Drift

drift

It is interesting that a scientist, Alexander Graham Bell, who died in 1922, is the inspiration for an exhibition of contemporary art that includes such diverse practices—he is sure to have approved. We are grateful to Micah Donovan, who first saw photographs of Bell and the kites that he designed in 2008 at the National Historic site that bears his name in Cape Breton, for suggesting the concept of art as a bi-product of serious play, and permitting the mind to “drift”. I would like to thank Malcolm Sutton for providing a thought-provoking essay that contextualizes the artists’ works within the framework of engaging, as he says, with the unknown. Foremost, we are grateful to the artists, Callum Cooper, Marc Ganzglass, Klara Hobza, Kristan Horton, and Christof Migone for sharing their work with our audience.

Finally, I would like to thank our funders: the City of Oshawa, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for their ongoing support.

Gabrielle Peacock Chief Executive Officer

DRIFT: THE EXHAUST OF THEIR EFFECTS

But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

—Bruno Latour1 In a 1903 article for National Geographic Magazine, Alexander Graham Bell—who by that time had already worked out an electromagnetic basis for telecommunication and owned patents for the telephone—admits that he has been “continuously at work upon experiments relating to kites.”2 The small black and white photos of Bell from the opening years of the 20th century show a number of the many working designs he made for kites, some pyramidal with several tetrahedral cells comprising them, others dirigible in shape with a tetrahedral structure underlying them. Seemingly in anticipation of the question his National-Geographicreading colleagues might raise3 about the kites—Kites, Bell?—he declares, “Why, I do not know. . .”

Which expresses a feeling of tentativeness, of searching, of not knowing. It is a feeling that American writer Donald Barthelme appeals for in the art-making process: “The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. . . [W]ithout the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”4 Not knowing, and engaging with the unknown, for players and makers, inventors and artists, is but one paradoxical side effect of working with what is at hand. This route of mind and hand in unanticipated directions is full of accidents, crashing kites, trying things out, backtracking, sliding away from preconceptions and knowledge, and encountering the alienness or otherness of the world, its objects and its forces. As shown in the photos that Bell took to document his process, it means trying out one shape after another, in various sizes and configurations, leading at some point to the tetrahedral structure that Buckminster Fuller would later make famous.

The artist who engages with the unknown allows the world to act on her as much as she acts on the world.

She must recognize in the expression of objects—even

in the subtleties of their exhaust or the invisibility of their forces—something going on that, though unforeseeable, is revealing of something more. We might call this movement, where we lose our conventional points of reference, drift. We qualify our term by insisting that the process is not passive as it might sound; on the contrary, being caught up in drift is active, but as active in reception as in trying things out. Bell, for example, as well as not knowing why he was playing at kite making, of course on another level did know—he was compelled by the idea of human flight. He states in the same article, “We are all of us interested in aerial locomotion; and I am sure that no one who has observed with attention the flight of birds can doubt for one moment the possibility of aerial flight by bodies specifically heavier than the air.”5 To drift means setting out in one direction, perhaps with a certain horizon in view, in acceptance that elements will push you in other directions and to other horizons. Most important, though, is the recognition of forces beyond the self, that complete control over objects is an illusion and that, as Ian Bogost suggests in his characterization of wonder: the suspension of one’s own logic primes one for such encounters.6 In a book titled Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Bogost proposes that the logic of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism dominate the way we perceive objects. That is, we see things always in relation to our human selves: how an object can be useful to us, how it has a face like a person, how it must have feelings like we do. An object can be anything you can think of, real or imaginary, tangible and intangible, an atom or a table or a chimera. In asking what it is like to be a thing, Bogost directs us away from considering objects solely in relation to ourselves, presenting a conceptual problem that is likely impossible to answer, because, for example, it is

Cover: Alexander Graham Bell Tetrahedral Kite Photographs 1902 Courtesy of Parks Canada, The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.

impossible to know what a wooden table experiences.

Bogost states, “The experiences of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between black noise7 and the experiences internal to the object.”8 Our task is speculative, and the first step is “to suspend all trust in one’s own logics, be they religion, science, philosophy, custom, or opinion, and to be subsumed entirely in the uniqueness of an object’s native logics.”9 Again, a difficult task, but one that the artists of this exhibition appear to have taken to heart.

