haecceities
or
"I’m no f**king Buddhist
But this is enlightenment" Björk [1]
Benjamin Woods
Writing in, through, and
away from the project ‘widen, subtract, warm, cool, observe out’ (being
presented at the Incinerator Gallery garden space, Moonee Ponds 30th
January to 28th March, 2015).
Image 1: Benjamin Woods, widen, subtract, warm, cool, observe out, proposal image, 2015.
For around a year I’ve
been making various rings out of timber. I bend the timbers by soaking them in
water and clamping them around different plywood and cardboard “forms”.[2]
The forms – as well as the rings that are bent on them – are maneuvered in
movement improvisations as a kind of perceptual shade, for acts of non-seeing; partially
and sensitively blocking out what is visible. The rings are used to experiment
with acts of perceiving-moving. When handling them I’ve experienced a widening
of sight along an edge towards a felt, bodily sense of open and intensely
particular orientation. For me, they have heightened an awareness of what is
visible as a field of activity completely permeated, made and reworked by what
is invisible.
Image 2:
Performance-lecture in Helen Grogan’s SPECIFIC
IN-BETWEEN (the choreographic negotiated in six parts), ACCA 2014. Photo:
Laura May Grogan.
Jeanette Winterson says
that she sometimes sees ‘[Barbara] Hepworth’s sculptures [as] inversions - that the
object, however beautiful, is a way of seeing what surrounds it.’[3]
Even at its most basic, sculpture requires the production of multiple positions
or views. I’m most interested in work that operates openly across larger
spatial and temporal distances/sites, where sculptural objects are generative parts of
expansive artistic explorations. Participating in highly mobile, open and dispersive material
arrangements might allow for ways of being that can at times engender the
subtraction of any one position or stance. Dynamic materials and their wild
(indeterminate) circumstances become intensely mixed with social and bodily
movement, movement that happens as both means and ends (touches and responses,
reading and writing, feeling and doing). In this mode of working complexities
are not captured, they continue to unfurl.
The ways the body moves,
are themselves, a belief system. The process of moving into and through
postures is not the corporeal translation
of a belief or idea; rather, that process is the belief or idea as it produces
a certain stance towards the world, the self, and the relations linking the
two… This belief is lived on the order of the body – as a form of consciousness.[4]
I take care when reading this piece of writing. In the past I’ve noticed
that it can be very easy to let actions become heavily contrived, inflected by
inward anxieties (of doing “bad”). It also seems easy to let the influence of
others (including nonhuman otherness) so harshly shape the spaces and times
that we participate in making. In the project ‘widen, subtract, warm, cool,
observe out’ the rings are a tiny
contribution to a mixture of forces that enable
and constrain what can and cannot be done or said (an ethical fabric).[5]
The rings provide just enough of a line of flight for experience, enfolding
fresh information, different trajectories and forces, altering the ‘way of
seeing’ (and eventually the practice) itself. I’m most excited by this project’s
potential to test out a lightness of ‘touch that
does not seize hold or manipulate or possess’ others.[6] Even
the finest intervention can act as a nerve with which various movements refresh
our approaches towards figuring and questioning what matters.
I arrive at the garden
space with arms full of timber rings and various accouterments. Strewing them
across the scoria ground, I begin exploring the site. Marks appear: sticks,
weeds, eucalyptus growth at the middle of very large trees, decomposed baby
bird, shiny old chocolate wrapper, spitfire caterpillar, concrete paths,
crashing sounds of the adjacent waste transfer station, the path of the sun.
Shade, an intensity I had been observing for some months before, is compelling
where I stand. As a dynamic play of possible arrangements overtakes my body,
the rings begin to stretch the space, redistributing distances and senses; they
are cutting across anything at their edges, indiscriminately. What might be
considered welcome become, to varying degrees, perforated and peppered with the
potentially uninhabitable. All the qualities are lived. The imperceptible and
invisible saturate encounters as forces relating and buzzing within fractions
of visibility.
Image 3: Benjamin Woods, widen, subtract, warm, cool, observe out,
installation detail, 2015.
Bibliography
“Interview with Alphonso Lingis,” Bobby George and Tom Sparrow, Singularum, last accessed 25 October 2012,
http://singularum.com/interviewwithalphonsolingis.
Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing
Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2009)
Jeanette Winterson, Hole of Life, TATE online, 2003, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/hole-of-life.
[1] Björk, Alarm Call in ‘Homogenic’ (One Little
Indian, 1997), 8.
[2] When I make rings in the
morning a length of timber will be soaked and bent, left to dry until the
evening when it will be unclamped. Sometimes another will be bent straight away
and left to dry overnight. On the days I bend the timber, most of the hours are
left open for other things to happen. In these studio engagements, I can see
how making something can come to help shape time and space.
[3] Jeanette Winterson, Hole of Life, TATE online, 2003, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/hole-of-life.
[4] Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing
Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2009), 36.
[5] The forces that produce
what is possible are not merely the current physical and social encounters;
they are also (but not accumulatively) what has
been done or said in the practice (history, discipline, field), how and where
they have been spoken, or how and where they have happened, with affects/effects
that stretch and disperse beyond the accountable.
[6] “Interview with Alphonso Lingis,” Bobby George and Tom Sparrow, Singularum, last accessed 25 October
2012, http://singularum.com/interviewwithalphonsolingis.