Reading Exercise (on Cross-reference at Nieuwe Vide)

Text written upon invitation of Emily Williams, curator of "The Object Lag" at Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem (2010)

Reading Exercise


It’s dark and raining when I arrive at Nieuwe Vide. At the main entrance of the building I see a sign that indicates a secondary entrance to reach the show. As I stand on the threshold of the door, at the top of a smaller wooden stair, I glance through the exhibition space. There are several objects scattered in a relatively large rectangular white room. I see two or three tables on the right, a few big wooden platforms like those usually used for loading goods at the centre, and several standing objects arranged on the left that most struck my attention. They all have a rectangular shape but vary in height and material. One seems to be an empty portable screen for projections. Another looks like a school blackboard, and another a music stand. They give me the clear impression of shapes waiting (and wanting) to be filled, like the white pages of a book.

Transition Evening was the final presentation of five weeks of workshops developed by Emily Williams, Maja Bekan and Suzie Herman with a group of artists who use writing and theory in their works. As a visitor of the opening of this fourth part of the Object Lag, this evening was the occasion to experience the results of this process of exploration of what a text can mean, as a narrative emerging from the exhibition space. Writing from that perspective, I can say that the evening was not about the discovery of a single tale but rather witnessing – or better being part of – the disclosure of multiple narratives created over time by the works in the show and the live events that occurred during the evening. All together those elements created a constellation of meanings sometimes overlapping, sometimes completely different, that animated the exhibition space and filled, on a conceptual level, those empty screens seeking content that I had noticed at the beginning.

But which were those narratives and what were they about?
One was a story of repetitions and monsters developed between the video fragments of Scott Joseph’s “Haunted Matter” screened on a monitor in a corner of the room, and the story told in a series of live actions by Ceel Mogami de Haas, under the title “Drift-Draft” [1]. While Joseph’s work spoke of repetition as a narrative device in the moving images (as visible in Buster Keaton’s slapstick actions, or the several attempts by Wiley Coyote to catch Road Runner), Mogami de Haas’s presentation suggested that repetition is a characteristic traceable also in an apparently closed system such as Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818. [After all, each text, de Haas seemed to suggest, comprises references to other works, texts that have appeared before and in some way are contained, repeated in the new ones ‘albeit sometimes with errors’].
Taking inspiration from Shelley’s fiction, de Haas’ “Drift Draft” unfolded into a compelling analysis of the monster as a narrative device used to show things that should remain hidden, things different to what is generally accepted. (“In a world created by a reasonable god, the freak or lunatic must have a purpose: to reveal visibly the results of vice, folly and unreason as a warning to erring humanity.” [2]) This observation reminded me of another meaning of ‘repetition’ as suggested by Deleuze: an intentional act of selection that aims at reaffirming the potentiality of difference. A reading that applied to Joseph’s “Haunted Matter” created again a new relation between the two works.

This search for relations among the shape and content of the several works in the show could continue further and in a deeper manner. (I could think, for instance, of the tools for a lecture analyzed by de Haas – a table, a chair, a laptop, etc. – and how those same images printed on posters were actually present in Mrova’s work as traces of a real engagement that happened among theorists, activists and artists looking for models of ‘transdisciplinarity’).
What I’d like to highlight here, however, is how in Transition Evening forms and contents of the project supported each other in a successful way, providing the spectator with a concrete and physically rich experience of the possibilities of intertexuality and cross-reference, when, in other words, a text is more than a single page, a single tale, a printed book and therefore, a single artwork [3].

In particular, drawing from the writings of another theoretician of text and texuality, I’d like to suggest that Transition Evening could be seen in itself as an open work, where in this case the exhibition is similar to a written text, which via carefully chosen concrete forms and scenarios developed in time, is able to convey the openness (and the cross-reference) of a text [4].

A. Serino, December 2010

Notes:
n.1 “Drift draft” consisted of a live presentation accompanied by a series of collected images projected at irregular intervals in different points of the exhibition space.
n.2 “Fragments of texts read for the performance”, Ceel Mogami de Haas, available at: ceelmogamidehaas.blogspot.com
n.3 Cross-reference was the title of this fourth part of “The Object Lag”. As explained in the press release of the project, the participants “were invited to explore readings of essays, texts and approaches in writing and to experiment with possible forms of presentation—reaching beyond a linear reading or printed matter alone.”
Here one reference that could help clarifying the ideas of cross-reference and intertextuality is Roland Barthes’ description of a text as “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations... The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (“S/Z”, London:Cape 1974, p.22). Or also, Michel Foucault: “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands... Its unity is variable and relative.” (“The Archaeology of Knowledge”, London:Tavistock 1974, p.23)
n.4 Here I refer to Umberto Eco, see “Open work”(1962)