Saturday, September 7, 6:30pm - 9pm: Performance of Hum•drum, composed by Luc Trahand. Following the performance, there will be a screening of the film Spiral Jetty (1970) by landlord Robert Smithson (the presented version is not courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation). Beginning at 7pm, <<Hum•drum: A fugal performative reading by Luc Trahand. Voices present and past phase in and out in rhythms and transpositions. The words of Hum•drum amalgamate disjunctively in staggered dance, to be caught in frames by the attentive ear>> (Statement by Luc Trahand). Hum•drum refers to Trahand’s textworks (books) and correlative soundworks included in the collaborative installation works (built with Sinclair Vicisitud) incorporated in this exhibition. Detailing the work, Trahand writes <<With the aim of decorticating the layers of summation to expose the skeleton of our realities, phrases were arranged through a stochastic process to be ordered differently in each printed copy. Using the software Max/MSP to code probabilities and random variables, obtaining degrees of unpredictability forces the reader/listener to consider the operations that they are making while building an understanding of the work. The primary focus becomes the relations between phrases and between paragraphs rather than the ensuing narrative. [] The same stochastic model used to order the phrases is synchronously creating the adjoining sound element of this work. It is therefore also different per printed copy. An underlying bed of sine and triangle waves oscillate at flipped 180º phases and at varyingly small differences of frequency (heard as low accelerating and decelerating pulses) which emphasize the subtraction between the elements. Above this sonic stratus, clouds of languishing violins come and go, like voiceless, indiscernible echoes. In this midst, the rusty churn of a trudging cello chases an antsy, effervescent saxophone. The latter acts as our mind does on our perceptions—it yearns for legibility and won't shy away from lying to conform. The whole soundscape is a tethered subordinate to the hand that writes, a rhythmic dictator that we must revolt against, but that we cannot and will not survive.>> Afterwards, a screening of Robert Smithson’s film "Spiral Jetty" (35-minute duration). Emerging as a core work of the Land Art movement, this particular piece exemplifies a macho-industrial tendency of the (white, masculine) artists of this movement to consider “Land Art” as a kind of brute—‘boys-playing-with-trucks’—attitude toward “land” (art) as that which bears the mark of development, construction, colonization, and civilization. Something is moved, built, or destroyed. A mark (a scar) remains as a the signature of an unauthorized author: a manifest destiny, made manifest (…an especially topical statement when one considers Land Art’s coinciding obsession with the transformation of natural landscapes throughout ‘the American West’). According to the informational text provided by the Holt/Smithson Foundation: the “Spiral Jetty is made from over six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and earth collected from the site, "Spiral Jetty" stretches 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide in a counterclockwise spiral.” (The work is located on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake.) In part, the film "Spiral Jetty" functions as a documentation of the work; however, it also aspires to materialize the space-time of the structure through a myth-making genesis: destruction, construction, reconstruction (as the visual and oral narrative articulated through the film). <<Spiral Jetty is a discontinuous narrative, part science fiction, part document, part travelogue. On the soundtrack Smithson describes “the earth’s history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing.” He described that the film set out to make this “fact” material>> (Holt/Smithson Foundation). Working-through the materiality of missing pages and absent information—of gaps and lacunas—the screening of this nearly obsolete—or at least already eroding—artwork and its documentation is presented in consideration of the exhibition’s questions of the pace of technology, time, obsolescence, and (dis)appearance—or the inability of any structure, mark, or (recorded) process to keep-up with the rate of its (re)production. (This relationship of a sign(al), imprint, or trace to lag and latency is perhaps made more visible by looking at this film as a work that collapses the distance between the event of an artwork’s production and its eventual documentation. Between an event, a memory, and its re-membering: a film.) How does an artwork speak, read, and write its own structure and language? How does a context or document contaminate, reinforce, delay, or survive an artwork? And why is destruction and pollution the usual modes of producing cultural works intended to last? While the film might bring-up these questions, it also demonstrates the different materialities of a work that occur in the gaps and lacunas of its making or presentation—after all, this is where these questions emerge. Meanwhile in Utah: as the Great Salt Lake currently dries-up due to climate change (or however else you don’t want me to describe some anthropomorphic consequences of our industrial actions), leaving the "Spiral Jetty" high-and-dry, there is a moribund opportunity to return to a reflection on the place of ‘environment’ as medium. As it was originally being made the Spiral Jetty was already acknowledged as a harmful, masculinist intrusion on the natural landscape of the Great Salt Lake—so where does it strand itself now as an intrusive monument to an altered landscape (‘development’) in a place already beginning to end? Hopefully, the film might be posed as a negative didactic in response to this question. Ultimately and initially, the combination of these events—the performance