Solo Residency: Spacing

What is one to do with the individual? Social Distancing: space them out, like Carl Andre. Ben: notice how they are spacing themselves out, like breathing.

This opportunity has emerged from Blindside innovating their compliance to social distancing and temporary exhibition closure. To be honest, compliance is not something I think of when I think of good art. The more anarchic cells in my body are bouncing with hope that compliance to public health advice, enacted now, can produce interesting structural changes to pre-pandemic governance.

A quick response to global events – even when a pandemic isn’t happening – doesn’t come easily for me, in words at least.

[Tears and grief and commitment to practice have been coming more easily.]

Events at the scale of the studio, the gallery, or the university classroom, however, are different. My sculpture practice, rather than enter crisis mode in pandemic, feels bolstered as the right thing for me to dedicate some of my time to each day. I was doing, thinking, feeling different things (other than refreshing news sites and building anxieties) before this pandemic, and I will be doing, thinking, feeling different things when our more dangerous micro-inhabitants get less keen.

I would ordinarily write a residency proposal for which I might be able to invent some of the spatial and temporal elements, some sculptural investigations. Even in a pandemic there will be some room for invention. However, due to the timing of this residency, there are already interesting guides on possible activities that I wish to mine.

At Blindside I am to access and work as an individual human body in the gallery. I’ll clean up my bodily traces.

[Already this understanding of an individual doesn’t hold up to my sculptural experience. As cleaning and hygiene practices attest, any individuation is contingent. I’ve read the words porous body used quite often in this regard, but I think I prefer gooey… *looks out the window at the rain*… or foggy. The influential artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art comes to mind in this moment, in many moments. It always provokes in me the question of what I am maintaining each day with my practices, what am I turning attention towards, away from, is my attention moving at all? If the cleaning maintains a slowing down of public health risk in a pandemic, I am happy. If the cleaning is about maintaining some partitioned understanding of self, I’m less happy.]

Travel between my apartment and the gallery must be direct and swift, without diversion, with social distancing. There is so much to think through, but touch comes to mind first when I think of the scales of the human and the virus and their co-becoming, and when I consider our response to mitigate the speed of travel of corona infections.

In her text The Deepest Sense, Constance Classen unpacks the sense of touch in medieval Europe. Touch, according to Classen, was the ordering force in European cultures at the time. People shared drinking cups and delighted in carvings, embroideries and metalwork, all apprehended closely in low lit rooms. Furniture was pushed to the edges of rooms to allow easy orientation by feel. Classen argues that many touch-bound aspects of life changed quite rapidly with the arrival of the plague. Broadly, these cultures worked their way into the ocular, the image and the view became a main mode of enjoyment. Today it could be argued that touch has become more about spacing, to briefly consider Derrida’s engagement with Nancy (On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy)… can two eyes touch? Perhaps a poignant text for social distancing, Derrida considers Nancy’s writing on touch as that which is excribed or ex-ists, a parting and imparting of self, differently – a repeated fainting/passing or syncope. Instead of touch as joining, continuistic, and foundational to other senses, touch is refigured as ‘endless partition… a community without community…’ A rejection of world that generates a world as its very own rejection, in Nancy’s phrase.

As a sculptor who works mainly with slow processes of forming (bodies, imprints, impressions), I feel much closer to the medieval. But I won’t share a cup during a pandemic, for genuine fear that doing so might kill my grandmother, or you, or myself. I feel closer to the medieval because I feel as though the spacing of touch – our social distancing as a prime example – has the potential to sensitise us to touch itself. Sensitising is something I believe sculpture can do exquisitely, if not sometimes awkwardly and confrontingly. My daily self-isolation walks have been sweet. Every leaf and sound have been encountered like treasure. My friends’ words, projected 1.5m, land in my body with that much more weight.

I read Derrida’s words in this way: to space touch out might actually make touch possible. To consider oneself to be spatially continuistic with those around you might be to (perhaps accidentally) override their differences, abrasions, and dissent. To consider oneself to be temporally continuistic with oneself might be to override your own differences, tensions, and changes.

I hope the above writing helps to position the way of investigating I will be undertaking at Blindside.