On Frottage (Part II)
Performance script, July 2015
Starting. Starting.
Starting somewhere that could be near the beginning, but my concerns often loop or shatter into overlapping fragments, so maybe this is not the beginning but a part overlayed from another point further this way or that. Or that way, or here or over there.
Some parts or fragments return, others shift their position.
There is always movement.
There is always movement.
Movement between different parts, parts that could be considered as layers. Layers of objects, bodies, words, histories, subjectivities.
Contacting layers, surfaces, planes of matter – overlaid but continually shifting. Imbricating, intersecting, to the point that information or intention is obscured, exposed or transformed.
On describing intertextuality, Julia Kristeva suggests that
“any text is the absorption and transformation of another”
The transformation of information from of one layer into another, when in moving contact. A translation through movement.
There is always movement.
Movement could be…a back and forth motion, or rotary action.
Movement could be…rubbing. Rubbing could be a back and forth motion, or rotary action
Rubbing could be…to subject some thing (or some one) to pressure or friction. Spreading or applying a substance or erasing, aggravating or relieving.
When I first started rubbing, it was in an attempt to trace others’ words. To translate them onto a surface, to re edit, insert, erase; create new statements.
The automatic nature of the act suggests that this is not the mark of my hand – I am channelling something, another’s voice. I become a medium for textual ghosts. The words appear like spectres – faint, negative spaces in an untidy drawing. A reversal, only ever tracing around the edges; the letters remaining slightly imperceptible — something always escaping.
This frottage is a kind improvisation. Taking already formed words, I frottage new texts, allowing the disjunction between where I think words are under the paper and where they appear, to control the language.
Selective translation.
Rubbing became an attempt to insert a female body and voice into a masculine construct. My body in contact with this object — rubbing as a productive or destructive force. Frottage as a double entendree – a sexual act and a means of artistic production. Both are an act of creation of sorts, of friction, of image, of pleasure, desire. Both have to do with contact of surfaces – of touch, tactility, sensation, a description or experience.
The taking or making of a reading by rubbing, a desire for contact with something, corporeal or textu(r)al.
Text becomes texture becomes surface becomes movement.
Text rubbed into image.
Texture rubbed into image.
Text rubbing image rubbing texture.
From text to texture.
Texture and text from the latin, textura – web, structure; stemming from the texere – to weave. To weave – overlaying one thread on another, to create a web, a network, a movement that is not linear, but multi-directional. Back and forth perhaps. Or a rotary motion.
My attention turned to rubbing stones, unembellished with words, but embodying their own language, systems, structures.
Stones that predate text — finding language through form.
Marks and markers that have lost their original function and framework; standing in for human acts, presences in the landscape.
In Lucy Lippard’s words:
“The unpeopled megalithic sites and earth monuments, like more recently abandoned ruins bring us back to art in an unselfconscious context. Freedom from my own daily space opened up new views of history. I began to perceive places as spatial metaphors for temporal distance. Such a dialectic is a major part of the Stones’ attraction. They offer a framework within which to explore the crucial connections between individual desires (to make something, to hold something) and the social values that determine what we make and why.” (p5 Overlay)
The rubbings form a kind of writing, a response to the somatic presence of the objects, retracing to create a new layer, an interface between the stone, the writer, rubber and reader.
A reading of a three dimensional object, an expression of surface, but also of mass, temporality, a physical labour, the relationship between bodies and stone, of motion.
A process achieved by covering, overlaying, concealing what lies beneath, a writing made through touch, texture made into text. Each mark is one of countless possibilities, a method which is unfixed, relentlessly revised as the fabric is moved by the wind, the body and the force of rubbing.
In covering the stone to create a new layer, there is a continuous interplay of reveal and conceal.
In her essay, Illiterations (1989) Christine Brooke-Rose suggests, “that (the) women artist(s) needs more withdrawal and less belonging” in order to overcome and circumnavigate both the lack of (and possibility of future) canonization of their work.
More withdrawal, less belonging: is this the same as revealing less and concealing more? Could this process of withdrawing and belonging be seen as a continual movement, a constant push and pull (in multiple directions) between withdrawing and belonging — to be simultaneously inside and outside, pushing at accepted structures and mediums, to expose, subvert, resist and confront?
To remain unfixed, a constant revision of position. Beginning again and again.
Gertrude Stein, 1926:
Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series.
Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing.
Starting. Starting.
Starting somewhere that could be near the beginning, but my concerns often loop or shatter into overlapping fragments, so maybe this is not the beginning but a part overlayed from another point further this way or that. Or that way, or here or over there.