les Mouvement Des Images, Centre Pompidou, 2006

HAYWARD GALLERY, Undercover Surrealism: George Bataille and Documents, Hayward Gallery Publishing, London, 2006 MODERN ART OXFORD, Fiona Tan: Countenance, Modern Art Oxford, 2005 SERPENTINE GALLERY, Gabriel Orozco, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2004 WHITE CUBE, Gabriel Orozco, Jay Joplin/White Cube, London, 2006 Websites Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, in Foucault, info www.foucault.info August 2006 Sol LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, in www.erg.be/multimedialab/doc/citations/sol_lewitt_sentences.pdf October 2006 Exhibitions Gabriel Orozco: Eleven paintings and a Drawing, White Cube Gallery, London, October 2006 Le Mouvement des Images, Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 2006 Undercover Surrealism: George Bataille and Documents, Hayward Gallery, London, July, 2006 Time Zones: Recent Film and Video, Tate Modern, London, 2004 Conferences The Use-Value of DOCUMENTS: Bataille/Einstein/Leiris, London, June 2006