and the screening—finds dis/connections between performance, exhibition (or display), record (or document), and the pace of presentation (on any of these ‘levels’ or modes). As each of these modes play crucial and recurring roles in the cultural production of art practices, spaces, and institutions—and are particularly central to this exhibition to the extent that it asks about the obsolescence or latency of how art itself constructs its discourses—it seems a relevant place to start to reflect on the beginning of the exhibition’s end. …. A Spiral: Spiral Jetty was one of the first art films I saw during my undergraduate studio arts education. We watched the film in a January-term (3-week intensive) Winter course equipped with an immersive, materially and experimentally driven curriculum gathered under the question of Art in the Ecozoic Era. Partially or initially inspired by an article (1992) by Thomas Berry with the same name, the focus of the course was to turn to the question of the Earth in relation to artwork. Though, perhaps more forcefully, it positioned a way of re-examining the periods of art history in relation to deeper time organized around transformations and industrializations of the Earth through anthropomorphic and anthropogenic processes. So it also posed critical questions about how art is recognized, recorded, categorized, contextualized, and histroicized: documented. Since the course was taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts during the middle of a particularly wintery winter, the practices we were able to come-up with were mostly based around the problem of a lack of natural resources aside from ice and snow—and whatever remaining plant life managed to surface (everything else had been covered by a blizzard at the beginning of the term). We were only able to build using materials available outdoors, on the premises of the college. Most students struggled to make anything at all. Many made nothing. My friend from Texas was hospitalized with hypothermia. Our relations to the “Earth” were met with resistances. We were nearly starved-out of making. This course is how I became interested in Land Art, and its consequences—and its aberrations. …. Anyway, my copy of the Spiral Jetty is from that course: nobody wanted it. (—Z.) __________ Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. Her sculptural works can be understood (i.e. read) similarly to her poems, handwritten diagrams, annotations, and even the scrawled lists. But instead of words the arrangements are primarily of physical objects and materials: her more-than-linguistic language. Her approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate. Her work meditates on and Venn-diagrams decay and growth, contradiction and harmony, things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic… Allison Arkush was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She received her BA in studio art and psychology from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, graduating magna cum laude. In 2019 Arkush relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska to begin her graduate studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After receiving her Masters Degree in ceramics and sculpture she continued to teach at UNL until returning to Los Angeles in 2023. Since moving back she has settled her practice into a studio located downtown in the thrumming Fashion District. She has exhibited work at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Baltimore Clayworks, the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery, Turbine Flats, La Bodega Gallery, and Reisig and Taylor Contemporary. | Born in Los Angeles, Maccabee Shelley studied environmental and Earth sciences before earning degrees in studio art and ceramics. Intrigued by the perception and projection of value and obsolescence, Maccabee translates refuse through various materials and processes exploring the space between object, image, and experience. | French-American interdisciplinary artist Luc Trahand’s work spans multiple mediums and forms from music and sound to language, film, and movement. <<*Within the contrived apotheosis of the white gallery, the echolalias recall the rhythms of the heart—”l’organe amoureux de la répétition” (Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répétition). While the ruptured spleen weakens, the infections of thought can propagate. What starts as nested addition and subtraction becomes a palimpsestic, immersing monologism that is unequaled. A paradox underlies experience: the belief of reality. Architects of our incarceration, bound to an incalculable entropy, one decides what cell to walk into, and, unfreely willing, locks the door. Comfort washes over as one learns the square inches of crusty cement flooring and plastered wall, gradually coloring in the complete unknowns with vacuous understandings. To these constructed confines venerated, our appraisal rings, inebriated by sweet no-things.>> *{Installation Statement by Luc Trahand. Humdrum refers to Trahand’s textworks (books) and correlative soundworks included in the collaborative installation works (built with Sinclair Vicisitud) incorporated in this exhibition: installation statement; link to project.} | Sinclair Vicisitud is a (born-and-raised) Los Angeles artist. Working in mixed-techniques and mixed-media, Vicisitud’s figural, expressive work usually takes-place through a practice of painting that interweaves gestural imprints and studied forms. However, this surface-process is often navigated through the multi-dimensional, sculptural features of the canvas or frame. At times, their (initially) painterly work is totally transformed into a sculptural object. ____________________ [Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty (1970): 16 mm film, color, sound. Duration: 35 minutes. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.] …. Image: Installation View Day.