How does a drift become tangible, entering into art or the gallery? If drift describes movements through which the artist encounters and encourages unanticipated, contingent forces—movements that, though forming a major part of the artistic process, are usually inaccessible to us as viewers—translation describes processes of materialization: translations from an abstraction to a material particularity, translations of an invisible force into a physical embodiment, translations as a tangle of forces into a gesture. Translation may be accidental like a side effect, or subtle like smoke coming off the abstraction, but in either case it signals the presence of something else. With these conceptual and perceptual challenges in mind, we might ask, what is a meteorite the exhaust of?

WITH THESE CONCEPTUAL AND PERCEPTUAL CHALLENGES IN MIND, WE MIGHT ASK, WHAT IS A METEORITE THE EXHAUST OF? The meteorite fragments that find their way into Marc Ganzglass’ Meteorite Inclusions (2006) collided with Earth in 1947, in Siberia’s Sikhote-Alin Mountains.

They are composed primarily of iron, like the iron we mine on earth—yet, as Ganzglass states in an interview, “They are alloys from space, which is outside our history.”10 Indeed, the meteorite’s narrative was completely outside our consciousness until its earthly collision, and until Ganzglass had its fragments in his hands, and until he was in the particular situation as a resident artist at Wisconsin’s Kohler factory.

Working with labourers at the Kohler factory, during a several-month-long artist residency, Ganzglass added fragments of the meteorite iron to the earthly cast iron structure of the drinking fountains. By including fragments in drinking fountains, Ganzglass draws our attention to a social narrative where objects are treated very much for their use value. But because they do not so easily lose their quality as alien objects—we know there are pieces of outer space in the exhibited fountain—he also, by striking contrast, draws attention to another narrative outside of human use and history. Even though water fountains are quotidian objects, found in every school hallway, and even though Ganzglass has socialized the alien fragments, bringing them into history, the iron still has an outsider quality that bleeds into the fountains and that speaks of a cosmic trajectory of a completely other scale. The simultaneous presence of multiple scales, some of which are material and others abstract, are so often indications of a drift in translation.

Marc Ganzglass Meteorite Inclusions 2006

In the same way that a meteorite may be viewed as the exhaust of other forces, so might the detritus that finds its way into Kristan Horton’s stop-motion animations. In the series of videos that comprise The Floor is the Door (2013), Horton directs our attention to a variety of bits and pieces that help form what Bogost would call the black noise. They are things that have fallen from some larger, probably more significant body, into anonymity. They might have been swept up in a stairwell or artist’s studio floor, or found under the cushions of a couch, or down the side of a car seat. A bit of wire, flecks of paint perhaps, a particle of plastic or ceramics, half a peanut, twigs and unidentifiable dust, some appearing electrostatically charged, all invisibly manipulated to move about on three layers of glass in, at times, a McLarenesque animation. Importantly, these animations draw the tiny things out of the black noise of the periphery, into the centre of our vision. As the animated objects accumulate, rotate and shift in fields, we see the traces of play from the artist’s manipulations. Yet as we watch these videos we also feel far from the artist’s consciousness: the objects dance hands free, arriving singularly or as a spray, appearing out of thin air to land among other debris, then shift about as constellations as the camera rotates. Each video shows a variation on this theme of anonymous arrival. As in Ganzglass’ work, we are compelled to shift our perspective to accommodate another scale, this time minute, and to give ourselves over to a foreign, divergent logic.

When we encounter a pun, we enter into a short circuit in language that allows us to see two things at once. Christof Migone’s telephone installation, Publick (2013), invites us to place ourselves in the centre of a pun whose full meaning we learn only after we enter the work. In Migone’s words, Publick is comprised of “[t]wo old style phones without dials. . . , installed side by side on a wall, left-right phones, stereophones. On one all you hear is the sound of licking, close and intimate, for salivaphiles. On the other you hear a voice telling you that the sound you hear on the other phone is the sound of the artist thoroughly licking the phone, it is left ambiguous as to which of the two phones has been licked (in fact, both have).”11 Here, the gap that once dissociated the lic of public from the lick of our tongue is erased so that the terms come together in the simultaneous present of publick.

One imagines the drift taking over, where the artist follows the hidden logic of a word, finding the lick of public, and that logic perhaps leading him to the material manifestation of it in a telephone installation.

