Co-isolated

Slightly different content for this blog, my catalogue text for the ‘co-isolated’ exhibition here in Sydney. Work by David Burns, Richard Goodwin and Michael Snape. More info here: UTSArchitecture

Aesthetic k-hole

David Burns is a junkie for repetition; his work is an aesthetic k-hole.

Ketamine is an anaesthetic; pharmaceutically speaking it belongs to the class of drugs known as dissociatives which operate by blocking signals to the brain. According to frequent users, the slight overdose called a ‘k-hole’ is the closest one can get to death without actually dying, its effects include an inability to think, extreme tunnelling of vision and an overwhelming sense of cold dread. If ecstasy is a ‘tactile temptress’ full of baroque intricacy, ketamine is pure Miesien box.

Towering.

Lights on.

No one inside.

David Burns is a junkie for repetition; his work is an anaesthetic for the ecstasy generation, a generation hooked on sensational intensity.

There is something terrifyingly destructive about insistent repetition. It lays waste to our sense making apparatus, annihilates coordinates of reference and etherizes the self to the point of oblivion. In this infinitesimal calculus of sensation, cold mechanical repetition reveals itself as nothing less than the affective DNA of modernity itself.

The thin white lines.

The cold corridors.

The rectilinear banks of fluorescent light.

No one inside.

It’s the closest you can get to death.

The figuration of waste

Foam works by absorption – the absorption of loss.

To require insulation, one must first conceive of something that must be isolated from threat (or insulated from loss).  Foam conditions one environment against another, to do this it deploys a form filling fluid of atomized elements. Weak molecular bonds and pockets of air prevent the exchange of heat, the transfer of sound and the impact of force.

In this piece by Michael Snape we see the outlines of a community to come, a community of those who share the same waste (and air). For in the manipulation of one we produce the other.

In mere blocks of insulation; from which half carved bodies are splayed and contort we find a paradoxical form of contemporary life – the intimacy of anonymous material.

These figures are anonymous and mute.

They oscillate between the arcing gesture of a drawing and the excavation of depth from foam; barely held, barely suspended.

Barely together.

Co-isolated.

Co-insulated.

Since contemporary life is marked by the atomization of individuals – by the diffusion of bonds that bind elementary particles into something more substantial, more collective – foam comes to form its archetypal metaphor, its bonds are temporary.

It offers little resistance.

The wasp and the orchid

According to Immanuel Kant, we do not own our sexual organs.

Our genitals can only belong to another who has given us their organs in return.

In this reciprocal exchange of parts, a carefully delimited part of the body – the reproductive apparatus – is understood to take on a partial autonomy from the other parts that make up the person. Though all beings are equal in their capacity to reason and self-legislate, this capacity does not apply to all parts of beings equally. The sex organs take on exceptional status.

Certain types of wasps are parts in the ‘reproductive apparatus’ of orchids.

That is to say some orchids have wasps for genitals.

These orchids feature iridescent plumage ringed in small hair-like fibres that repeat the morphological and chemical character of female wasps. The sex drive of insects drives the genetic differentiation of plant life. Male wasps are endlessly falling in love with orchids.

The partial autonomy of parts detected by Kant finds one conclusion in the monstrous couplings of different species; it finds another in the coupling of bodies and things- that is, in the art of the prosthetic

For Richard Goodwin, this prosthetic solicitation begins with the sewer, in which the digestive tract and anus are connected to a network of tubes at the scale of a city. On other occasions the skin is de-laminated into a carapace the flesh is torn to cloth and an entire ensemble of exfoliated objects –rickshaws, bikes and moths – reassemble into disturbing couplings.

That is to say, some machines have autonomous limbs for parts.