objects i cannot touch

Video (2014)

OBJECTS I CANNOT TOUCH is a video piece that was commissioned for The Avant exhibition at Tactic Gallery, Cork, Ireland in 2014. It emerged from conversations with Anna Moser in the context of a two-year feminist collaboration called Aesthetic Failures. The piece considers bodily gestures, geometrical metaphors, unwieldy desires, formal seriality, and the possibility of describing objects in the medium- and genre-specific realm of the (printed) text and through performance.

Originally titled, ‘Lines for Anna’, it was re-named for a performance at the Serpentine Gallery within the exhibition design is a state of mind, which presented various shelving systems and everyday design-objects that the visitors (and performers) were of course not allowed to touch.

[Prelude] 

‘geometrical lines do not produce likeable people’ 

ah well now that is a different matter 

i don't know what you’re talking about 

oh these shelving systems 

these so temporary frames

[….]

*

 

it seems perfectly clear to me that someone could have presented a principle, a prescription, almost medicinal, wrought in such a way as to be twisted into a formula, an underlying cryptograph underlying all possible propositions. when unambiguously concentrating on the dealings of every word or line or stroke that is constituted as structurally open, this milieu comes to stand for or calls upon the parameters of the creation or composition being the same or similar to those same or similar conditions of the productive agent as maker. and as it is precisely and unambiguously their total dependence on ‘use’ (what isn’t) and love (at its smooth and glassy horizontal qualities if considered in that light), it is merely a linguistic formulation subject to all the exigencies of beautifully unchanging constellations.

phew. that was a lot of words. could you hear me

 

*

sometimes i light a cigarette, look through the window, orient the tangents of my body and still nothing moves.

 

i cannot see you.

 

distance distance

 

i cannot make aphorisms.

 

Publication:
Paratext 1 (2015).