Holding Up Front, August 6 - 20, 2016, Y+ Contemporary
photos: Polina Teif
As for us, we too want something that’s neither inside nor outside, neither a space nor a site. In an inhabitable surface that recognizes us, we’d like to gently sway. Then we would be happy.¹
— LISA ROBERTSON
These are the materials of the inessential. Polyester throw-blankets, faux flowers, simulation-plaster wallpaper: mimicry at the level of texture and surface. Through her “Office for Soft Architecture”, poet and essayist Lisa Robertson writes about such surfaces as “ancillary or ornamental phenomena that have no meaning in themselves.”²
—Subjectivity, identity and individuation are at stake; rendered irrelevant, even. There is dissolution into materials and preservation becomes decomposition. Here, our bodies merge into the things with and within which we live.
Still, strands, branches, threads and pieces add up. Amassed bodies congeal and fold into themselves or hold onto something else. Lodged in the non-space of the storefront, agglutinating into too-solid form, they are pressed into the service of surface.
Holding up.
Hanging in.
Aspirational normalcy—writes affect theorist Lauren Berlant—is a desire for stability, for a life that does not require continuous reinvention. In pursuit of this ideal we become “…survivalists [and] scavengers bargaining to maintain the paradox of entrepreneurial optimism against defeat by the capitalist destruction of life.”³
Fixity is tenuous. Materials survive as pictures, and pictures deliquesce into materials—hollow, content-less, obfuscating.