[-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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