Migone reveals a physical act—that of licking—that perhaps was always present in our mistrust of public payphones.

Christof Migone Publick 2013

Kristan Horton The Floor is the Door (video stills) 2013

In compliment to Publick’s pun, we also enter into a kind of slapstick comedy. Rather than a well-dressed businessman slipping on a banana peel, bringing his high-mindedness down to the ground, here the viewer steps thoughtfully, and perhaps high-mindedly into an artwork. But the world is not as it appears. There is something wet or slippery. The viewer has fallen into a vulgar trap. What makes the piece funny (and what is translated or made visible by the work) is the movement from the highly abstract expectations of the viewer—that he will participate in an aesthetic experience (intellectual, cultural, enlightening, etc.)—to the highly material disgust upon discovery that his ear is up against someone else’s saliva. In that moment the viewer becomes the particular material instance of a universal belief: that of the aesthetic experience inherent in encountering art. In other words, the slapstick of Publick draws the abstract concept of viewerness into each viewer. This abstract concept is a force that constantly comes into play but which often remains invisible to us. It is brought to light in Publick only through the saliva, the phones, and the possible revulsion of the listener.12

Callum Cooper Mine Kafon (video still) 2012

Callum Cooper’s short film Mine Kafon (2012) documents a spherical structure built by Massoud Hassani, a product designer born near Kabul and living in the Netherlands. Hassani developed the mine kafon from cheap materials—such as toilet plungers and bamboo poles. The structure resembles a giant dandelion flower gone to seed, and has been designed to roll on wind power across the flat smooth surface of the desert. It has a very specific purpose: to detonate antipersonnel landmines left over from years of conflict in Hassani’s homeland of Afghanistan. When released it steadily rolls across the desert surface until triggering a mine and keeps rolling even after the explosion, as it can sustain a number of detonations before losing its mobility. Perhaps most extraordinary in this film is the contrast between the constant invisible force of the wind and the violent, split-second force of shallowly planted mines, and how this single object negotiates both forces, moving with elegance in one while incurring damage in the other—moving timelessly in one while moving in the violence of recent history in the other.

Klara Hobza’s Diving through Europe (2010–ca. 2040) expresses the seriousness of play so often implicit in throwing oneself into the unknown. Hobza stands cheerfully on a jetty, in scuba gear, and declares matter-of-factly, “I’m Klara Hobza. I plan to dive through Europe.” As she outlines the route upstream beginning near Rotterdam at the mouth of the Rhine, the camera cuts to images of a slate grey North Sea, presumably frigid, to factory stacks shouldered by massive wind turbines, to waves breaking against cement (a motif of the first three videos), and to a loaded cargo freighter, terrifying for its single-minded trajectory. In other words she presents a fragmented panorama void of other humans and characterized by industrial activity—forces of a massive scale that make Hobza’s project seem impossible, and at very least, entirely hazardous.

Klara Hobza Diving Through Europe (video still) 2010-ongoing.

Image courtesy of Gallery Soy Capitán.

Photo credit: Pietertje can Splunter.

Hobza throws herself into this inhospitable otherworldliness, a European void inhabited by and comprised of unforeseeable forces (much of the time appearing in the videos only as a strange subaqueous green). Those that are foreseeable are dangerous enough: ships, toxins, temperatures, water itself—not to mention national borders, and centuries of conflict.

The risk of those involved in serious play is putting oneself amid elements over which one has often minimal control. Of course, we are always in a state of limited control, however much we might have fantasies of more control. As Robin Mackay puts it, “We are the product of contingent events, material histories, webs and networks of anonymous forces.”13 Yet this humbling recognition of the contingency of our situation doesn’t preclude the possibility of throwing ourselves in deeper, of making a decision to put ourselves amid a tangle of other forces, as Hobza does. In a sense, Hobza goes one step beyond Barthelme’s wager that not knowing leads us in inventive, unanticipated directions. Giving oneself over to other forces (even with years of diving training and planning) asks us to look beyond invention into the ethics of the drift. As Giorgio Agamben states, “A life is ethical not when it simply submits to moral laws but when it accepts putting itself into play in its gestures, irrevocably and without reserve.”14 Diving through Europe puts the human, without reserve, into play with the industrial, the natural and the deeply socially coded. It asks us to imagine a human-scale endeavour that moves against the seemingly insurmountable momentum presentday industrial and social activity.

