Ágnes Lehóczky
December 2021

‘Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence of self, it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being from the inside — the fission at whose termination, and not before, I come back to myself.’

Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ in The Primacy of Perception

Look, the thing is, even though we arrive from the outside, made from the outside, we are simultaneously looking inside, identifying with the fabric of the inside, now looking through and at the outside, through a skin (no glass): a part of and apart from of both inside and outside. A last-minute (point of) entry (with you ‘in absentia’), as usual, into the last hour of this configuration. Aluminium underneath and in between, no glass this time. Concave and convex, imploding, exploding texture of (our own) breathing (canvases). The correlative space which binds these ‘things’ together is what concerns and discerns the restless psyche coming from the outside entering inside with a liminal body. By liminality I mean co-dwelling: of the organic and artificial; weird symbiosis, (non-)mutualism. The interpersonal between spectacle and spectator is what brings about the thing (in itself). Almost beyond the Anthropocene which speaks only in as ifs... As if, if you like, you, given you were here, were also organically both part of and apart of me. And when I say me, I, naturally, mean the page. What is in the bucket? Water or blood? you’d ask. Some awful bacchanalia. The form of creative barbarism. An invitation, inside. From the outside. Maquette of the house of horror (unseen), an open house; commodious.

To metapherein: to fill the void in the pathology of our thinking (and remembering). 28 anthropomorphic stones, 345 x 2150 x 2100mm. All this to carry over. Bridging, correlation-making seems to be one of the many interpersonal points to find your meaning between bodies in the world. But the correlation itself, by nature, is obscure, the hiatus unnameable. The quiet terror of it, the quiet beauty, too causes anxiety. It’s hard to say but for what it’s worth, it occurs me one, the poet (in you) argues, the task of the poem, by which I mean the art work, is to leave ‘the greatest distance between words; the greater the distance the deeper the abyss the artwork creates.’i It’s a spiral. Curling inward and outward. Unsure where you are, inside or outside. Stone outlives being. It carves permanence into the ephemeral, shapeshifting mindscape. The earth’s memory which spirals in concentric circles. Planetary encoding. The priority (sophia?) of that which was before and after (ours). Mnemosyne eroded.

Ekphrasis in this part of the land is a paradox (by which I don’t mean impossible) in the attempt to mimic, translate, decipher; only possible in as much it ‘speaks out’. Mimesis does not suffice. ‘Neither is without the other. The thing as the manifold of sensed perception. This one is C-type print 60 x 60 cm 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in. Perceived and perceptor. Spectacle. Spectator. It is because ekphrastic attempts are only mirrors of the self. As if it were an archaeological site where your task is to re-construct the scene of an unfolding drama. Aristotle calls it tragedy. My private tragedy. But one without which there is no play. And you like play. Playful palimpsest pulsates in the texture of this paper, again, a tragic play. Sooner or later a kind of historic nothing surfaces. Surfaces peel off, surfaces surface. Systematic erasure, manipulators sans papier. The arts of cruelty. There is no such thing as no consequence. The archive speaks, nonetheless.

There is an insatiable desire to autopsy who we love. Autopsy, assembling is dissembling; a living collage of building and unbuilding: glyph. To carve out, to hollow out (my) hieroglyphs onto skin, your skin. Concave and convex landscapes. Implosion, explosions, erosion. Metal. Bronze. Iron. Glass. Skin. Vellum. Animal flesh. Human skin. Mummification of time. Plaster. Rust. Aluminium. Water. Sound. Vision. Screen. Mimetic urination. Absence. The silence of the extinct creates eerie music from silica black concrete, pulverized glass, nails, steel. Video, colour, no sound. Bronze, cellulose lacquer. Handtufted wool. Wax, polyester, iron. Plywood, casters, polystyrene, wire-netting, cement, scrim, plaster, dust, paint, spray paint, sealant. Handtufted wool. Horseskin, epoxy, metal, wood. Steel, electric light, red wine and pump. Human in absentia. As if speaking to us from another world. Spooky otherworldly communication. Like Hamlet’s father-ghost. Earth-ghost. Spectral speech, spoken, unspoken.

To damage ‘matter’, to harm (each other or the other) also imposes irrevocable damage on whatever is made of this other, an annihilation, a systematic un-seeing, aggressive omission, exclusion, (absurd desire of) annihilation of an animistic presence. ‘Periphery’: there is no demarcation between outer and inner circumference. Place, in this instance is oil on canvas, untitled (no title is accurate) 22.9 x 30.5 cm 9 x 12 in, is always the point of entry (or exit) in the work. Phenomenological space or spaces, exchange of spaces, intersections of spaces, synergies of spaces, spaces superimposed on one another, uncanny spaces, heterotopic spaces, spaces estranged. Where is origo. Anthropomorphic shapes of crime. 85.1 x 74 x 50.2 cm / 33 1/2 x 29 1/8 x 19 3/4 in. Mortified, like Loth’s wife, turned to stone. Yet this untitled is titled disaster. Torture commodious. No metaphor intended. Metaphors nullify urgency in this landscape. You look ahead into a future without a you (at last). We come back here for a reparative reading of the object, the thing-in-itself to ‘fix the damage on site’.

