Form of Resistance

Walls, Doors and The Church of the Holy Spirit (Cerkev Svetega Duha):

The installation Form of Resistance uses archetypal forms—a door, a wall…a religious figure—whose original narratives have become, through their ubiquity, altered, and in some respects, ordinary.

The Baroque church form is in itself the “embodiment” of a system of beliefs that has been accepted (even outside of the particular belief system) and then over time normalized. The sacrosanctity of the church is gradually diluted by the temporal constructs of change and distanced from its representational—consecrated—origins. This is also true for the building-as-body’s syntactical elements—doors (liminal thresholds), windows (portals of light) and walls (the form that is the embodied interstice between the inherent perils of the exterior world and the safe-haven provided by the interior spaces of the imbued material body); their specific meanings and rituals are reduced and then dismissed from the corporeality of the architecture as a whole.

Consecration is the act of giving form preternatural meaning beyond the material – beyond the ordinary; the X-Ray violates the sanctity of form's surface—through acts of material resistance—to reveal the ‘core’ language of that form, and as such excites one’s imagination to create alternative narratives.

Reciprocities

The part is the whole: each of the two sides which is the whole goes back over to the oth­er: anti­do­sis twixt a lan­guage and a world; ​“exchange of a reci­procity of proofs,” whose myth is that of the flood, when world things climb aboard the book of Noah, ark of the covenant, through the pro­ces­sion of nam­ing under pres­sure of the end of the world that has begun. On the thresh­old the throb­bing of lan­guage where criss­cross a world for the being who speaks of it and the poem of a tongue for a world there­in con­fig­ured, at this divide stands a sub­ject as in the utopia that finds its metaphor in every tim­ber­line: scene of the crease of the world’s dif­fer­ence through its fig­u­rants, as where for­est breaks with field, sea with land; a tim­ber­line path where the bor­der col­lie roams; said path where things break togeth­er, sand wave, snow mead­ow, alle­go­rizes the word thing divide for an utter­ance where­in the rhythm of their sym­ph­ysis is fig­ured. (Dokei de mega ti einai kai kale­pon lêph­tê­nai o topos) ( = Place is regard­ed as some­thing of great impor­tance but dif­fi­cult to grasp [Aris­to­tle, Physics IV, 212a 7; tr. note])” “Timberline” by Michel Deguy; translated from the French by Wilson Baldridge.

Trees and Resistance

As a child I was fas­ci­nat­ed by the shape of trees, espe­cial­ly the windswept ones that lined the marsh­es and beach­es where I roamed. We called the con­tort­ed oaks Scrub Oaks, and then there were the hunch­backed cedars and the two-faced red bay trees; all of them were shaped by acts of resis­tance to the con­stan­cy of the South­east Tradewinds. Their trunks and limbs—their bodies—overtly expressed the inter­stice of their inter­nal and exter­nal resis­tance and the resultant poten­tial ener­gy held with­in. The inter­course between grav­i­ty-laden tra­jec­to­ry and wind gave way to trees that were short and twisted…gnarled, and the arched sweep of their limbs and leaves point­ed west­ward, acqui­es­cent­ly bow­ing to the relent­less­ness of the pre­vail­ing winds. The sto­ry of their resis­tance was etched upon their barked sur­face as evi­dence made man­i­fest through the reci­procity between inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or forces. Their form was their story.

The trees were a front­line of resis­tance that gave notice to the two topo­graph­i­cal sides of my own sto­ry. And when walk­ing upon their exposed roots and climb­ing with­in their limbs, I felt a tac­tile entan­gle­ment, a kind of uni­fied between­ness that I shared with the con­toured rough­ness of their forms: an entwine­ment that embod­ied the wry indif­fer­ence of the phe­nom­e­nal world. This embod­i­ment con­tin­ues to fos­ter the notion that per­ceiv­able forms are a cap­tured inter­stice of the dual­i­ty of resis­tance: the mnemon­ic trees; a body’s coun­te­nance, made vis­i­ble through the inter­face between DNA and grav­i­ty. And grav­i­ty – the silent har­bin­ger of spec­u­lar aware­ness, indif­fer­ent to both mat­ter and emo­tion, all-the-while sur­rep­ti­tious­ly pro­mul­gat­ing the latent poet­ry of decay.

Changeability

Both material and nonmaterial forms of resis­tance change when one part suc­cumbs to anoth­er. Pushed beyond the intrin­sic abil­i­ty to resist, the sta­sis of stored poten­tial ener­gy shifts and re-forms as anar­chic reset­tle­ments, and as such, forms change. Michel Deguy’s ​tim­ber­line, too, despite the sto­icism of its fig­u­rants, even­tu­al­ly forms hesitant correspondences: at the Timberline tem­po­ral dis­place­ments con­found one’s mem­o­ry of place to the point of dis­ori­en­ta­tion: sym­phys­tic topogra­phies—the familiar joints connecting two sides—become fractured…unknowable.

Superficies

Super­fi­cies are the observ­able countenance of the duality of resis­tance: the causal appear­ance or pro­jec­tion of coun­ter­ac­tive forces that are most often defined by internal content. Yet the poet Joseph Brod­sky notes that ​“surfaces—which is what the eye reg­is­ters first—are often more telling than their con­tents, which are pro­vi­sion­al by def­i­n­i­tion, except, of course in the after­life”. Brodsky suggests that the relationship between content and surface, and perhaps more importantly the distances between, are dialectically co-dependent, correspondent and liminal.