ONE GETS CAUGHT IN THE DRIFT BECAUSE ONE IMAGINES. One gets caught in the drift because one imagines.

One drifts because one knows there is something other than what is constantly in front of our faces and that there are flows that are less convenient to be swept up in. One drifts to move against the familiar and habitual, against the status quo, against the smooth, efficient flow of capitalism. If there can be said to be an ethics of the drift, it is in the recognition of forces of different scales at work and the willingness to put oneself into play amid them.

Through the drift so much is brought to light, even if only as alien traces.

- Malcolm Sutton

ENDNOTES Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 155.

1

Alexander Graham Bell, “Tetrahedral Principle in Kite Structures,” National Geographic Magazine 14, no.

6 (June 1903): 219.

2

Bell points out in his National Geographic article—as though to contextualize his experiments—that at the time in North America, kites (a papered cross with a ribboned tail, like ones in cartoons or crayon drawings) were the toys of children, whereas in Asia they had long been an adult pursuit. The article describes how he moved from flat, diamond-shaped kites, to three-dimensional tetrahedrons.

3

Donald Barthelme, “Not Knowing,” Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 12.

4

5

Bell, “Tetrahedral Principle,” 219.

Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 124.

6

He borrows the term “black noise” from contemporary philosopher Graham Harman, who characterizes it as “the background noise of peripheral objects”(32) or “noise that approaches silence” (33).

7

8

Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 100.

9

Ibid., 124.

Marc Ganzglass, interview by Trong Gia Ngugen, ArtSlant, (December 2008), http://www.artslant.com/ la/artists/rackroom/46427.

10

Christof Migone, “Publick.” Christof Migone, http:// www.christofmigone.com/html/projects_gallery/Publick.html.

11

At least this is the comic procedure that Alenka Zupančič explores, following from Hegel and Lacan.

See Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 27–32.

12

Robin Mackay, “Introduction: Three Figures of Contingency,” The Medium of Contingency (Falmouth/ London, UK: Urbanomic/Ridinghouse, 2011), 3.

13

Giorgio Agamben, “The Author as Gesture,” Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 69.

14

LIST OF WORKS Alexander Graham Bell Tetrahedral Kite Photographs 1902-1907 12 digital reproductions Alexander Graham Bell was a scientist and innovator. His work with kites in Baddeck, Nova Scotia led to several developments of the tetrahedral space frame in architecture. Photographs of Alexander Graham Bell’s kites are courtesy Parks Canada/ Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.

Callum Cooper Mine Kafon 2012 film to DVD Callum Cooper is an Australian Artist and Filmmaker.

Marc Ganzglass Meteorite Inclusions 2006 water fountain. Sikhote Alin Meteorite, documentation. 37.5cm x 29.5cm x 31.0cm Marc Ganzglass is an artist working in New York City.

Klara Hobza Diving Through Europe 2010-ongoing 3 DVDs, surface marker buoys, map of Europe Hobza currently lives and works on the land masses of Eurasia and America.

Kristan Horton The Floor is the Door 2013 DVD stop motion animation Kristan Horton is an artist working in Berlin & Ontario.

Christof Migone Publick 2013 2 wall mounted telephones, recordings. dimensions variable Christof Migone is an artist, curator and writer who works in Toronto.

© 2013 The Robert McLaughlin Gallery 72 Queen Street, Civic Centre, Oshawa Ontario L1H 3Z3 rmg.on.ca Graphic design: Jacquie Severs Printing: David Thomas Printing Curated by Micah Donovan Essay by Malcolm Sutton.

Drift: The Exhaust of their Effects Catalogue of an exhibition held at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 21 June - 8 September 2013 ISBN: 978-1-926589-81-7 1. Cooper, Callum—Exhibitions. 2. Ganzglass, Marc— Exhibitions. 3. Hobza, Klara—Exhibitions. 4. Horton, Kristan—Exhibitions. 5. Migone, Christof—Exhibitions. 6. Art, Modern—21st century—Exhibitions. I. Sutton, Malcolm. II. Robert McLaughlin Gallery. III. Title.

709.05