il n'y a pas de hors-texte

Jacques Derrida 1

To speak is to make words common, to create commonplaces.

Emmanuel Lévinas2

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of passages.... Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where the winner gets a prize, nor it an activity of exegesis: it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.... Education properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasion of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.
Michael Oakeshott3

In this installation, Anitra Blayton presents the conditions of presence, which are the conditions of the situation of the co- presence presupposed in conversation. While it is always already the function of artworks to open a discursive field, these works engage the conditions of the field of discourse they open. In this, the works in this installation are reflexive. As such, these works are interventions both within the fields of signifying practices they engage, and the lifeworld mediated by those fields of signification.

Colossus of Forum is a site-specific work consisting of seven texts in vinyl stencil lettering applied in circles to the structural columns running as a curved intermittent spine down the center of the Forum Gallery. The texts consist of rhetorical commonplaces, with words missing.

The problem with you _ _ _ _ _ people is you want everything for nothing.

One out of five women can't _ _ _ _.

Kids who _ _ _ _ their moms make fewer mistakes.

There are those who would _ _ _ _ for the love of freedom.

Class guarantees _ _ _ _ _ _ _ and credentials change _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.

To some children, an empty cardboard box is as good as _ _ _ _.

A _ _ _ _ _ man once saved my life.

Engaging the viewer to enter the conversation, to complete the sentences, to fill in the blanks, the spacing dashes elicit a delimited set of possible responses. To thus delimit response, by language, by word length, by syntactical considerations, is to display the interaction of parole and langue4 as a system of differences. In responding within this system of differences, the viewing subject completes the work by completing the sentence, a completion which is an indexical mirror of the subject's mediation of the lifeworld.

The seventeen circular mirrors of Still Living to Tell About It are arrayed along the west wall of the gallery in ascending and descending sequence of diameter, with the largest mirror at the center. The diminution in scale of the mirrors at the ends of the array implies a distancing at the periphery of the visual field, while their sequential repetition opens a spatial metaphorization of the temporality within which the viewer's reflection in the several mirrors occurs: the Augenblick, the perduring Now of presence and self-presence centered between the symmetrical recessions of retention and protention. The mirror reflects the viewing subject, doubling the subject's presence in a bending back of presence as self-presence. As an instrument of duplication, the mirror is a site of presentation and re-presentation: the re-presentation of viewing self as the mirror image presupposes the presence of the viewing subject, whose gaze is re-flected as the mirror image, and in consequence the relation of viewing self to mirror is indexical. The turning back of the gaze onto itself at the mirror's tain5--that crease, as it were, at the surface of being--is the visual analogue of the situation of the subject's entry into the symbolic order of language, an entry to which reduplication is central. Thus Roman Jakobson:

At the transition from babbling to verbal behavior, the reduplication may even serve as a compulsory process, signalling that the uttered sounds do not represent a babble, but a senseful semantic entity. The patently linguistic essence of such a duplication is quite explicable. In contradistinction to the "wild sounds" of babbling exercises, the phonemes are to be recognized, distinguishable, identifiable; and in accordance with these requirements, they must be deliberately repeatable.6

This entry into the symbolic order Jacques Lacan terms the mirror stage:

. . . the sight in the mirror of the ego ideal, of that being he first saw appearing in the form of the parent holding him up before the mirror. By clinging to the reference-point of him who looks at him in a mirror, the subject sees appearing, not his ego ideal, but his ideal ego, that point at which he desires to gratify himself in himself.7

This look at looking is the look blinded by seeing itself looking: la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar.8 This regard of the gaze as involving its own blinding evokes the myth of Perseus and Medusa. The gaze of Medusa held the power of transforming the living body to stone, the power, as Craig Owens has noted, to create figures, statues.9 Perseus' theft of this power entailed turning it back on itself, using his shield as a mirror to reflect Medusa's deadly gaze. Owens suggests that:

