Between Seeing

28.3.2010



Between holding and letting go- something on the verge. A wavering. Something that shimmers. The paintings of Van Gogh that solidify into things and landscapes and people at a certain distance, but where the pigments fight, seperate out, mix and re-settle, embrace and shout as something compelling and disturbing, up close. Even when the paint runs dry the swimming momentum continues. A swirling rush of affects that perturb our nervous spinal column- set us into a flow of reactivity and counter-balance. It is hard to get a one right gage. We know the gage in which everything gels and blinks out the unsettlement of moving particles. But we can't help ourselves- we go closer. Too close. We look into the dizzying momentum. Are seized by it. This is as much what the picture is about as the tidiness of cohesion. We seek out the disarray of our fragile mobile displacement. We expect the arrival of the vertigo to know of this mutual viscous space. Until it is the very viscosity- the crowds of people in the gallery in the mid-space wedged between picture and picture on opposite walls- the crowds of pixels that disintegrate before our eyes, eddying around our bodies, reaching almost into our gagging response. Something of the disgust and compulsion, where we smell the raw disintegration of flesh affected by time. The tenacity of a painter long dead painting moments of holding together and coming undone, precipitating both. Quiet insubordination, shouting outside itself, silently. Witness the unutterable. Terrible, glorious.

My father on a bridge- vertigo- seeing beyond- the body entrapped. Stoppage and impossible running potential which is our undoing. Flimsy sides, atoms exploding from bodies without tensegrity. Imploding into disarray-slow leakage. Between galleries on a boat in the Thames. Debris, backing onto the paint scarred wooden vessel- with each swash and backlash, more morsels- utility pieces, toys and cartilage, decomposing tarnished plastic bags and the rare finds drop to the clay- plugged and partially immersed, resisting the pull and swash of the water, rinsing through grains of lighter sand, mixed into the atmosphere of the liquid medium- churning and un-churning over and over again.

In Contact Dance, Steve Paxton talks of Entrainment- that which happens in the minutiae of contactable propensities- and the resistances and marginal reallocations that ensue when there is this low level hum of engagement and disengagement running through one another. He talks about the details “at a low level of perceptual consciousness", "so small" that they are "almost slipping away" within "fragments of time", "fragments of impulses of the body". (All this on You-tube, sparing me the book- references.)

How do we practice this entrainment, slipping between coalescence and dispersal? Using a moment of affront and near eruption as the levying into a different outreach, - the build up of silt on a different shore only to be imploded by its own weight and the utilization of the vacuum around which another circulation evolves. The moment before reactivity there is a slight wavering where a two way pulse is measured, abstaining the readable volition of one in regard to the other. That measuring of directional forces is a kind of occlusion- an invisibility in the shimmering there/not thereness of a perfectly matched split attention. That absenting is an occasion. A lull before unidirectional action sets in to move the story onwards- narrate a turn of events; make it so.

In the details of that fragmented matching other levels of coordinated notation are arrived at. In the session with M, is his head touching my hand or my hand touching his head? Small adjustments and on-going reallocations across the speed impulses that are set up to create thoughtlessly, a meshing. In that meshing different intervals are played out between what a contact is, by constantly tipping the balance of angles in which that contact meets. This perturbation begins to play out a schema that is a repercussion of every instance of stopping and starting. The contact is a means to describe this pulse- or rather to enact it. But all this is at a quite invisible level if one were to describe M as from a certain distance.

At a glance, he appears a slanted figure being enticed along a bumpy road between point A and point B. The slight remodeling of head movement that ricochet through his body and affect the alignment of other points of contact that floss through and redistribute other bodies including that of an irritant and hurried Carer, would be irrelevant. Then all one would see would be the jerk and spasm of a head in perpetual motion- a kind of continual blur against upright stature that makes it hard for any observer to focus on.