Back from the Peninsula

Close-ups

Bodies of Work / Adam Dickinson

Bean haricot legume

 

The common bean arrived in Europe as part of the Columbian exchange. The Pope gave a bag of beans to his niece as a wedding present in 1533. She was marrying Prince Henri of France. From this the white bean dish of cassoulet emerged. Common beans acquire nitrogen through an association with bacteria. The centre and the periphery mix. The inside and outside of a practice mix.

The bean recurs for Claude Viallat. It appears regularly on the surfaces of his canvases, which are often suspended without frames from ceiling or walls.

 

Interoception refers to the signs and signals interior to the body. It is the collection of senses that provide information about the body’s internal state. A throbbing pulse. A growling stomach. The urge to urinate.

 

But what if the body is

a body of work, or the

site of a gallery, building,

archive, or sea? What

are the interoceptive

signals reporting? What

does it mean to listen to

this expanded body?

 

These artists are listening to the material signals inherent to their traditions and influences and to the material (bodily) conventions of their practice. They draw attention to frames, stretchers, and to the environments in which they live and work. We move from the crystalline “Marée basse” of Charles Lapicque, with its ships in mottled turquoise, to the regular grids of Louis Cane (“Toile tamponnée”), to the latticed “Chassis” of Daniel Dezeuze.

Interoception as an artistic practice involves paying attention to the “senses” within a “body.” It may be a biological body or a conceptual cloud like an art practice itself. What are the forms of signification within a body/cloud that we take for granted? How can we pay attention to the poetics of these internal messages?

 

Salt is a message intrinsic to this region, to the body of Hyères-les-Palmiers. The Sea. Les Salins. Salt is in the biological and cultural history. Over the past forty years, the Mediterranean Sea has become saltier and warmer. Soil salinity is a growing challenge.

Colour is also an intrinsic message from the body of this place. Azure waters are its quintessential symbol. Here, in Port du Niel, all the painters in the exhibition, from both generations, concern themselves with the chemistry and colloquy of colour.

Musée du Niel / Salins des Pesquiers / Porquerolles / Villa Carmignac

Nicholas Hauck

Lisons in purple impending scents of backgroundbrush, listen:

If it’s too much up and down, then we can’t

help the stop.

What’s drawing in the yellow book:

the shirtless fishmonger, a chatty

musician with background chainsaw threat-

ening cows, crunching, swaying, seeing as rumination.

 

Hair held pink, we wake, walk as fast as

pen allows, as stick

can be thrown, c’est une histoire de vitesse.

Twin sheets pathwaying

to tolerance & abstraction, as in informal

dress, as in shortness of attention and breath-

taking sceneorities.

This is a creative break. Starlust

means more here, centrally

pushed like shopping carts and their dis-

contents of underbrush intimacy, fireprone.

 

Beneath sleepiness, charm. Together

we excel togetherness, bright, chirpy com-

raderie among the tallest trees’ softly sloping

paths. Mais pas du tout! Mais tant mieux after-

math of arboured suspension, or floating.

***

Find a spot by the time you’re OK. How

do you like to sit? There are lessons on going

farther to places out there, the way we

yesterday, the here wanting to be known, the now

we place in going. Our rumble, a swift comment

hiding hellos, a half-submerged oceanic

desire, or something like gorgeous or longing or

closeness dirt-sketched, the rattle of possibility in

hand or even the role of decisions mal chaussées. Things (esp.

water) are heating up. Un mégot vaut… grimace,

ramasse, wrong as, or else! That’s it: the distance between

seagull and cicada.

***

A deciduous group: Carmignac, rereading myth.

3D hyphens between nature &

body, we’re esthetically array, voraciously

divine, unpure in almond-shaped

negative space, crabyrinthine. For every

real word spoken, a hand-

tufted romance, a double-sided

fantasy of chessboard digestion.

We question spectatorship’s

come-hither look, undecided

in leaving, learning, leaning behind

understanding the air. A mind

is not a sequin-homed hermit

blind ropebathing in Tracy

Emin confessional. See how that

kiss is framed? The sweetest

taboo weaving nurture, waving awkward

beyond & outside wetness,

opening our eyes onto pawns and

temporary sirens, a fluid process of

vision in ecosystems of seabed

texture, cattails, flight poems, cut-

wheat smells.

***

Waves of just-off-the-

Boat smiles, greeting retro-fish

display: salty, fresh, ripple-slick

skin, netted and at least hand-

buffeted, handling gills and razors

with ease & ice. Guppy-grinned net-

apprentice, blue under the off-

side squeezed buoys.

