[-empyre-] Response to Clare



Clare, your question about building into the traces resistance to disappearance reminded me of the first banners I made, which were oil paint on linen. When I began to use them in marches I became conscious of an excessive ptotectiveness towards them (as future traces) beacuse of the huge investment in time involved. Since this involved a potential limitation on how they might be used in actions (among other reasons) I shifted to a making drawings, scanning them, and having the banners printed digitally on to a synthetic canvas. It made me feel more or less unreserved about risking them, about the grass clippings, dog shit and other stuff that marching adds to their surfaces (though I am also aware, as David mentiond in his introductory email, that these digital technologies have problems in archival terms, so the oil paint banners will probably outlive them).

I am attracted to actions or performances where the process of generating indexical traces is in-built. It's one of the things that I like about several of Beuys' actions. His May Day Sweep of 1973 (in which he swept up the rubbish left behind after a May Day march in West Berlin) made collecting traces the process of the action. The residual object ( a vitrine full of rubbish and the -red- broom) operates as a curious double trace - both of Beuys' action, but also of the march (and implicitly of its political langauge and heritage). Many of Beuys' actions refer to their traces in this way. In Eurasienstab, 1967, he begins by unpacking the objects he is to employ in the action from the box they were freighted in. In Vakuum-Masse, 1968, he finishes by packing the objects he has used in the performance into a metal box and welding its lid on. So the process of activating and then leaving objects is enacted, as part of the structure of an action or performance. The enclosing of the objects in the wedled box in Vakuum-Masse also articulates an important feature of traces, that they don't yield their past use or narrative in a straightforward way. Part of what is interesting is that they can withold the process that generated them. That open-endedness is perhaps part of the possibility of their re-activation.

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