Penny In The Fountain
group exhibition w/ Anu Vahtra, Lieven Lahaye and Veronika Eberhart
VBKÖ, Vienna
July 9 - August 10 2022
In Her Hour (Openings), 2022
Drawing on semi-transparent paper, absent handwriting
101 x 70 (x 7)
Process:
I start out with filling a sheet of paper from start until the end with automatic writing; a continous registration of all the thoughts that passes through my head. Every sheet takes approx. 3 hours to fill. I then cover the writing with another sheet of semi-transparent paper and mark out where the line of thought involuntarily exhausts and changes. The black markings thus indicate the gaps between the thoughts in the text underneath. The sheet with the handwritten text is later removed and thrown away.
I repeat the process until it is exhausted.
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Kristeva writes:
“The fact remains that another reading of the unconscious itself might locate within its own fabric (...) that nonrepresentative spacing of representation that is not the sign but the index of death drive.” Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun – Depression and Melancholia, 27. New York: Columbia Press, 1989.
During the process of writing, of emptying myself of words, I gradually realize that the words in themselves are not the aim of this project – the flow of language yes, the materialization of the immaterial stream of thoughts yes, and an answer to the yell, yes – but not the words as my words in the common sense. In the end they sort of stand in the way, they become the skin I need to shed in order to reach the living core - they become the carriers of process, of my physical extension and embodiment in time and space, my subject’s documented presence, but what stepped forward through this, what became visible, was an underlying something, my pulsating something, an underlying rhythm. Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine – what stepped forward was an inner spacing, an inner punctuation or negativity, an inner unknown, punctuating and breaking, rupturing and breaching, occurring chaotically, without, or outside of structure, breaking the structure, a vertical break in a horizontal structure.
Lispector writes:
“I must interrupt to say that “X” is what exists inside me. “X” – I bathe in this. It’s unpronounceable. All I do not know is in “X”. Death? death is “X”. But much life too, for life is unpronounceable. “X” that shakes within me and I fear its pitch: it vibrates like the string of a cello, a tense string that when plucked emits pure electricity, without melody. The unpronounceable instant.” Lispector, Clarice. Agua Viva, 72. New York: New Directions Books, 2012.
In Her Hour (Openings) – So what is this X, the inner void, the spacing, the breaching, the opening up, the vertical gap in horizontal time, horizontal structure, the index of the radiating dark sun, the negation – the enigmatic and feminine, in the male, the hidden and fully revealed at the same time, the underlying and the always present – In Her Hour, Openings, in her, from her, openings in the hours, spacings that enable time as such to become hours, that which enables time to become time, that which is the time’s Other, the time’s It, the time’s infinite half, the residue of pulsating placenta, of lifegiving merging, of wholeness and unity; the meeting point of the axes; the origo, origin.
Is this then the ultimate unknown? The ultimate enigma? That in process seeps through, the unknown, the enabler of movement, of change, that which makes repetition of the same impossible, stillness impossible, that which breaches structure, syntax, so structure and syntax can renew themselves. Is this the it that seeps through, that is not possible to pin down, that is there, occurs, but escapes definition, and when looked for, when hidden to be revealed, steps forward and becomes visible? That which is the Other half all the time, but might be unrecognizable; that unknown component of You, of the I, the placenta that yells and breaks the given; the unknown in the known, the unfamiliar in the familiar? There is revolution in poetic, mater-nal language. Gravity and grace.
Lispector asks:
“Is “X” the breath of the It? the cold radiating respiration of it? Is “X” a word?” Lispector, Clarice. Agua Viva, 73. New York: New Directions Books, 2012.
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Excerpt from the text On Becoming The Origo - Martine Flor