Some works and their afterlife

Mika Elo

In this exposition I present a cluster of works with regard to their subtle interconnections, often not consciously constructed or intended in any particular ways at the time of their conception. The afterlife of these works, however, enact aesthetic intra-actions of their ensemble. Shedding light on some parts of this cavernous network of pressing matters I make an attempt of explicating the ways in which artistic thinking might get "diffracted" into many part-processes that are both divergent and entangled. In the course of my presentation, I try to be sensitive towards the fact that these strings of thinking are distributed in a complex manner across the divide of sensibility and intelligibility. In terms of the chosen approach this implies avoiding the use of discursive explanations as the main medium of explication. This "method", if it can be formalized as one, involves priorizing the material circumstances of particular articulations, both verbal and non-verbal, over content-oriented gestures of translation.

Muistiinpanoja / Notes

(1993–2017)

These outlines make me think of the ways in which the principle of containment has governed, and still does, our thinking of the body. The same principle haunts artworks as well: how often are pieces of art packed into boxes in-between of their resurrection times in exhibitions?

These lines, as all inscriptions, are traces of movement. Insofar as they are purposeless in themselves, they tend to please themselves as their own gesture. The delicacy of touch vital to the arts is, perhaps, nothing else than this self-feeling, a gestural longing for form. A situated sensitive-reflective relation to the forming of the form would thus be the common denominator of the arts in their multiplicity. Jean-Luc Nancy, to whom I am referring here, summarises this libidinal moment in drawing by saying that the stroke or line "executes the gesture of its desire".*

Insofar as we can speak of"lines of thought" (as I suggest in Tangents performance, on the video at 4:30) something like a "meaningful connection" between making and reflecting doesn't have to be a functional one. The way in which an artwork results in something, that is, appears, for example, as an outcome of research, doesn't have to be programmatic or even explicit in order to "make sense". What is implied in the work has the potential of becoming unfolded (literally: ex-plicated) in its afterlife, where the original is already "irrevocably departed", as Samuel Weber notes in the passage that I chose to use as the motto of this exposition (on the menu page).* Therefore, exposing art as research can be understood as an explication process that cannot be fully explicit in a discursive sense – all ingredients will never be present in the discourse. What counts is sensitivity towards the non-discursive gestures of this process, its "lines of thought". This necessary incompleteness of each particular gesture of explication resonates with Niels Bohr's "indeterminacy principle" discussed by Barad. According to this principle, the nature of the observed phenomenon is dependent upon the material arrangement of its observation; the phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus.*

"Many years later...", as the possible continuation of the voice-over of Muistinpanoja / Notes might put it, a new work dealing with Lacan's optical schema started to claim the status of a retroactive footnote to two particular scenes [5:05–5:20; 8:10–8:26] in this video.

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