il n'y a pas de hors-texte
Jacques Derrida 1
Thirty five drawings, in red-orange watercolor and graphite on paper, arrayed in a grid of five rows and seven columns, are on the wall opposite the door. Small, eleven inches high, ten inches wide, the scale of the drawings and the delicacy of their execution precludes their being adequately seen from a distance; to see them, one must enter the gallery space. Entering, one finds the drawings, and oneself, to be framed by walls covered with gray texts, reiterated as performed by two voices. Entering an exhibition, one finds one has entered into an already ongoing conversation.
As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor 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 is 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. 2
If it is conversation which "gives place and character to every human utterance," then indeed there is no outside of the text of conversation. Given then, that one is always already within a conversation manifested in a plurality of modes, an intertextuality of texts: text as spoken, text as the gray writing on the walls, image as text, ur-text and metatexts, of which the texts comprising Noah Simblist's installation are fragments. Fragments are parts of an absent whole, traces of an absent presence.
Getting to the bottom of things is not merely getting to their roots, but to the ground from which the roots emerge. Getting to how a thing is as it is, then, is not merely to rehearse a causal narrative; it is necessary to disconceal the structures enabling the causal narrative by which the thing comes to be as it is. Thus to take up Noah Simblist's works, it is not sufficient merely to regard the motifs and material cause and form, but one must also regard the conceptual and historical structures forming the context by which the work comes to be as it is, and not otherwise. The visible entitiy of the work emerges from this invisible ground, if it is a ground, if there is a ground, if the notion of ground is other than merely nominal, flatus vocis.
This presupposition of a ground cannot go unremarked. While the being of a ground seems perhaps self-evident, the notion of a ground is hardly uncontested in the past half-century. 3 If the notion of a ground is merely a fish story, a bit of fishy business floating about without an ur-text one might reach by an adequate sounding, how then does one plumb the depth? (Depth, of course, being another manuifestation of the notion of ground.) One might simply gulp as a large fish might gulp, and swallow the whole matter whole. One might take the matter layer by layer, and go where that leads.
The spoken text is reiterated in the text of of the wall panels. To say that is already to presuppose a primacy of the spoken texts, a primacy older than Saussure, or Aristotle. 4 Both spoken and written texts fill and define the volume of the gallery space, always already a space set apart. 5 The texts are layered, with commentaries on the ur-text, and commentaries on the commentaries. In brief, a perduring conversation, the proximate sign of which is the recorded ongoing spoken texts, performed in two gendered voices. The audile perception of the text performed by the two voices is reiterated in reading the written text rendered on the gallery walls in vinyl lettering; audile and visual perceptions of the texts weave in and out of synchronization.
Not first to be encountered on entering the gallery, but at the center of the commentaries is the ur-text, the text of Jonah. Among the prophetic books of the Tanach, Jonah is unique in being a narrative regarding the prophet himself. Jonah is a reluctant prophet. Fleeing from his appointed mission, cast overboard to save the vessel on which he flees from the tempest his presence has elicited, swallowed by a great fish which vomits him onto dry ground, Jonah sulks after delivering his prophecy and the people of Nineveh repent.
On the wall at right of the entrance of the gallery is George Orwell's "Inside the Whale," followed by Salmon Rushdie's "Outside the Whale," a commentary on Orwell's text. Opposite, the text of Jonah is followed to the right on the west wall and at the left of the north wall by Edward Said's text "Two Visions From the Heart of Darkness," from Culture and Imperialism, which comments on Rushdie's text. At the center of the north wall is a text from Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude. On the right of the north wall, and continuing to the adjacent east wall, is Jacques Derrida's "On Forgiveness." Every commentary, every exegesis. every interpretation, adds another layer, moving farther from the the ur-text even as engaging the ur-text, itself always already removed from the things hemselves. Thus the multiplication of texts, even insofar as it is an amplification of commentary, exegesis, and interpretation, is equiprimordially a disconcealing and a concealing
Thus the texts as an enframing context of the drawings.
The watercolor and graphite drawings enframed by the texts consist of five permutations of sequential evolutions derived from the intersection of two congruent equilateral triangles rotated into overlapping oppositional orientation. With the bases of the triangles along the vertical edges of the sheets of eleven by ten inch paper, the intersecting triangles set up a geometry of smaller triangles, generating an orthogonal isometric solid. Within these virtual volumes, the symbols of cross and Star of David are variously generated. Reading the sequence from left to right, the symbols progress from a single instance to seven instances. The particular symbols matter. Sequential development of the symbols from the underlying geometry also matters, as a visual correlative of the enframing of the drawings by the texts, and as a production of a volume analogous to the interior of a whale, and a gallery space.
What is enabled by Simblist's installation is framing the ramifying question of the artist's situation: what is the position of artist, as a species of public intellectual, in a society not infrequently indifferent, if not hostile, to the art as anything but entertainment and diversion, mere decoration, another spectacle in a society increasingly of the spectacle? As Holderlin asked, ". . . und wozu Dichter im dürftiger Zeit?"6 Or to phrase the question somewhat differently: does the artist entering the studio (for which the gallery space is in a sense the public correlative) withdraw into the belly of the whale to ride out the storm as if returning to womb, as Orwell's text urges, or instead set about making a "as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible," as Rushdie urges. What, simpliciter, is the responsibility of the artist, qua artist, qua person n the world? This question is not one-sided, addressable only to the artist in the studio. The galley space is in a sense the public correlative of the studio, the locus of the shift from the privacy or the artist's agencywithin the studio to the agency of the viewer in response to the work. The other side of the question, then, is what, simpliciter, is the responsibility of the viewer. qua viewer f the artwork, qua person in the world? That the question of agency is entailed, for artist anmd viewer, answers Holderlin's question
Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Southern Methodist University, Noah Simblist received the Master of Fine Arts at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work was recently featured in the three-person exhibition New Work, New Year at Gray Matters Gallery, Dallas.