Untitled Document

A Partial Requirement
MFA Thesis Fall 2007
Ruslan Trusewych
ruslan.trusewych@gmail.com
630.802.0355
Sponsor: Tom Weaver
Second Reader: Katy Siegel

Serendipity and Convention meet at a bar; unsurprisingly, they fall into an awkward silence. Finding it unbearable, naturally, Convention breaks the silence with a poorly considered remark. But Serendipity has already left.

The following is an account of my actual activity and attempts to convey how my relationship to my practice inspires, motivates, and organizes artworks.

Structure and Attitude

     Immanence, as The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines it, means “Operating from inside the thing or person (1). My use is a bit more nuanced. We can roughly divide immanence in two: physical and social. Physically, steel lends itself towards the construction of bridges and paper to the construction of disposable coffee cups. Bridges cannot be made of paper; a steel coffee cup betrays, theoretically, its designer’s reflexivity. Similarly, objects, images, activities, in that they have a semiotic component that affords social arbitration, have predominant properties that form immanent potentials. Gold glitter glue sticks are a particularly rich example. Gold has a long historical tradition, in art and in economics, of signifying value, creating value, or being interchangeable with value. Glitter, conversely, is a cheap shiny material that has a very short tradition; speaking to a contemporary moment, it affords a superficial and often amateur attempt at transcendence. Hot melted glue, the ubiquitous temporary adhesive utilized by sculpture students to bring elements together while still asserting their arbitrariness, suggests the necessarily temporary nature of their combination.   I claim all these readings of gold glitter glue sticks are immanent to the material and are aspects of their functions as social objects. Moreover, glue sticks’ physical constitution suggests actualizations (pragmatics). For example, they can be used as intended or welded together to form a structural object of surprising durability thus confounding other possible reads. In my studio practice, this kind of immanence motivates my decisions: what materials to bring into the studio, what kind of processes to subject them to, what kind of formal or conventional devices to exploit for their manifestation.
     To explicate my method, I wish to articulate the distinctions between immanence, as I have mentioned, and essence (the transcendent notion of ideal categories of which manifestations are instances). I believe these differences reveal themselves in the artists’ structural deployment of contingency and subjectivity.
      Thomas Hirschhorn’s ambitious and charged installations (2) utilize an essential (top-down) logic because they approach political agency as a transcendent category of which his process is an instance. Taking for granted conventional conceptions of political agency creates a logic that maintains a rift between himself and his purported subject matter. His stylish use of the DIY aesthetic, combined with well-intended references to Emma Kunz, as well as ostensibly edgy use of gruesome, politically charged images--are simply citations and not products of an transformative artistic process. Such a process remits an engagement with inter-subjectivity, repositions moral conventions, and embodies how an individual can make meaning. Hirschhorn’s practice fails to implicate himself.
     Quite different are Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ immanent (and intimate) investigations through his own subjectivity (3). A pile of golden candies squarely filling a room, delicate photographs of vultures circling far above, a list of personal and historical events scrolling around the room just below the ceiling, these are considered and personal but speak softly of what it means to be a sensitive and courageous person. Rather than address AIDS as an issue with normative, if unclear, pronouncements of what should be done, Gonzalez-Torres presents us with artworks imbued with political agency in that they are considered engagements between his individual circumstance and the harsh social reality that he inhabits.

DISPARITY AND THE DYNAMIC

Disparity is built out of a bottom-up (self-organizing) use of the immanent qualities in ordinary things. A collection of artworks substantiates the vitality of difference. Thus dynamics can be discussed as a rhythm or pattern of deploying disparity. Moreover, valuing dynamics affords the possibility of formal engagements desirous of an impact full experience for the viewer. Disparity and the dynamic, as it describes the work in the exhibition, suggests variability, an active shift in registers, from one side to the other—an active engagement.
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, what can be said at all can be stated well, everything else must be passed over in silence. I disagree. Though on the continuum formed by “stated well” and “silence,” I certainly situate myself proximate to silence. But I feel that I can take several passes over, or under, or next to the inaccessible region of silence, each one from a different direction and in a different vehicle, and turn to myself with eyes bulging and neck straining trying to mark its presence.