***

Layered bus fares through impromptu

memory-making: swinging lunchtime, bead

work, fossilisation, erosion’s

opposite: missing stops. Purposefully

forgetting which way is.

***

1. tart                                         9. loose

2. sweet                                    10. central sporting corner

3. bubbly                                   11. (empty #1)

4. twins                                      12. electricalness

5. negative dreamkeys            13. flooded

6. first tetrad                             14. holy (suggestive)

7. linear ambivalence              15. fading progress, feeding process

8. escape                                    16. unfolding traces (pistage)

16. void’s pinkspace edge        24. slit-slat rabbit rhythms

17. loophole bloodweave        25. release

18. bridging                                26. capture

19. disappearing #2                  27. hayhalo boat visage

20. insect alphabet                   28. (empty #2)

21. almost rough seas              29. hole-in-two buddy

22. prayer-ish                             30. (empty #3)

23. tickled encounters              31. endless snailpride

32. sneeze                                 39. beard w/portrait                   47. beach cutoffs

33. peeping bull                       40. chance remixed                     48. dirt short   

34. rollerball                             41. endless halftime                    49. endive breakfast

35. refreshed gorge                42. hopscotch maze                     50. diveteam poolparty

36. (empty #4)                         43. endlessly over                        51. seasonal neighbour

37. cloud boudoir                   44. controlled dismantling          52. polyester picnic

38. prairie decision                 45. hidden and sought                53. loveboat feeling lovebent

39. lumineffort                        46. face off, open space              54. grounded

***

Pleasure without content or enjoyment is our guide. We go through high or get through low where the roots show judgement’s articulation: the trip between sites, comfortably close to the facts of subversively thin paper. We do everything for the distance: make a cuphandglove face, let the real act up

let the table yellow                blackgrey a photographer

let green dirty                         blur starry work

let the weed hole                   odd a special white

let our visit level                     decline rocks

let a wall sound                       prolong 20 peanuts

bring rain over                         tape the sportsack break

hear the bag tang                    loophole our valet ‘round

point the crab drive                random the topic bark

plastic availability                    jump protector caps

hat a water dance                   number source-boats

thing the dip wet                     knock the want source

trim pocket fuzz                       stomp step away

paintbrush death’s dearth     bird a somehow scar

frog possibility’s skin // duck the swallow in flat // hop our carryaroundfront // recoup an edgeframe // circle the wack-a-muse // hang around and busy the is // rope where an in-there gets smaller // adapt to staring in // bridge the almost rough // knob a fold inward // if the trace-exchange // noon the middle ground // site the non-here.

***

What is the significance of site time? What marks the surface of discipline? What is the experience of bare feet? How do gardens work? What works a garden? Whose garden? When is a tree not a garden? Whose garden? Where does a path lead? What leaves a trail? Can a way trace backwards? What is the opposite of a path? Who follows? Where does time lead? Where do sites belong? Why belong? Where does a site end and a body begin? Where does a non-site begin and a site end? Who cites a body? Who keeps tabs? How abstract? Who blurs the lines? What is composite? Who isn’t lyrical? Where is status? Who adapts? Where does the wall give in? Why does exchange? What happens at the centre? Who is inside? Where does outside define? Who does? How outside? Whose time? Is it ever? How to deconstruct way in? Who builds sensation? What takes time take? Who gives voice? Where does speech? Does fascination explain? When are nights time? How to ask why the ground? What hovers between? Where vibrates? What points the arrow yellow? Feels the wind? Who steps where? What brings around? Why not corner? Under whose authority? Since when do they? Why speed up? How to manage? Because of which alphabet? What is spelling? Who spoils? How does? Which over there? Why now? What if touch? You won’t? When do we? Who filled the glass? What insight? Despite whom? Roped up in where? Which is what again, sorry?

***

The importance of moving in the mud

dissimilarly. Sedimentary flow & basin

layers, international node-ballads

of simultaneous contrast, a lightly

eccentric salt-culture, symbolic of

mechanisation and its sources:

agglomerated sedentarisation, or

perennialized ecological heritage:

sansouire & glassworts.

 

Ruderal ornithological heritage

for each leg-length, a water-

deep miniopterus’ agenda, salt

finally getting a bit of height, the second

opposing the first, same-sourced.

 

Nonfigurative without abandoning

reality’s separately considered

material, the usual everydayness

of structures close to facts’

compositional trace & the amorphous

geometry of saline translation.