NS

This text was published in Issue 17 of Ctrl+P Art Journal, September 2012. The accompanying photographs comprise an ongoing series started in 2009.

Maybe at one point it mattered where you were, in order to be able to get a sense of all the rest out there. A long time ago, when the question still mattered, what is that out there, and how can I get a sense of it (though, the question was probably more accurately, how can I get control of it). At one point it was flat, and then it was round, and then it became flat again. This is what I look upon, this atlas arrayed like an alien hide racked up on the side of the building.

What is the order supplied by these ripped, irregular outlines, concretely approximate, that they should be mounted so? From this, my street-level perspective, viewed from this very specific, hectic and indifferent corner in the Central District, Hong Kong (Des Voeux Road and Pedder Street, to be exact), the world on the wall is static totality.

It is not exactly a war map I am privy to, or an illustration of any particular property deed. It is a call to remember, rather than discover. Or rather, to keep in mind: the rest is out there. But what is the rest? Obviously, it doesnʼt have any particular features, nothing you would seize on. But with a glance, we keep in mind: itʼs 6 am in NY. As on a giant flash card, World flashes up in front of us.

In that instant, NS is that recognizable shape passing unrecognized. From the global view there is nothing particularly salient about it, except for its salience. It juts out into its form like the handle of the continental mass, a fractal projection injected into the extensively moderate curve of an East Coast, somewhere. The flattish lumps of vastness that stretch across vinyl hoardings and unpocked metallic reliefs evoke nothing, serving solely as the thumbnails for repetitive, brute accumulations—your Siberias, Saharas, Ontarios.

The edge between NS and negative space is infra-thin. Just as the mainland depends on it to be comprehensible, NS needs this other, this dark interval that surrenders our differences.

(The artist George Brecht, indignant at the institution of gaps between shapes, breezily brought together Havana and Miami on a map, dissolving family tensions with a shotgun wedding. Their consecratory kiss begs the question: islandizing the peninsula, or peninsulizing the island?)

In a rarefied club of peninsulas that includes “the boot,” “the mitten,” “the horn,” and the “tiger/rabbit,” NS essentially holds the global in its semiotic orientation. To some, it has quaintly and conveniently resembled a lobster, but to me it has always looked like an arm with a finger held northward out of its loose fist, isthmus-cuffed at the wrist. NS punctuates the coherent coastal palindrome with FL as its subtropical reflection, pointing up, gesturing handily to the yet unwritten boreal limits, ⤴ exploitation yonder.

Some less protuberant points come equipped with prosthetic aide-mémoires, artificial bulges large enough to affix their silhouettes to eye and tongue. Liberty, Twins, Syringe: NY. We may not even be able to point out where they would appear up on the map, but their meanings pop up iconically wherever we go. NS, by contrast, has only achieved partial, brief brushes with megastructure-as-calling-card: a Titanic whose immense portability was too radical for its time, and whose proximate final resting place brought only a spout of touristic identification on the impetus of the first truly global movie. A giant explosion on the ill-fated passing of two other ships, rather than erecting a suitably eye- catching monument, simply knocked everything else down. Movements in the proto-global economy havenʼt been kind to the movements of NS itself; with its dead Latin name, it could hardly be said to transport easily.

The scene of the global is the dream of Central. On this crowded corner of the financial sector, down south China way, the world gazes over us like the mute idol of a cult that is too big to fail, surrounded by the lesser fetishes of advanced capitalism, in concrete approximations of worldly desires, your LVs, D&Gs, H&Ms. Elsewhere (everywhere—in China at least), printed in bold but unclear insinuation on the tarpaulins draped over the sheet metal walls hemming infinite numbers of construction sites, its apparition rises again, remote and lure-like amidst visions of computer-generated condominium utopias: the West, the world, everything, the rarefied club. NS haunts the global daytime and its manic and delusional circulations of fantasy, touching everything from coffee to sustainable lightbulbs to air travel to office space. As unpossessable as it is, NS whispers down to you: this could all be yours. It manifests as sacrificial token of the hemisphere, blobbed, smushed, reduced, transfigured, dolled up for a rendezvous with the fickle, homogeneous tastes of Empire.

