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Her artillery
Trisha Donnelly

Her work and its clarification are fragmented. Trisha Donnelly (San Francisco, 1973) is like an escape artist, constantly circumventing a simple verdict. Bruce Hainley attempts to typify the works through the mind of the artist.Swords, shields and cannon fire: for Trisha Donnelly art is more than reveille. The battle began a long time ago, before she was born. It continues long after whatever the little word after means has fallen into disuse. Drawings, video, the deployment of photographs not as pictures, actions – it would be best to consider it all, if not sculpture, sculptural: the interrogation of space (mental, physical, emotional) and its electric conquest and resistance – these are demonstrations of her tactical knowledge. Recently Karl Lagerfeld said he woke up one morning with an image of a long line of women in black, a kind of l’armée des ombres. Yes, an army of night. Glamour apocalypso. In the corps there are only various privates. What may at first have looked like privacies, girl jumping for joy, or love singing singeing signing its tropicalia – and all of that it would be extremely well to do, even though the day were coming when the sun should be as darkness and the moon as blood – this was not what it was, or only what it was, but a call to arms to figure out video before moving on to figure out something else (not that it’s ever concluded, conclusive). The technology allowed her to slow time and pinpoint the ecstasy of the performer’s climax, what hurls him or her out of themselves, out of the human. It allowed her to translate place and the idea of place, an elsewhere we often remain deaf to, into a language mistaken for love instead of the seduction of the medium and its machinery. The human is just one of the aesthetic’s effects. Given a sunset and a beautiful girl too many will believe anything rather than the fact that a medium is being taken apart before their very eyes, and taking them with it. There’s a picture in black-and-white of Donnelly as a warrior. Can’t see the head, can’t see the feet, can’t tell if it’s just a masque of masculinity or an actual dude – he’s going on memory here – but I’d swear it is her, a sword in each hand. You know the look. A nimbus surrounds him, her. It’s the radioactivity, it’s the sublimity: The D from W. A warrior always ready for action draws the sword, and the gesture, radioactive, continues forever, slicing through eternity, half-life by half-life. The distance from war is never very far. Every breath is one for life over death, but approaching the inevitable, nonetheless, the debt from wonder. She arrived as a messenger on horseback to announce a surrender, but it was not hers.Still some would turn her into a Cassandra, wishing only to see romantic neo-conceptual dreaminess or, worse, the occult. Ostriches! They bury their heads in the sand of the beach that Bas Jan Ader shoved off from in search of the miraculous. Of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Most forget the adder’s poison; forget the suffering, some of it staged, a scene changed. Most forego the strangeness by relegating it to a box ticked magick. Anything to forego the decomposition, an art that doth decompose. Ader was never conceptual art-lite, but, like many of his peers, dared to expand art’s possibilities: telepathy, sunburns, radio waves, astrology, ESP, weed and trips into the unknown, beyond. Whatever, it got called ‘Conceptual’, not ‘witchy’ or ‘esoteric’. (Is the trigger wire for these different adjectives’ activation gendered?) By attitude, temperament and look when he with sly tears, when he like Gilles in black cords, when he with careful attention and attenuation seemed to put his finger in irony’s dike, he knew it couldn’t be left there forever. Ader was questioning, frequently through repeating the ‘same’ piece in different media, his own place in Dutch art history – fallen from grace, falling off his bike into a river, out of the tree of knowledge, over Niagara Falls from an armchair – as well as his and his object’s inheritance and inherency. He who lies full fathom five is not her father. But oh the terrible work that has been tolerated in the name of Ader, ‘made’ (I use the term loosely) by those satisfied with the LCD of paranormal schmaltz. Donnelly participates in none of this. Early on she claimed Nina Simone as her mother. Her name is Peaches. Peaches pulls the finger from the dike. Let a flood sweep LCD away. Peaches takes a drawing and tears it into two parts, pins one part to the wall, resigns the ‘missing’ part to absence, mailing it to someone, anybody’s guess, never to be reunited. It is a way of asking what remains of drawing, the medium, torn to pieces. Is the drawing complete? Is any drawing – anything – ever complete? Is the drawing more the part pinned to the wall or its elusive Other? It bothers; it should, since there’s usually too much sublimation of the violence of representation. Donnelly has confronted Sturtevant’s drawing connections, slicing and dicing into the interior immediacy of contemporaneity, its exquisite corpse; she’s seen the use of defacement as autobiography. Asking what remains, Donnelly is trying to find out what a drawing is and could be – other than a luxury item people buy when they can’t quite commit to a painting. Do you know what a drawing is, what it can do? It can become ‘photographic’ or ‘peformative’, by which I mean active, atomic, atomising through a wall, leaving a blue auratic outline, call it Kirlian or call it the moisture transferred from the subject to the emulsion surface of the photograph causing an alternation of the electric-charge pattern on the film. Call it a draw between absence and presence, touching the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. It can destroy not only painting. Peaches takes her bite, sometimes with borrowed wolf fangs, and if you wait and listen you will even hear the howling. She’ll kill the first mother she sees, often not even a woman, who refuses to risk hearing the howling. She will take your morning, and it will be broadcast. You will not know until it is already gone. The strike is pre-emptive. Experience seizure of time itself, the thing you are filled with and forget you possess until it’s too late. Consider this while listening to the score of collapse played on a grand organ; the opposite of that sound scar is not construction.The tearing, the removal, loss mailed to the Other, the morning taken, the wind of the future blowing in the corridor of the institute: this has nothing to do with the invisible, with invisibility. It is documentary. Anne Carson has written, ‘the Sublime is a documentary technique’. Full of danger. Full of temps mort. Donnelly kills her dinner with karate, kicks it in the face, tastes the body. Her name contains the given (donné) and it is what she sublimes.This is a disambiguation page. A grammar of ice and air and solarity to organise a rhetoric of her elements. In Köln – in Die Brücke – she provided conjunction, a bridge, by taking away transparency and constructing a long wall to interrupt the glass allowing one to see through something, anything, too quickly. It conjoined the seen with what cannot be seen, how they gird one another, like the drawing torn to pieces holding the room with its missing. Condition: oversight. Rx: drammings of blindness. Night is coming; it may already be here. There is something of death in it. She walks oblivion on a leash. Its sound is ominous and Egyptian, untranslatable, just a special effect but no less affective, and a single one of its paws keeps the desert, grain by grain, whorled without end, from disappearing into thin air.Originally commissioned by FROG, issue no.2, Also published in Afterall 12Work by Donnelly can be seen at The Whitney Biennial 2006, New York.

Bruce Hainley

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