SCULPTURE (ART) AND ONTOLOGY

     Consider a circle; how can we define it? An essentialist response would cite its essential roundness and imply that there are other circles that more or less resemble essential roundness. Roundness is thus a transcendent characteristic of the idea of circle. This provides a top-down understanding of what a circle is. There is also a bottom-up account, a morphogenetic one. A definition that accounts for how something is by how it came to be. A definition of a circle by how it is made; namely, by taking a line segment and rotating it 360 degrees around one of its end points where the other endpoint describes a closed curve, a circle. Eschewing essentialism and transcendence, this bottom-up account is immanent to the material world, to reality, and is central to my self-understanding as an artist (4).
     A material process affords me the opportunity to engage reality. Choosing, forgetting, arranging; such activities bring together usual and extra-ordinary things in order to identify or discover (create) an attitude towards these activities. That is, I use it to seek the invariance that structures my contingent subjectivity. Rather than only represent my engagements with my life, I wish to create instances of them.
     It was a 99-cent store that hosted the encounter; in front of me was an object whose existence I could not resolve. Whether a miniature of the real thing or simply a section of it made to scale, I could not tell, but it was surely supposed to be an elephant tusk. The tusk, made out of dense plastic, had carved into it a procession of elephants. How could this be? Maybe it is a copy of an actual carved tusk. A material depicting the animal killed to obtain it—a metonymic ploy. Is this a joke? What group of executives decided that American consumers needed such an object? A kitsch object as dense with conflicting readings as any art object—I had to have it!
     How do I consider the tusk? It is a mass-produced kitsch object yet it displays the kind of self-similarity or self-consciousness we attribute to intentional artworks. Then what is my intention? I must make an equally self-similar and self-conscious presentation. Trying to reconcile the goals of signifying complexity and of manifesting it (self-consciously), I see on my studio wall a Sierpinski Triangle (a simple fractal) I had recently installed. But how do I turn these specifics into a sculpture? But the Sierpinski triangle is just an image of a fractal, an illustration, a logo. Superficial, it creates a surface; I paint a gold stylized version on a panel and affix to its center a pyramid to display my prized possession. To make it physical though, to allow the object to rest on the pyramid, requires a displacement. The panel must lean against the wall. But this gesture leaves a space between the wall and the panel. It must be there, but how do I mark it? I recall that I have a book, purchased during a regular trip to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It is titled, What to Expect when You’re Expecting, a handbook to assist pregnant couples, and I place it in this space. An encounter not dissimilar to what instigated the entire process of transforming an engagement with a found object into an artwork folded over reflexively. Self-similarity again. Fully accounted for, the artwork is simply a considered amalgam of a few contingencies.

SPECIFICITY AND QUOTIDIAN LIFE

It came to me via the interstitial institutional practice of emailing novel media clips. The video remained lodged in the front of my brain for several years. In its banality, in its ordinariness, it nonetheless depicted the exceptional. It is a nine second clip of the closing moments of a high-school basketball game. The camera focuses on the far court where teams fight for a rebound. Just before the turnover, a young boy darts left along the foreground and exits the scene, possibly running to the concession stand or the toilet. Aware of the time, and having obtained possession of the ball, a player quickly launches it towards the opposite basket. Following the movement of the ball, the camera turns to the near court where the spectators, and now we, witness the convergence of two trajectories at one point. The boy, hit directly on the head, falls to the ground. We witness those in the stands automatically and sympathetically clutch their heads.
As I make decisions, I create problems for myself. Situations that require more decisions (including undoing previous decisions), slowly cultivate an artwork. So is the artwork the answer to a problem? No. The artwork, in that it is successful, is an embodiment of the problem, not a solution. In regards to attempting to articulate reality,

Deleuze stresses the role of correctly posed problems, rather than their true solutions, a problem being well posed if it captures an objective distribution of the important and the unimportant, or more mathematically, of the singular and the ordinary (5).