The myth's central episode is almost proto-photographic; it seems to describe that split-second in which vision bends back upon itself to produce its own imprint. Perseus inserts Medusa into a closed system, a relation of identity between seer and seen; the immediacy of this link makes the relationship of Medusa with the image indexical (and not simply iconic). Thus Medusa is transformed into an image, inserted into the order of designation; henceforth she will serve primarily as the support of a long chain of discursive and figural events,...10

The individual's entry into the symbolic order--the constitution of the individual as a symbol-using being--is at once the constitution of the reflexive self qua ego and the distinguishing of the self from all alterities: the bifurcation of subject and Other. This precondition of conversation is accomplished with some attendant peril, as the myth of Perseus and Medusa suggests. Yet, the viewing subject is stilling living to tell about it, indeed is a subject able to tell about it only insofar as having accomplished this precondition of conversation.

Colossus of Talk, with twelve polychromed steel barrels held at various inclinations within a framework of steel tubing, has a sense of movement belying its static mass. Its sense of animation, defying gravity, is a product both of the implied swinging of the barrels--"larrons o'toolers clittering up and tombles a'buckets clottering down"11--and in the circular configuration of the whole piece as having an implied rotation about the horizontal axis. The title and the text associated with the piece by the artist reference the childhood practice of joining cans with string to make a 'telephone', which the associated text presents as a myth of origin:

Once upon a time, various people in distant places wanted to talk to one another. In the beginning, they were desperate, and they shouted at one another across the cliff tops, the mountain peaks, the fields and out of windows. Then, one day someone connected the closed ends of the two cans together by a long string. One person would talk into the open end of one can, while the other listened through the other.

This reference is directly expressed in the piece by the ear and mouth motifs represented as icons painted on the inside bottoms of the barrels. Speaking into the circular opening of the barrels produces a reverberation, the audile equivalent of the reflection of the viewing self in Still Living to Tell About It; the barrel form as locus of speech otherwise presented in Soap Box, Butt Warmer and Peacock.

The structure of Colossus of Talk richly elicits other resonances. The twelve barrels of Colossus of Talk and the circular structure of the work evoke the progression of the zodiacal signs, and the rotation of the heavens through the year, trope for the course of a life and thus engaging the motif's association with the wheel of fortune.12 The wheel of fortune has its quotidian manifestations in the ferris wheel and the grue, mechanisms respectively of diversion and gruesome toil.

The two-sided configuration of Weeping Marys, with its two associated chairs, pile of file folders on the floor, and an oval mirror and iron towel rack on an adjacent wall, embodies the duality of conversation. One side of the structure is covered with gray plastic laminate, a cool, efficient, office-like environment with a contemporary plastic chair and stack of file folders; the other side, older and of wood, more domestic in feeling with a chair almost kneeling forward, with an oval mirror and iron towel rack on the wall adjacent to the freestanding portion of the work. The text provided by the artist13 for the piece, audible on the two telephones in the freestanding portion of the work, is a narrative relating a conversation in which the narrator was one of the participants:

It was just another routine day at the office. People: permanently disabled or dying. I picked up the phone and called the claimant. After the third ring, I thought I might just call again the next morning. (What was I doing there so late today anyway?) Oh yeah. I had been taking longer lunches and my cases were piling up. She answered but she seemed reticent to talk to me and asked that I call another time. But what about her case? I had to make her talk to me. Her condition really did not appear severe but buried in the medical report, there it was, ". . . patient weighs 90 pounds. She says she has lost 35 pounds in only a few weeks." I had to keep her on the phone and convince her to go back to the hospital to begin AZT. As I continued to ask her questions, she began to talk to me more. The phone call seemed to last forever. It will never be forgotten.

This embedded quotation14 is a representation of the represenation- ality of language, involving the viewing subject in a conversation about a conversation, a discourse on a discourse. In doing this, what is transparent in quotidian experience acquires a density, an opacity, that renders the signifiers of one's mediation with self and other visible, and visible as such. To so be placed into copresence with the absented repressed of signification is to enter a metadiscourse which gives place and character to every human activity and utterance, and to grasp it from within.