I’ve been thinking of night rides and how I tend to perceive the road signage as a blurred out laserlike stream of reflective light. Or the long-exposure photographs of stars, where they look as though they’re falling through the viewfinder. In both cases, light in motion trails away. In a sense, it is not the light in itself that I experience, but its trailing movement. The light is the very falling that carries the light of the star across the sky; or the sign along the windshield of the car that I’m in. Here, the thing is the deferral of what the thing signifies, as though what we are witnessing is the verb, neither subject nor object. I get a sense of indeterminacy from this. I think the star, the sign—the object of meaning—is, under normal circumstances, perceived as static only because we happen to be falling in simultaneity with it. That in a sense, we are falling in simultaneity with it not only through space, but through a shared linear experience of time too. And it’s when I view this linearity from a timeless time, or a time out of time (perhaps the long-exposure instant, or perhaps the dislocation of form through reappropriation), that the trailing of light, and analogously, the deferral of meaning is made evident by the introduction of an indeterminate term. The trailing light is relegated toward a limitlessly extending, linear chain of signification, a line of loss upon which it never finds its footing; where it’s always restless. The object becomes processual. It becomes a flow that traces out the limit of the symbolic register of a historicity that sets the terms for the apprehension of what it signifies to: star: fixed point. Remote incandescent body that is like the sun. That the fixed point is actually one in flux, as an implication, devastates the subject—who leaves in its wake a formless and nebulous cloud of polysemic excess (and I am referring to the subject of phenomenology, the “I” that is the seat of intentionality, agency, experience and intuition). I often tend to think that both sex and catastrophe, much like timeless time, possess this disorganizing potential that could be directed toward the self-assuredness of human experience—what we perceive to primarily populate being. This is why I’m not going to pretend to be able to zero in on the art object. I don’t know what the object is. Indeterminacy devastates teleology too. The object, clearly, is not for my use. I can only make out a sense of becoming, a feeling of deferral through time that is arbitrarily off-shot in the dark. On the other hand, there is a sense of eroticism about the excess that survives the subject of phenomenology (the authority of which, especially since Hegel, has dominated continental philosophy). The nebulous dissipation of the subject leaves room for a negative indeterminacy. It is through this indeterminate void that we may come to recognize an excess of things—named and unnamed, past and future—that have equal stakes in existence: a surfeit of experience which would otherwise only be misrepresented in non-poetic language.
Sem Lala
Participating artists:
Sem Lala
Kyriakos Kyriakides
Pierre Bal-Blanc
at Hot Wheels Athens
until February 25, 2023