Seeing as devastation

14.5.10



Something about seeing with the whole body which is devastating because it affects and alters- a sort of caustic acidic redistribution which should be embraced. That destabilisation which is on-going a kind of petrifaction that is innovative because it kick-starts recovery at the same time as the devastation is going on.


Falling into a fall. Offsetting the angle of abrupt ending. Edging into the paragraphs of continued lull. The hurt not mended- but struck up- magnified- seized. These endings hurt. We grasp the hurt like a dot to dot- abbreviate it but also take it somewhere further. Stand with it- let it rinse through – like a stinging mouth-wash over the gums. Percolating it- keeping it there. Lingering with it. Living in the ravages.

In the Henry Moor exhibition it was like that. The abrupt endings and metal muscle palettes in torsion- seized and elevated- the pain palpable- the endings totally unsentimental. Coursing around these remnants and articles- addressing them wholly- was like striking percussion- hearing the tinging and thump and shudder of a body’s beginnings and ends. A life caught in the middle. This abbreviation pulled into an excess stretch that is a luxuriant release and the gasping death-throes.


At ease and ill at ease roll together. I work around these. The school kids are always one room behind me but they are getting closer. Bright sounds in the corridors. Then those figures, recoiling from their lost flesh, cautioned by their missing limbs, roughly sawn off trees and plaster casts twisted and bent in a last insult before the molten lava is poured in- they harden for good.


There is a woman in a wheelchair being pushed around by an older woman. She is tenderized, sensitive, alert to the too wide berth she is being given by the passersby, yet herself lingering, sketching, quipping in and out deftly with her hand, her light voice, her perception that quickens and cuts away as she ponders, stares- absorbs into- absolves, lingers. The school kids flood around the chair- the swash and back tide of the pebble-filled water swilling up against the rocks. A natural process. I stand still too and allow the same forces to swill over me and retreat. From that I get a sense of embracing- the permanence of staying in position. There is one small boy with a large square plaster on his forehead. I feel the give and take of the skin under the envelope of surgical material. I feel and tenderize the sculptures in the same way.


I am exhausted soon from this affinity with something that can not feel back. I circulate each piece- get up really close, swaying like an oracle pendant that has lost any position of interpretation. I am pummelled, ushered, drawn and pulverised. The pores in my skin expand like that of an orange- I feel the metallic scoring into me. There is an affinity. The shoulder is my shoulder, the leg, my leg, the stomach bunched here, protruding there is my stomach- its sickness, it’s pouting searching. The chest my chest, ripped open, a direct line to the air- brutal. The back- it’s knottiness- areas of strain and twist just off from a line of easy reckoning- of relaxation and flaccidity, are what I feel. An unsubtle poke riveting all in place. A disturbance. Disjointedness.

The knees, the knobbly-ness of those knees- sinews at the back- cartilage at the sides where bone and flesh are woven together. The bulge of the calf- slightly pulsing. The ankle jointing – all the striated ligaments- tension and release of the toes- that torsion. And the thick powerful muscles around the neck- the roll and lollop of my head- I mean of the head of the sculpture- its weariness- the vestibular balance in the ears- the eye sockets spraining and wounded- cartilage and air-passages of the nose- either nostril- the lips flaying, gripping.


But on the sculpture there are no lips, no eyes, no ears- just a round pin head worked into a ledge at the last moment at the front – to demarcate the sidedness that is the quality of a head.

Strange – is it my features or an affinity- empathy with the gathering and dissipation of the sculpture? Caught between expressivity and blankness.

The same goes on in a treatment that evening- body-work. How do I know where to go? How do I decide? some kind of resonance between devastation and re- constitution that builds up equally in me as in the receiver- one aspect opens up the scope of another – through areas of attraction, repulsion and a low level buzz that sounds out in a drift so that I feel the tenderised areas in my body and go to the body of the receiver as a righting- an alignment of offsetting and magnification- a double- entendre that can only be experienced in this doubling and unity- an intensification- a sustaining for long enough that something occurs- a line engraved.


We have to go with this devastation – willingly activate it- then take the recovery as is needed. But it is too often inhibited and replaced with the ready-made version of the completed body that cannot be real because we have not gone through the stages of perpetual devastation and recovery to make it so. You have to rip muscle to build muscle as a body builder will tell you. It is never a presentable fact to begin with. We turn away from one another because we cannot bear to go through the motions of this unwinding. Disability is the last vestiges of that process- projected apart from the real body- the complete body- the finished body- that never knows of this process of seeing and witnessing by opening to devastation. That is why the body stops thinking- stops being articulate. Sadness of that finalised and cling-wrapped state is in a sense more tragic than the ravages of dis-ease and disability that touch all of us on a zigzag journey between birth and death. That journey animates us between one incompleteness and another.

Any creative process works in strictures. Begin a single line- a mean self-referential single line- perturb it slightly- watch it unfold and play into another line, then another and another spilling out of its own narrow oaring. Each time setting a new gage exactly where it ends, escalating, magnifying like a pack of cards flickering between hands. The figure of a moving animate life will grow- or a song the implications of which cannot be known as it takes route in gut after gut after gut. Best thing to do then is to keep narrowly and stubbornly to a specific course. Play it out doggedly, endlessly- let the contagion of other facets or the spoils of other leanings gradually shuffle around this set piece until the gage of that settlement is up for bargaining- improvise from repetition and certainty into the gradual warping and scurrying of that certainty. Let a multitude unravel by staying exactly in the limitation until that crease has effect. Make spaciousness out of the hesitation of filling the gap and by putting off accomplishing a starter sense of the whole. Work with single attributes, leanings, tones, specialities- the breed of a certain curtailed whining attitude that has no choice but to launch or be lured into what it is not.