Solidarity with matter, with fabric, materia prima: by this I mean a kind of split perception, a form of mutualism of hurt, to wear a bio-diverse skin. No glass can protect me from being hurt, now on my own, in this instance. Malediction. Made of iron nails. An alternative hospitality in which non-guests, you and I here, being inside and outside, exchange modus vivendi. Time pulls existence and non-existence into one dimension, into a newly discovered ‘retro-futuristic’ space of time in which the rock-solid semantic ground of the word evaporates into a perpetual deferral of its decipherability. This ‘lack’ now operates as the essence of the work of art. There are multiple hermeneutic dimensions here. Sans is the beyond. Like an echo from the after, but muffled before. Barely audible but clearly audible. Hence what comes between you and the work is flesh again. Bulleted with nails. A shared skin. It hurts. Words do.

It’s a kind of self-identification. I am made from. By speaking, I make myself one who can be spoken to (allocutary) and one who can be spoken about (delocutary). I, time, I history, I, I, I, skin. Hung up, vertically, upside down. Left, to be misremembered (dismembered), at a crossroad. I, abject I. Butchery. Butchered. Upside down. But it is also a form of self-preservation. It is not so much the horror, I want to turn to my fellow stranger to explain, of the sight of the butchered: but the silent correlation between the mummified and the slaughtered. The former, in this argument, lives to sustain. To annihilate, to terminate. And the correlation forms a shared rhetorical question (or horizon). Both fellow skin and I’s, I know, tremor. A displaced tremor. A tremor of displacement.

Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other,’ Heidegger writes somewhere in the ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, reflecting on the inseparability of artwork and artist, yet, it feels, as if you were entering an archive or a museum, as if the work was abandoned, left behind, artists long gone. Sensed and sensor. The spectre, oiled on canvas sized, in two parts 61 x 151 x 3.5 cm 24 1/8 x 59 1/2 x 1 3/8 in, rearranges the view of the picturesque. Death drives art. The spectre of legacy. Elkrönig. Or like Derrida’s Hamlet, it lurks around. It is in fact a triptych.

What drives art is ambition: to exhibit inhibition. We call it a crisis of expression, or perception. A protest. The desire to resolve/liberate what we turned into confines. A feast, a celebration of being in the present (body) outside as organically inside. The body of the artist = the work in progress = progress as art. Organic. Human. Waste. The cycle begins. Autonomy, almost achieved here to a level of absolution. Which also means ‘turning point’ or ‘disorder’.

Elsewhere it translates as a ‘live or die’ moment. Here, the former takes place. The flesh of the work of art, moves, breathes, it functions in sync with the body as it too lives to functions. Art: the human waste. There is no such a thing as mimesis. There is no metaphor (intended). Forms and formations and deformations of piss-taking. Vegetation. A strange spectacularity of the awkward. Discomfiture of the body as apotheosis. The mysterious momentum, the spectral second between composition and compost. and decomposition. You somewhat miss the yellow. Body of art(ist), organic fertilizer. The genuine bohemian. All, compost. This cycle, she knew, is indestructible. Viva carcass, viva giant strawberries, snow, exhausted semantic fields of piss-flowers. Faecal poems. Viva, viva. Repulsion. Viva desire. Viva Helen, viva the anti-social. Viva decadence.

An entry into an alternative interpersonal (the question remains between the co and the inter-dependent, paranoia and reparation). I am unaccompanied by I. As usual, in the company of self, a one-to-one again. Objects here already settled in dusk. An hour before closure. Nowhere a sign, do not touch. No such thing as ekphrasis. By this I also mean, once you found the entry point, it is not only impossible but pointless to search for the exit. Only configured, transfigured, (non) figurative shame. Apo phainesthai ta phainomena. Let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself. Periphery, comes to mind again, from Greek peripheria, ‘circumference, outer surface, line round a circular body,’ but it also means literally ‘a carrying around’ (what, your own body?), from peripheries, ‘rounded, moving round, revolving,’ peripherein, ‘carry or move round’. One mutters here in some awkward embarrassment to oneself. Yet this monologue is dialogic. It’s gaining some invisible body here between longing and belonging as company, as configuration of a companion. In-between is the silhouette of grief (a word you hate): ok, let’s call it hiatus. I become for what I came here to become sheer air.