This performance-paper-artefact brings together and enunciates a number of key threads that emerged in the research, including the potential of jouissance as a site of positive affect and abjection as a continual process. In doing so, the work communicates a new theoretical and conceptual model of intermateriality and painterly poetics that extends Kristeva’s notions of signifiance and intertextualité beyond the textual and verbal registers of language to the realm of art practice. Within the collaborative context of Otherlands, Taylor’s work examines the capacity of non-representational painting to function as a form of signification. By problematising such artistic practice as ‘elsewhere,’ ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ of communicable language, Taylor demonstrates that it is precisely in the spaces that disrupt representational structures towards the place where meaning collapses that have the capacity to elicit meaning insofar as it is sensually produced in its performative and material utterance.
This performance-paper-artefact takes the form of a 32-foot paper scroll that incorporates collisions and slippages between textual, painterly, material and 'other' sign-systems. This hybrid language is performed via the application of Lyotard’s concept of the phoné as a non-verbal sound articulation of language to ‘enunciate’ the ungraspable and non-representable dimensions of the work, as the scroll is physically unravelled and negotiated as a material artefact. The combination of these intersecting layers of the work enable an ‘other’ articulation to occur that resonate with the space of the semiotic and chora in which the subject as infinitely in process is not bound in language by pre-established signifiers but is rather closer to the pure materiality of existence.
The work is simultaneously a performance, paper, text, artefact, painting, articulation, dissemination and the research itself. It communicates a robust, critical and scholarly argument that evidences the research supported by ‘academic’ conventions such as footnotes and references. Yet it does so by also disrupting and reconsituting these conventions and symbolic structures by putting into practice, via its performative and material enunciation, its own unique form of signification. Crucially, rather than 'reading' or 'presenting' the performance-paper-artefact per se, which rely on dominant socio-symbolic structures, the work instead opens up sites of live encounter between the work and those present as subjects-in-process: it is here that meaning-making is experienced via affect, establishing the possibility of alternative intersubjective and intermaterial spaces of signification.
[ pause ]
I have found an ‘I’. It sits here on the paper in front of me; seemingly alone but amidst falling ’’s and >’s and [paint mark]’s.
‘I’ meander(s).
