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Our Word is Our Bond Maxine Kopsa
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This is how
it starts. Three avocados in a wooden bowl are wrapped up in newspaper,
crumpled and unreadable. "The Recurrence of the Sublime"
(2004/5). The avocados are to be replaced when overripe and the
newspaper when too worn. Sometimes the bowl sits atop the pile of
newspaper sheets, this pile diminishing as the work continues, and
these unruffled pages, now legible, report on the day of the first
lunar landing. In his studio
there are objects waiting to be used. Coloured sponges, cans of
pop, a collection of glass bottles, stone figurines. There's a banner
leaning against the wall: an emergency blanket taped to two sticks,
one of those shiny pieces of foil which keeps the heat in. It can
be placed in any way, lean in any situation, taking on slightly
different shapes. "Quick Standard" (2005) stands like
a sculpture, with its shiny exterior and the roughness of the wooden
2x4s, and at the same time is loaded with implication: a security
blanket for the victim of the unexpected becomes a banner, a political
tool. There's a carefulness
in his choosing, naturally. One could say this of any author. But
Kuri's carefulness seems somehow more specific, even more precise,
than say, Marcel Broodthaers's collection of old etchings or Duchamp's
choosing of his readymades, more vigilant and more frivolous
at the same time. Because although the objects chosen (and used)-a
can, an avocado, a piece of grass, a newspaper, a wheelbarrow, adhesive
fruit labels, an endless amount of receipts, plastic carrier bags-acquire
a significance within the work. They've become a part of, become
ingredients, in it. They never entirely lose their original quality.
A smashed can remains a smashed can, a receipt, a receipt. Literally,
they are collected, put together, but not wholly transformed
to become a purely aesthetic vehicle. Their first identity (as Gabriel
puts it, "their semantic nature") is held on to (as a
reference) and so becomes part of the new narrative of the work.
At the same
time, this collecting seems to have more to do with a 'getting rid
of' than an amassing. "Collecting is more like death than creating,
like running against the clock," he said. And perhaps aware
of his own predilection for its seductive nature, he added, "collecting
just to collect is like desperately holding onto that which inevitably
must be surrendered. One has to be careful that it not become a
fetish act in itself." It's true one collects in order to keep
something alive, something which has already died. And this paradoxical
weeding out through accumulation-"it's more difficult to hold
myself back from accumulating the potentially perfect objects than
not"-is mirrored in a similar method, step two in the process
of making: the stripping down in the resulting object itself. "In
this modus of collecting one potentially cancels out a part of the
original function and sense but the semantic implications of the
material remain crucial in the end. They are obviously visible in
the result. The objects are still raw." Stripping down, cancelling
out, getting to the bottom of, a Calvinist (forgive me Gabriel)
exercise in how close you can get to ephemeral without negating
the material. And in this partial cancelling out of the function
of a found object, in this stripping bare to the essentials of both
the circumstances and the materiality of the thing at hand, the
object placed in a new (odd) situation becomes a sculpture, like
a sculpture. As he says it, "somewhere between a system
of ideas and a series of material paradoxes." Both subtle and
explicit at the same time. "Things less altered allow more
space for contradiction." Plastic carrier
bags with the words "thank you" are hung in clusters attached
to a ceiling fan and slowly rotate, moving back and forth and around,
sometimes touching the adjacent cluster. And when they do, you hear
the soft rippling crunches of plastic on plastic, in air. "Thank
you, thank you, thank you…" over and over again. Thank
You Clouds (2004) could be a comment on our on-going, merciless
consumerist arrangement, the validity of the system and its faults
underlined by the absurd (a word I promised I would avoid) repositioning
of a plastic thank you bag hanging on a rotating fan. It could be,
but it is also futile and capricious yet nonsensically reasonable.
As the bags hang, move and are blown through the logic of the created
system they conceptually question the thing-ness of their thing-ness:
their nature, initially brief, in that they were (are still?) disposable
bags, as relocated as they are now made permanent and sculptural.
Not too long
ago Gabriel said to me, "Obsession should be valued because
it cannot be faked. It is genuine." But saying that, I might
be pointing the reader in the wrong direction. Obsession, as being
only an "unreasonably persistent idea in the mind; [a] condition
in which such ideas are present," is not really-at least how
just defined according to the Oxford Dictionary-a basis for Gabriel's
work. That's not quite enough. But obsession in the sense of the
careful building up of a system and the careful (compulsive?) manoeuvring
within it. In other words, the painstaking set up of boundaries
for the sole purpose of working within those very boundaries. Or
a wholly subjective creation of a system which nevertheless has
a relationship to a more general sense of public system. "I took
advantage of being at the seashore to lay in a store of sucking-stones.
They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion
I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally among
my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised
the problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say
sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the
two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat.
Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting
it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat
by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced
by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced
by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced
by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking
it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets,
but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took
hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat,
certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while
I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just
described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully.
For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four
stones circulating thus might always be the same four…[One]
day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that I might perhaps
achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets,
or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the
principle of trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly
began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah,
I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I
had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure. Finally
I seemed to grasp that this word trim could not here mean anything
else, anything better, than the distribution of the sixteen stones
in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and that it was
my refusal to consider any distribution other than this that had
vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally
insoluble. And it was on the basis of this interpretation, whether
right or wrong, that I had finally reached a solution, inelegantly,
assuredly, but sound, sound." 1 That the solution can come from the same source as the problem-notably yourself-and still surprise you on both occasions, its creation and its solution. That a word-here, trim-can be the solution, but remain a word not fully comprehended, grasped. And that this redeeming word, which feels as though it came out of nowhere, but really, again, came from the same source as both the problem and the solution, namely from yourself, can take on a life of its own. As though it were the avocados. Sol LeWitt said:
"Since the functions of conception and perception are contradictory
(one pre-, the other post-fact) the artist would mitigate his idea
by applying subjective judgement to it. If the artist wishes to
explore his idea thoroughly, then arbitrary or chance decisions
would be kept to a minimum, while caprice, taste and other whimsies
would be eliminated from the making of the art. The work does not
necessarily have to be rejected if it does not look well. Sometimes
what is initially thought to be awkward will eventually be visually
pleasing." 2 And he also
said this, which, in my mind could just as well have been uttered
by Gabriel, either right after or right before he told me about
obsession: "Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. The
logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at
times only to be ruined. Logic may be used to camouflage the real
intent of the artist, to lull the viewer into belief that he understands
the work, or to infer a paradoxical situation (such as logic vs.
illogic). The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful
are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance
of simplicity because they seem inevitable. In terms of ideas the
artist is free to even surprise himself. Ideas are discovered by
intuition." 3 Idea 1. In a
store, the customer slip of a credit card receipt is handed over
to the buyer. It's printed on a slightly glossy paper that eventually
fades taking the record of the time and place, the testimony of
the random but specific purchase, with it. This voucher the customer
receives is a carbon copy replica of the one left behind in the
store and the one destined for the bank, the only difference is
their colour, one is white, one is pink and one is yellow. All three
are more than similar, all three in fact are alike except for the
increasing fade in the copies made. Together they form an indivisible
entity, like a trinity, invalid without their identical others.
Their repetition however, their visible sameness, in no way assures
their equality. For each slip is in fact a separate instance in
the hierarchal nature of the commercial transaction: the individual-the
intermediary-the authority. They are alike but contingent and therefore
create a conditional relationship. A conditional relationship underlined
by Gabriel who decides to replicate the whole one more time, to
copy the three digit for digit, including tax, credit card number,
date, location, time. He gives instructions to reproduce the voucher
into three otherwise identical hanging tapestries, 360 cm long,
120 cm wide, in white, pink and yellow. The three slips of a proper
monetary transaction, a proper contingent relationship, become (yet
again) a new contingent relationship. One now not only reliant on
the outside world of trade but also on the more general understandings
of convention. The Trinity Gobelin Tapestry (2004) displaces not
only a transaction but the nature of the beast, so to speak, relocating
the conceptual deed (an activity) and its material proof into the
realm of crafted (hand-worked, individual) result. There is an
undercurrent in LeWitt's words which in some ways opposes concept
to perception, idea to result. As if the result, the actual thing
was less important than the idea that got it there. I'm jumping
here, ignoring some subtleties (LeWitt didn't deny the look of the
artwork entirely, but perhaps he did/does, its object-hood) in order
to make a point, that being that, then-around 1967-there was perhaps
less room for both. Less room for something conceptual AND…what
to call it? Something visual? Palpable? Material? Something not
in denial of its thing-ness. Is it going
to far to explain this? A very basic principle, perhaps one so basic
that it might shame the author here to actually put it down in writing,
and shame the reader as well for forcing him to read such blatancy.
But it should be said, I guess. What it is, is the careful, the
intricate, the fragile line between belief and denial, between build-up
and ruin, or between knowing you're right and showing modesty or
doubt, at the same time. Modesty. And persuasion. "How to
Do Things With Words" is a compilation of 12 lectures the philosopher,
J.L. Austin, delivered at Harvard in 1955 4.
The editors of the second edition, the one I now hold in my hand,
write in their third-personed preface: "Dr. R. Sbisà
has read through all of Austin's notes for these lectures, comparing
them with the printed text of the first edition and noting all the
points at which it seemed to her that improvements could be made.