 

Instructions for Open Participation

Performance, text and participation (2012)
As part of the event Under the Fig Tree, Above the Date Tree at HomeShop, July 7th 2012, and installed until August 19th. Another version appeared as part of the project Friends of Freiheit in North Adams, MA, June 2012.

Instructions for Open Participation begins with, as the title suggests, a set of instructions for open participation I had written in advance. Initiating the event, the vinyl-cut lettering is separated out into syllables and/or characters and mixed up.

Working with the resulting fragments, people are invited to participate in the formulation of what they think should constitute instructions for open participation.

The resulting instructions are adhered to the shopfront window.

Some weeks later (on August 4th, 2012), interested passersby inquire about the text on the window. They are invited to reconfigure or add to the instructions for open participation.

I am delighted to participate with them, but I refuse to tell them what my original instructions are. We work on it for several hours on it until we are satisfied that our instructions for open participation are more clear and coherent than the previous version.

Cultural Proposal

In collaboration with Ragunath V.
Correspondence, photography and architectural model.
Frankfurt am Main, DE, 2006.

An art museum was proposed for a miniature train set in the Frankfurt train station to its owners and an architectural proposal was made in collaboration with Ragunath V.


Architectural rendering of the proposed Kunsthalle, whose structure morphs between letters borrowed from the font of the Frankfurt street car’s digital signage.

Consent Form

Installation with text
“Fatti e finzioni della venusta isola di San Servolo in Venezia” Exhibition as part of artLAB artist residency on San Servolo Island, Venice, IT, 2006.


An alcove of the laundry room of a former insane asylum is occupied with a new wall, rendering it autonomous from the rest of the building. Bunk beds from the facilities are installed with lamps. The door leading into the space is left open and unlocked permanently. A ramp leading to the door has written on it in non-slip material, in English and Italian: “Access to the work happens under the direct responsibility of the visitor”


 

For Nick

(Published in LAGNIAPPE by Nick Santos-Pedro, X Marks the Bokship, 2009)

 

This is a new development.

My work until now was calculated and technophilic, and in a way innocent: Lately it seems I want to write only about love.

Perhaps I know where this comes from.

The streets—those engines of stories—pump out streams of absence that swirl and return in cycles (that eddy) and accumulate as uneven ballast. I begin to tend, I begin to repeat.

I.

My city is not even my city. My city is experienced in transit and in dialects. Continuity eventually produces me as a being with a namethe beginnings of a habitatbut I cannot imagine building a life in my city. It is too much effort. Fantasies in my city are practical, functional equations. They measure distances between points, schedules and social classes. I find it hard to dream in my city. 

II.

Yet I allow you a city. When I wander through your city I get to imagining how you would move about this place, where interactions happen, the gatherings and celebrations, how would you go home with someone and who you’d avoid on the way there; in your city I imagine how different generations coexist and what skills you would need to be successful there; what tradition would dictate, which areas you would steer clear of, how public would your life be and how would you dress? To see someone’s home empowers that native, the inhabitant, the knower, the master, the one with bonds and family; your person becomes filled out, strictly without your presence. Your image, to me the visitor, is given reason; the factors that form a personality become visible within the construct, and you are God-like, Nature-like, so dominant and impressive compared to the one I thought I knew, isolated and plucked from your context, as you were.  

III.

In a city where I know nobody and nobody who has ever lived there, bodies appear randomly. Someone just exists for that moment our paths cross. I am desperate to understand how the young people meet each other and start relationships, but everything is pre-determined. Faces host neither normal nor aberrant expressions; they are simply locked to their surroundings. The shopping malls where I become aware of these ‘people’ have erected spontaneously, only moments ago, like complex mushrooms.  

This is no encyclopaedia. I can imagine countless permutations; I can imagine the possibility that there are no singular locations and no singular individuals who come from them to tease another with their secrets. Or another possibility: Where on my register is the scenario of following someone to Texas, out of ardour, only to end up working in a gun shop? I am a beginner, and still quite old-fashioned; I leave it to the poets to report back to me.