Occupy Issue 6 James Merrigan

8/3/2019 Occupy Issue 6 James Merrigan

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/occupy-issue-6-james-merrigan 1/6

OCCUPY PAPER ISSUE 621

james merrigan James Merrigan is a video/ installation artist and art writer.He is the creator of +BILLION-, a bi-weekly online art journal.Future art projects include ‘So Long Roger Fenton...’ at Monster

Truck, curated by Claire Feeley, ‘Futures 11’ at the RHA, and asolo show at the LAB in 2012. He is the recipient of the 2010/11Irish Residential Studios Award at the Red Stables.

The following text needed to be conductedin an orderly fashion. The reasoning behindthis effort to create ‘order’ will becomeclear when you discover, through readingthe following text––the predicament of anartist writing on a group show that he is alsoa part of... James Merrigan 1

This talk is refusing to be led in the directionI set myself.Italo Calvino 2

I, I!...the lthiest of all the pronouns!...The Pronouns! They are the lice of thought.When a thought has lice it scratches, likeeveryone with lice...and in your ngernails,then...you nd pronouns: the personalpronouns.Carlo Emilio Gadda 3

An ‘orderly’ prefaceItalo Calvino diagnoses Gadda’s irritationwith his own ‘self’ in the above quotationwhen he writes: “The passion for knowledge therefore carries Gadda fromthe objectivity of the world to his ownirritated subjectivity.”4 Taken from Calvino’sproposed lectures for Harvard Universityin 1985 under the optimistic banner of SIX

MEMOS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM––tocut a short story even shorter, the lecturesnever took place and the sixth chapter on“consistency” was never nished due to

Calvino’s sudden death in 1985. Calvino’s“Six Memos,” like the art object, is ameditation on “Potential” and the ‘guringout’ of the objective arbitrary rules that thewriter sets for him- herself in the process of writing and thinking.

Shinnors Scholar Mary Conlon is a curator based at Limerick City Gallery of Art.Calvino’s existing ‘Five Memos’ underpinher curatorial project so far, which werepublished in 1988. Trompe Le Monde,translated as ‘Fool the World’, is the titleof Conlon’s third installment of her “SixMemos” project, and was played out atOccupy Space, Limerick, in 2011. The groupshow included ve artists: Juan Fontanive,Dana Gentile, Helen Horgan, MichaelMurphy and myself or ‘I’; the subjectivepersonal pronoun that Gadda would rather have ‘deleted’ from existence.

‘I’ with Two ApostrophesThe irony of this text is that it is near toimpossible to avoid the ‘I’––that subjectiveself, ego, id, thinking substance, that gets inthe way of our view of the world, especiallyin the case of my participation as an artist

in Trompe Le Monde. Paradoxically, whatmakes Gadda’s prose so compulsive ishis effort to get rid of ‘himself’. UsingCalvino as a point of entrance rather thandeparture, ‘I’ will start with four of the veartist that made up Trompe Le Monde, andsee what I can do with ‘I’.

To grasp this concept of ‘I’ with bothhands let’s start with ‘identity’ in the

context of Dana Gentile’s art practiceand photography in general. Becausephotography can exist outside the tightparameters of the art world, there is a



OCCUPY PAPER ISSUE 6 22

apostrophes everywhere

fundamental split between its position in artand popular culture. In an article for FriezeMagazine titled “Snap Shot”, Christy Langewrites how Isabelle Graw’s 2009 book,High Price: Art Between the Market andCelebrity Culture, claims the commercialsuccess of Andreas Gursky’s photographshas been “confused with artisticachievement.”5 There is also the case of the narcissistic discourse that has beentriggered by Jeff Wall’s photography, whichhas prevented any other artist who utilises

photography solely, or as part of their artpractice, to be separated from his godlikepresence. Identity as Slavoj Žižek describesvia Jacques Lacan is a complex issue; he

writes: ‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexual’implies, among other things, that balancedco-ordination is missing, that nature, withinthe realm of human existence, is anythingbut a harmonious and whole ‘One––All’.As Lacan expresses it...nature does not‘copulate’ in order to generate the ctitious,perfected unity of a spherical totality.Lacan is great on anything to do with the‘fractured self’. His analysis of identity isfurther split with Žižek’s usual tinkering withthe paradoxical. ‘Fracturing’ is an important

aspect of postmodernism and contemporaryart. Although this is nothing new, the imagehas been fractured since Cubism, but whatmakes art today more difcult to piece

