Hiding in Plain Sound (Fullessness)

(2024)

Conference presentation for the panel “Left in the Dark: Blackness as negation or an ephemeral form of being?” chaired by Anna O’Meara, Universities Art Association of Canada UAAC-AAUC conference, Western University, October 25.

ABSTRACT:

Everything up in the air. A certainty of uncertainty.

The only thing to do is to do. Not to be, only to do. To not be.

Born to not. Nêtre, neverything.

To do and not do lists. Undo is undone. The doing of not being.

A surfeit scheme predicated on an ‘I’ that does, but one always in excess of oneself, a one too-much (Hélène Cixous’ plus-je).

A profusion which quickly becomes aware of the need to temper, to let the ‘i’ down the lowercase path.

Sprinkle a bit of negation to everything. Necessarily present, but better out of the way, sidelined, stricken.

Not even barely registering, blipless, beyond or below range.

This presentation’s principal focus will be Simone Forti’s performance of Platforms which used a prop made by Robert Morris that eventually became his Box for Standing (1961).

In this “dance construction”, as Forti calls it, she hides under the coffin-sized box (it’s lying horizontally) and does vocalizations while using the box as a resonating chamber.

Juxtaposed to this sonic, claustrophilic, and invisible choreography will be Adrian Piper’s Untitled Performance at Max’s Kansas City from 1970 which was an attempt to achieve objecthood via a shutting off of the senses.

Both locate us in a domain where we can, as Catherine Clément puts it, “enter the logic of nighttime; it is a different logic, one of syncope.

A liberated logic.