GLOSS IN SIX SCENES
by Isobel Wohl
1.
In the desert a plant grows. Not sure if they’ve seen it yet but I know it’s there or I think I know. Creosote. Ironwood. What I don’t know is its name.
They snuffle, they press their snouts into the plant body. Light tumbles pink and orange across the land. I like to think I know how the sand feels underpaw. From the distance light touches the back of the dark vegetation and the animals know what is being set on fire.
2.
This one is in another landscape, and this one is true.
I see a signpost in the marsh. It reads, BISHOP’S HIDE. I say to my friend, That’s a strange one. What, she says. I says, BISHOP’S HIDE. I am imagining the skin of a religious man, peeled off, tanned and spread out on the ground like a carpet or sloughed off in a heap like a vestment unwanted, gleaming with blood in the twilight. What sort of place could be named after that?
No, my friend says, a hide is like a little hut. Where you conceal yourself so you don’t scare the birds off. Then you can watch them move, their little footsteps, flight.
Oh, I say, then a hide is what we call a blindin America.
Oh, she says.
We go inside the blind-hide to look. The floor is made of wooden slats and there is a low bench and in front of it a long wide cutout for looking. We sit.
Next something rustles in the reedmarsh, rush, there’s a foot of unseen something. In the hide there is a strip of sight constructed. At the edge of the hide strip I see something take flight. Meanwhile another animal rubs its furry side against the hut. I can’t see it and it can’t see me. A blind is a hide and both are where you look from.
3.
I arranged a phone conversation with the artist Neal Rock. First we corresponded by email. I wrote something like, Look, I’ve talked to Augustine but I want to make sure I incorporate your ideas into the piece also.
At first the quality of the WhatsApp call was not good and so Neal had to walk around a room in Charlottesville, Virginia until it was. We talked about glass and artworks that glow as if lit from within, also about light coming from elsewhere, glossing objects, also about how text can function in relation to artworks and press releases in the form of fictions that only obfuscate. I said, Yes, it’s important not to obfuscate. It’s important to think instead about what work the text does or does not have to do insofar as the act of, art of, act of making intelligible is concerned. How writing can show work that operates as a series of reframings or filtrations across distance.
Neal said that there are at least fifteen or twenty drawings under each drawing, that first on khadi paper he laid acrylic wash, that he then drew with charcoal on top, that he then erased some of the charcoal, drew again, rubbed out, that drawing becomes like editing, twenty maybe drawings under each.
I said something like, Look it looks like the thing in front, the subject, object, that thing is not being seen, it is blocking my sight, blind spot, burn.
4.
Clay in a hand grasped, formed before you know it. A shape emerges before its maker knew it. The side of the animal sees the shape of the blind.
You see it transformed, distanced, blown up. You see where its finish wants you to touch it.
5.
What you are seeing has been kept from you. It is shown only in the gloss, in the hide.
6.
Around the corner from a greengrocer’s, three C-prints show polaroids that show small clay objects against a clay background. I can see the impressions of fingertips. I can see nervous activity. We enter the gallery space.
A boat, a tic, a finish, a tongue, a blind, lying on a black metal frame. I see it from its contours and from the light that slides over them, pools in their crooks and junctures. It shows me a dark shape. What I don’t know is its first form, plasticine or clay somewhere else.
On another frame lie two open Cordon Bleu cookbooks, and on their pages black masses weight instructions that tell me how to make oranges en surprise. In the photograph that accompanies the recipe light from some bulb in some photoshoot falls on meringue and orange. I want to touch sleek sides and rounded tops, touch the object from which touch was removed in replication, expansion, and lacquer in order to make the finish that makes me want to touch the thing that was removed from me. Sight is most tender where it borders and so forms its limit. You may have held it in your hand before you knew what it was.
On thin shelves small luminous drawings lean against the walls. They are in groups of twos or threes. Their edges are irregular and sometimes catch flecks of colour as if smoldering. Charcoal marks seem to obstruct my vision. At times these marks take forms like plants and at other times they take the form of stripes. In some of the striped works internal divisions open the work into another enclosure of looking. Dawn happens from a margin moved central.
Non, 2019 on the facade of Transition by Augustine Carr
Non, 2019 on the facade of Transition by Augustine Carr
Cordon Bleu II, 2019 with Summa Theologica VII, 2018 by Augustine Carr and Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Cordon Bleu II, 2019 by Augustine Carrr
Cordon Bleu II, 2019 with Summa Theologica VII, 2018 by Augustine Carr and Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Photos by Ben Westoby
Cordon Bleu II, 2019 with Summa Theologica VI, 2018 by Augustine Carr and Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
Untitled, 2019 by Neal Rock
“After his decades-long explorations of American deserts, the British architectural theorist Reyner Banham stood defiant against the historical imperative of understanding deserts as places of self-discovery. In the last pages of Scenes In America Deserta, Banham declares he has done little more than lose himself in these seemingly baron landscapes. In doing so he encountered continual and shifting oscillations from centre to margin, embracing an inexhaustible wonderment over the pursuit of self-knowledge.”
Neal Rock, 2019