James Merrigan, My Mother is a Fish (2010), 1min 38sec audio, 2 chairs, William Faulkner’s novel ‘As I Lay Dying’, plywood, corrugated plastic, Gorilla Tape, led lights



TITLE(basenine)

OCCUPY PAPER ISSUE 623

together is the teaming of the fracturedimage with the fractured identity; combiningto create a perpetually fracturing narrativethat is always missing a piece of the jigsaw.Artists who use photography as one aspectof their art practice, such as Shannon Ebner,are particularly good at revealing both anidentity and hiding behind some signier that spells out FRACTURE. Dana Gentile, anartist based in Brooklyn, New York, is alsoone of those artists.

In an earlier work, Plate Tectonics, 2008,Gentile literalised this idea of ‘fracture’or ‘shift’ in the display of found porcelainplates that were ‘repaired’ with inserts of maple. This specic work sets up a premisefor Gentile’s photographic images atOccupy Space. Personally, the photographsoffer much more because of the artist’sconsistent control and deliberate articulation

of the formal construction of the image,against the shattered narratives of thebroken landscape and the staged humanelements within the image.

During a conversation with Gentile, the artistdescribed that the three colour photographsthat inhabited the rst room of OccupySpace were “humourous” efforts to controlthe environment. Birdbath, 2005, showsGentile standing in her family’s upstateNew York home, dressed in a bathing suitwith a glass bowl full of water in hand. Her pose is expectant. Her eyes look toward ahanging bird-house ‘feeder’. All the linesdrag your eye to the hole in the feeder. Thehole is also placed where the traditional nailfor hanging ‘framed’ photographs is foundon the back. The composition is all aboutbalance and expectation.A view from back to front, or the “potential”for expanding beyond the frame of representation, or one point of view isalso offered in Tree House, 2004. A treeis positioned awkwardly before a timber

house in either a failed attempt at elegantlandscaping, a “humorous” effort to“control the environment,” or just lazinesson the part of the house owners. The

Dana Gentile,Birdbath (2005), C-Print, 20”x20”, Scarf Head (2006), C-Print, 20”x20”Tree House (2004), C-Print, 20”x20”




Colorado sun attens all the objects beforethe artist’s lens. Although, from Gentile’scamera view the tree blocks our full viewof the house, the sun sneaks through easily

to light up the wooden gable of the house.The tree is a failed sunshade. Again, likeBird Bath, we can imagine Gentile waitingfor the sun to reveal some failure, andthen point and shoot. A chance elementwithin the picture frame is a glimpse of aconcrete rim of a road that cuts the picturediagonally in half. The rim reads as a seriesof dashes, semiotic openings that offer theviewer an escape from the frame; in the

sense of talking or writing oneself out of aclosed space.

Helen Horgan’s The Horse’s Mouths(2011) is like a big brain; a containedand protected island of absurdity. Aperspex triangular ‘bath’ lled with water

and oating islands that look like brainmatter, are straddled by model boatswith stilt-legged lanterns and motorisedrotating lights. But like Gentile’s semiotic

opening in the decorative substructureof the road, Horgan’s giant fabricated‘apostrophe’ punctuated the containedsculpture to offer ‘potential’. Calvinowrites “We waste precious time onabsurd clues and pass by the truth withoutsuspecting it.”6 Horgan’s sculpture for Trompe Le Monde was both diaristic andencyclopedic. Calvino also discusses howthe encyclopedia “etymologically implies

an attempt to exhaust knowledge of theworld by enclosing it in a circle.”7 Horgan’swork literally illustrated this point, but itis the “diaristic” form of her art practicethat torments the ordering of her centrallyfocused structures. But, from someone whoexperienced Horgan installing her own