When I walk into a gallery, regardless of the type of work installed, I see everywhere the residue of decisions.   Compelling arrangements of ubiquity and novelty can testify to a dedicated and sophisticated engagement with the specificity of quotidian life. In the rarefied space of a gallery it is possible for me to see how you live your life.
      The artworks I exhibit grow out of a messy and dumb process of butting up and ripping apart, of neglecting, of desiring, of an inconsiderate but immutable thrust; not dissimilar to the process of living one’s life. A subjective encounter with reality--a broad statement--this is the condition of living. Subjectivity is not something to transcend in order to achieve an objective account. Rather, the contingencies that form subjectivity provide a physical and procedural field out of which I can choose instances of a reality suffused with subjectivity. When I stumble upon a self-referential kitsch object, it provides an opportunity to play with intention, experience, time and presentation. presents itself. I take this opportunity as a mandate; it is my goal to cultivate a constellation of artworks that not only embody this mandate, but signify it, render it, form it for communion. Reflexivity then, is the means to situate yourself (you meaning, me, the artwork, and the viewer).
            Adaptability, performativity, sensitivity to situations, rigor, restraint, economy--these terms describe a practice. Receptive to potentials and with sensitivity to reflexivity and the recurring, it is my goal to exhibit a constellation of artworks whose disparate elements assure dynamics and whose consideration embodies the particular (peculiar) awareness that art affords.

REFLEXIVITY AND CONVENTION

I was in a frenzy of production. Having established some sort of logic, I was in my studio working on several collage drawings simultaneously. Occupying different tables or different parts of the floor, I would dart from one to the other; a synergetic distributed production had formed. I found myself focused on a drawing hiding under a table. Scattered: different sheets of paper with various scribbles, tests, and assertions, a hand-full of mark-making utensils, and the refuse of this process seamlessly integrated with the general disarray of the studio. As if searching frantically for something I misplaced, I was rummaging through this disordered accumulation of materials. I stumbled upon the tossed-off instructions to who knows what. Clutching this piece of paper with both hands, I found my answer. Depicted is nothing other than a piece of paper, clutched by two hands. I emit a “Thank God,” find the closest thing to an empty sheet of paper, adhere my salvation to it, scrawl down my instinctive utterance beside it and thus have material to temper more sober decisions.
For Walter Benjamin, it is in the act of reflection that an artwork comes into being; in reflection, an artwork gives itself form. Poetry, for example, is simply language ceaselessly evaluating its status as language. Artworks are concerned with their peculiar relationship to their own necessity.
…the work remains burdened with a moment of contingency. It is precisely the function of form to admit this particular contingency as in principle necessary or unavoidable, to acknowledge it through the rigorous self-limitation of reflection (6).

Benjamin’s preoccupation with form can be seen as an engagement with the conditions of displaying, of presentational strategies. Imbedded in any form of art is a presentation of its particularity and its contingency--the possibility of what might be otherwise. A similar superposition occurs in Benjamin’s theory of allegory which he claims is able to signify two things at once. In that they straddle metaphorical and literal content, allegories call attention to how their meanings are constructed as well as what these meanings may be.
The artworks I present allegorize the process that manifested them (reflexivity is folded). Thus, my artistic practice is implicated and it becomes my attitude that produces content. Simply, my work is a constellation of considered gestures.

WORKS CITED

Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. 1994. Oxford University Press.
New York.
DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. 2002. Continuum. London.
Mieszkowski, Jan. “Art Forms.” The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. 2004. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.

(1) Blackburn, Simon. “The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.” 1994. Oxford University Press.
New York.

(2) I refer to Superficial Engagement which was shown at Gladstone Gallery in the spring of 2006.

(3) I refer to the exhibition held at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in the Fall of 2006.

(4) Inspired by Manuel DeLanda’s accounts in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Pgs. 10
& 15.

(5) DeLanda, 7