Dr Linda Marie Walker, Giving oneself time (of life) 90 Degrees Equatorial Project, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, essay 2007
Giving oneself time (of life)
Dr Linda Marie Walker 2007
(This is what happened: a point (on land) was chosen in the world (a beginning), on a coastline, and from there three other points (on land) were chosen, each at a 90 degree angle to the one before, and each, as it turned out, on coastlines too, and then they were travelled to, framed, and photographed (surveyed in a sense, as if to attenuate time – and, as if that was possible).)
There are experiences that one never gets over – all-of-life for instance, the singular experience of being alive, and therefore being of the world, one of its infinite infinitesimal aspects. The experience of livingness (and non-livingness) is endlessly different, nuanced, shifting (like the deserts).
It (the life, the work, the writing) won’t be a matter of degrees in the end, or even at the beginning (and hardly ever in the middle), it will be a matter of framing, of setting-off again and again, of colour, of light, of sand and mud and love and hate and pain and time and due, and the touch of the thing itself (heart, sky, sea, birdsong, traffic, sunshine); intuition, the effort, the act, the shape, is the method (of watching the screens ‘be-themselves’). It is bitter-sweet to leave home, to look at the world as a mass of lines to follow, as continuums, convergences, as bundles and shimmers and gleanings and scatterings. You can see in the four framed-landscapes that proportions are not identical – despite the low perspective, they each have propensity for their own accent, their own dialect. Each picture/showing of the 90 degrees is resistant to being only a number, or being numbered as a degree (there is no surface appearance that confirms or proves that). And yet they, those places, or grounds, are real – real-fictions; a human body went expressly to find ‘compositions/composites’, to find what is (always) right before the eyes, and also (almost magically) invisible (the body needs to follow the eyes, it needs to take into itself the facts which overwhelm it) – as if everything ‘looks’ the same (and is the same). The ‘composite’ is the thing that awaits violence; and it is merciless about ‘propositions’ (do not under any circumstances propose what the composite might be, what it does or doesn’t do). What am I for, might, as an idea, slightly tear the composite, and you would wish it would rip it to shreds (the edges of the framing bear witness to the impending tear); instead, most likely, minor, imperceptible, repairable (external) damage. Intuition suggests a method of difference or division: a dividing of the composite into tendencies (e.g. two), writes Deleuze. (Desert Islands, p. 36/37) And, why not two thousand. “This method is something other than a spatial analysis, more than a description of experience, and less (so it seems) than a transcendental analysis. It reaches the conditions of the given, but these conditions are tendency-subjects, which are themselves given in a certain way: they are lived.” (Deleuze, ibid.)This, the given, as a sense of tending, is like an every present other-realm, a universe of one’s making, a force that must open ‘glimpses’ – and not abandonment or banishment, but the feeling of ‘hereness’, of the exactness of the presence of being-here (its wetness, hungerness, joyfulness, fearfulness, lightness …) Toward ‘what’ given does one (one’s work) tend … now we are dreaming.
On the screens, colour is a substance moving toward some unknown momentary other substance – a moment that might reveal a face, a tree, an ocean, a house. This constant changing is substance too (change + moment + colour) – three substances together in time doing anything in particular (that is, with intention), like regulating or implicating; instead being with each other toward whatever might (eventually) come into focus. Although here too there is no promise, nothing might focus, ever. And yet something (and this might be a flicker), in the movement, will suggest the merest recollection – as if, as I gaze, I detect an event, a feeling, a mood, a dream (and now you are dreaming; it is time to dream …).
This, overall, is delicate work; it slips past categories (film, photography, installation, documentary) almost silently, touching them carefully nevertheless (and necessarily, as they are critical energetic references), as the work works back into the world – not to represent it, this would be redundant – with the difference (unending differences of tone, tension, texture, taste, threat, time (and other language plays) the world has given, with its givens, with its incredible sorcerous strangeness (the world is undreamable). This is like asking: what is it to dream work(s)/writing(s)/self(s) into existence; or what is it not to dream … into existence … the equator (the great circle round the earth, equidistant from the north and south poles, the non-line that draws the top and the bottom toward the centre), equatorial forces, pushing, pulsing, pulling; the equatorial climate falls roughly between latitudes 5 degrees north and 5 degress south, this is saturated climate, a climate where air is thick as mud, anyway thick enough to knead, a substance, like the climate of the screens – a gentle insistent kind of saturation, here climate, saturation, becomes internal (the whole body kneads); the working out from the earth and the working in to the earth is a back and forth movement, a giving to the given, part of a continual process that breaks and cuts and cracks and splits, and yet because one pays (can pay) attention to the process (of falling apart) these acts/volitions are associative, directional, unimagined). So so difficult, and funny, and simultaneous – as is the odd mission of carting around a ‘framing’ device to precise places on the equator so as to push it into the ground for the sole purpose of photographing it ‘there’. What form of story-telling is this, what dreams-of-departure are at stake, what type of departure is imminent – as departure appears unavoidable (travelling so as to depart, departing so as to travel), as a type of beginning, a quiet, terrible, beginning – the throwing down of ‘order’ (the right angle) in order to see, to bring into view, as in a dream (mildly, faintly) something entirely otherwise, as a chance, perhaps.
“Ah! What do I call ‘force’? It is a matter of intensity, radiations, the physical emissions of the dreaming soul, of degrees of delight, almost always tragic. According to the state of the matrix, the dreams are naturally more or less apt to rise in the scale of the passions. If I stopped dreaming? I shuddered, I would crumble to dust.” (Cixous, Dreams I Tell You, p. 5)