Helen Horgan, The Horse’s Mouths (2009-2011), mixed media installation, dimensions variable



25 OCCUPY PAPER ISSUE 6

work, she is an artist who has her ownrule book, nothing is arbitrary––just likeGeorg Perec, who Calvino describes ascreating his own arbitrary rules to produce“inexhaustible freedom.”8 Gadda is alsoin Horgan’s sculpture, but he , as wasmentioned above, didn’t realise the ‘I’ wasa ‘rupture’ rather than a prison.

Why is it that the ‘art-object’ can alwaysget away with being unnished, and if questioned about this fact the ‘critic’ isrebuked with the philosophical objection––nothing is ever nished. If the art object isframed properly and the context is right,whether that context is shaped by lookingbackward for some precursor in the historyof the art object, or indulging in the hubrisof looking forward for something new or original, the art work in essence has toappear unnished or unresolved to offer potential for expanded narratives. Theseconsiderations came to the fore duringthe installation of Michael Murphy’s large

‘potential’ dance oor structure. Before theopening night, the installation of the workwas partnered by a conversation aboutwhether to leave the ‘I’ out, or leave it in?The ‘I’ in Murphy’s case was a stack of Shoot football magazines that he collectedas a young lad. The strong formalism of the artist’s work at Occupy Space alsoreferenced the past, but not Murphy’s past:

the art of the past in the minimalist purityof Donald Judd’s sculpture. Judd himself dened this mode of art object as a “simpleexpression of complex thought.” Wouldthe addition of the Shoot Magazines haveacted as an ‘apostrophe’ in the same wayas Horgan’s? The title of Murphy’s work––We still have the Taste of Dancing on our Tongues, offered (to my mind), a morerewarding ‘apostrophe’.

Juan Fontanive’s kinetic wall work seemedmodest at rst glance. My immediatepresumption that a rectangular white boxhoused a moving image was soon enough

Michael Murphy: We still have the Taste of Dancing on our Tongues (2011), Mixed media sculpture,2.5m x 2m x 30cm




debunked as ‘I’ moved closer to the object.Instead of a LED screen, a series of motorsacted like pulleys, threading a ‘dashed’black and white cord up and down in anaesthetically pleasing but also workman-likemovement (echoing the concrete road rimof Gentile’s Tree house). This is what BridgetReilly would make if she could work motors.The title of the work, Illuminated, also pointed

back to an Op art fascination with the shiftinglight. But what saved this work from beingoverly indulgent in optics and aesthetics wasthe prole of a head that framed the movingcords. You can imagine Fontanive’s objectas something that a psychoanalyst wouldhave as a desk ornament in their Manhattanofce, like the clichéd ‘Newton’s Cradle’.Fontanive’s art object seemed to be enactinga thread that connected all the works under Calvino’s view of the world as a “system of systems.”9 One question that ‘I’ am left withrelating to the New York artist’s work (butwhich is best left unanswered), was the proleof the head that framed the shifting cords theartist’s own prole?

And nally my own work, but in keeping withCalvino’s unnished ‘Five’ of ‘Six Memos’, an‘apostrophe’ will do.

’

Juan Fontanive:Illuminated (2011),Mixed media sculpture,32h x 26w cm

1. James Merrigan, ‘Apostophes Everywhere’, April 20112. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,Modern Classics, 1998, p.513. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,p.1084. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,p.1085. Christy Lange, ‘Snap shot’, Frieze Magazine, Issue 131,May 20106. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,

p.1117. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,p.1168. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,p.1229. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,p.105-6

Occupy Issue 6 James Merrigan

Documents

Transcript of Occupy Issue 6 James Merrigan