The editors have together examined Austin's notes at these places
and have, as a result, corrected and supplemented the printed text
at a number of points. They believe that the new text is clearer,
fuller, and, at the same time, more faithful to the actual words
of the notes made by Austin." It's just one paragraph,
and goes on for not much longer than this, meaning that its main
gist is the accomplished improvements and a proper slap on their
backs. Two pages on,
J.L. Austin begins his first lecture: "What I shall have to
say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit I
should like to claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts.
The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and
cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there,
by others. Yet I have not found attention paid specifically."
True, at least in parts. As though the
editors somehow in all their careful reading and re-reading of Austin's
notes missed the whole point. I'm speaking
of Austin here for two reasons
5.
The first though perhaps not even foremost has to do of course with
the notion of the performative which he outlines in these lectures.
And which I'll get to right after mentioning the second reason for
quoting Austin, this being, for his clear and very charming modesty.
His ability to walk the fine line between belief and denial, build-up
and ruin, between knowing he is right, though perhaps only in parts,
between being modest and persuasive, at the same time. The performative,
in short, is that which remains active in a phrase, always in a
state of becoming, you could say. J.L. Austin uses synonyms like
operative as opposed to recite or declare, contractual
and not descriptive. Is, instead of about. Austin: "They [performative
utterances] do not 'describe' or 'report' or constate anything at
all, are not 'true or false.'" A performative utterance is,
for example, the "I do" uttered in the course of a marriage
ceremony, the "I name this ship the Queen Elisabeth" during
the smashing of the champagne bottle, the "I bet you"
in the handshake of a wager.' Or as Gabriel used recently in an
exhibition he titled "Calorie Counting: And thanks in advance." Untitled (And
Thanks in Advance, 2004) is a work comprising a disused supermarket
shelving unit which holds different sized rocks engraved with the
sentence "and thanks in advance," one letter per rock.
On the back side of the shelving unit, sitting on two of the three
shelves, are two plastic real size lettuces one stuffed with bookie,
betting agency and lottery tickets (Lotto Lettuce, 2004)
and the other with queuing stubs (Stub Lettuce, 2004). Also
part of "Calorie Counting" is a work which runs along
the interior ledges of the gallery windows, hundreds of sales tickets
and receipts stuck onto rows of vertical metal spikes used to keep
away pigeons (Untitled, 2004). If you read them closely,
you'll notice that many thank you for your purchases. "And
Thanks in Advance" is-and I am guessing J.L. Austin might agree-a
performative utterance. It not only assumes an action, it also denotes
a situation in which the person uttering it is pleasantly, quietly,
passively manipulating the person on the receiving end. The thank
you in advance implies that whatever the favour being asked, it
will, assumedly, be fulfilled. Otherwise there would be no need
for the premature thank you. Thank you in advance is an utterance
which assumes a situation, develops certain circumstances and conditions
preferable to its own realization. Like the "I
do" during the marriage ceremony, "thanks in advance"
is in fact also therefore an act. Austin, "the uttering of
the sentence is, or is part of, the doing of an action, which again
would not normally be described as, or as 'just,' saying
something 7."
In saying it, we are doing it, he explains in lecture II. But he
doesn't stop there, and this is crucial: The performative utterance
cannot be voiced at any time and any place and still always retain
its performative character. It must be said under the appropriate
circumstances. "I do" must be said during the wedding
ceremony, "I bet" must be agreed upon, and understood
by all parties concerned. It is, you could say, site and context
specific Gabriel Kuri's works are an activity in the sense of the performative. They teeter over the arbitrary, mitigating between speculation and fact. Gabriel likes to use the word futile, I prefer necessary, where necessary touches on their quiet but modest manipulation: you can't get around them. Modest and persuasive, at the same time. The thing (the object, the result) in all its conceptual thing-ness takes on an intelligence of its own, never in denial of convention entirely or of the system in place, no, using it, but using it on its own terms. Like a revolt. Kuri's works are actions wherein the question remains always eloquently unanswered: is it an interruption or does it establish a relationship? It boils down to this; and, please, read this slowly: "It is (to describe figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer." 8 Footnotes 1
Samuel Beckett,
Three Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York:
Grove Press, 1965), 69-71. 7
Sweetly, he continues: "This is far from being as paradoxical
as it may sound or as I have meanly been trying to make it sound:
indeed, the examples now to be give will be disappointing. Examples:
(E.a) 'I do (sc. Take this woman to be my lawfully wedded wife)'
(…)." This is another instance where we can say that Austin
is making his lecture, and, here, the written lecture, a performative
one. By speaking to his audience, voicing his doubt and anticipating
their thoughts on the matter, he activates his lecture, keeping
it from becoming simply a statement, i.e. right or wrong. 8
J.D. Salinger, Raid High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour
An Introduction (Boston: Little, Brown Books, 1963), 95.
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