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Room
'For our house is our corner of the world?’ A room, in its bare essentials: four walls, window, door, bed, table and chair - the basic setting of a Beckett monologue 'But now I do not wander any more, anywhere any more, and indeed I scarcely stir at all, and yet nothing is changed. And the confines of my room, of my bed, of my body, are as remote from me as were those of my region in the days of my splendour." Such a room will become a point of departure and return in von Weiler's work. Firstly in Z’one,* he re-constructed from memory the room of his adolescence, and pausing, lived in the space for three days without venturing outside, pausing to read a book... Then he returned to the original room to measure and compare..... Memory had been generous: the room was in fact much smaller, more sharply angled and obstinate in its details - and significantly he had forgotten the gap under the wall through which notes were passed. In Nest he would reconfigure the room around this gap. Burrowing into the basement of an old studio block, first a long corridor would be built leading to a small chamber. In this heated chamber would be a soil-filled bed - such as one might find in a sauna - a place of reverie. Coming back along the corridor at midpoint sat a chair, and from the vantage point of the chair was a narrow gap. First impressions: a draught of cold air against the sweet wood smelling warmth of the corridor. The air was sucked through the gap with an audible sigh, sucked from under what one could make out to be an iron framed bed in a small room. The room was not otherwise accessible. "A nest-house is never young... ...it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting. For not only do we "come back" to it, but we dream of coming back to it.... This sign of "return" marks an infinite number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years and, through the dream, combats all absence." And yet returning in the daydream, from the warmth of our current nesting place, to feel a cold draught from the past, in that first hiding place under the bed, from a room that is now sealed and empty, is not the dream of return more comforting than the return itself? Dialectic
"Then reflect, my son: you are poised, once more, on the razor-edge of fate.' Two large speaker boxes are pushed against opposing gallery walls and held in place above headheight by an acroprop. From the left hand speaker comes a voice saying 'Let me down', and from the right hand speaker the same voice replies 'Don't let me down'. Let me down turns ceaselessly back on itself: the plea and the ultimatum delivered in a voice now victim, now aggressor - the dialectic of opposing voices, the dialectic of mastery and enslavement. Freud used the term ambivalence? to describe to uneasy coexistence of opposing pairs of instinctual drives - the dialectical pairing is then characterised by a third term which describes the relation between the two and its changeability. In particular the ambivalence of love-hate lead Freud to formulate the opposites of loving as (1) hating, (2) being loved and (3) indifference. Indifference being a special case as the forerunner of hate - the ego's repudiation of the external world with its outpourings of stimuli. Ambivalent pairings suggest the dysfunctional couplings that were central to Beckett, as in the couple who begin their courtship on a 'well situated' bench: 'Shove up, she said... I asked her if she was resolved to disturb me every evening. I disturb you ? she said. I felt her eyes on me...I thought we were easy, she said. You disturb me, I said, I can't stretch out with you there… Must you stretch out? she said... You only have to put your feet on my knees, she said.' Attention is built around another dysfunctional coupling: a speaker and a television have been placing facing each other from opposite corners of a small room. The speaker shouts out parade ground commands to the figure on the screen who struggles to obey orders. The weapon of war is a piece of 3 by 2 rough sawn timber - flotsam and jetsam of the artist's studio. It clear that the training will never achieve the desired result. Blind spot
"and darkly then the troubled water veiled the fading form" Blindness is a secondary theme that was analogous in Freud's writings to castration. He analysed the role of the eye in relation to the formation of the different drives and complexes and speculated that the primacy of vision over the other senses (as a consequence of the erect posture) had been a crucial factor in the formation of civilisation. 1° Freud's critique of the visual has had a decisive influence on art criticism and visual culture by calling into question the motivation of the viewer in relation to the thing viewed. Artists have responded to the Freudian critique in part by exploring strategies that reveal discontinuities between the act of seeing and the assumption of knowledge based on the visual evidence. Von Weiler makes work that is not aimed at the eyes. Visual pleasure is not the issue in this work, nor does the visual evidence explain the motivation behind it. If von Weiler offers simple, or precise visual experiences he does so by presenting objects that are readily visible but remain located in a blind spot, retain an inscrutable presence. The inscrutable object is that which offers itself up to be seen but resists investigation, throws back at the investigator the limitations of a methodology. |
Matrix
Three interconnecting basement chambers, dark, raw and humid; a dozen or so televisions clustered on the ceiling in arbitrary configurations, facing now this way, now that; a dozen or so video players racked up in an alcove feeding images out to the televisions; on each screen a lone figure, barely moving, upside down, against a dark ground, eyes shut or open; no sound but from the labouring of the machines. The two etymological readings of the title Matrix, which inscribe this project clearly within the lineage of the room/nest (as well as emphasising its site-specific construction), compete for attention: Firstly and following the origin of the word, to read the basement as womb, as a mould, as a cavity in which things are formed - umbilical video leads nourishing a batch of identical images, the gestating of a self-portrait... Secondly, to read matrix as a mathematical device - the algebra of the chessboard - investigating endomorphisms: transforming spatial vectors to mirror opposite - floor becomes ceiling, figure is reversed downside up... The imprecise overlap between the two readings generates an image that is hard to bring into focus, obscures a blind spot. These gestating images - do we posit for them a conception and eventual birth - or are they to remain in limbo, neither born nor unborn? In this sense they have yet to experience the first trauma - of birth - that will find its echo in each subsequent sense of loss... Anxiety
'At birth no object existed and so no object could be missed. Anxiety was the only reaction that occurred" Anxiety was linked by Freud to the trauma of birth, to the situation of helplessness, to the fear of being alone or in the dark or with a stranger. Anxiety, as an early warning mechanism to the danger of the loss of the protective object, was notable for two features and its connection to expectation and its indefiniteness. The silent purpose of this Matrix, its suspension of action, the passivity of these figures, their stillness and slight movement, infuses these basement rooms with a sense of expectation. Is this...is this...? "The silence...is echoing, indifferent, idiotic..Anxiety mounts; I observe its progress....I hear it identify itself moving up, like an inexorable figure, against the background of the things that are here.' Anxiety is the echo we give back to silence - to its indifference. Synapsis
A joining - a conjunction and conduit of nervous impulses between cells A fusion of halves - the pairing and union of chromosomes at fertilization The synaptic links in von Weiler's work are characterised by a tense attraction between halves that are held together whilst pushing apart. The halves function as an X and Y pair: they can be separated in theory but neither can survive in practice without the other. Their union and the tensions between them are embodied in use of the acroprop. The acroprop is also, in view of its function, a substitute - for a wall, column, lintel or beam - for a missing element in the architecture. In this sense it defines an absence - the lack of an essential part which threatens the whole edifice. Its placement indicates that repair work, reconstruction, renovation is underway - or promises as much. The acroprop is a recurrent motif in the sketches and drawings for projects, as well as being an important tool in the building process, often to disappear in the realised work itself as its function is superseded by other means of fixture. A recent development in von Weiler's work has been to make formal use of the acroprop as a basis for a series of related works - Horizontal Hold, Squash and Let me down. The acroprop allows the work to situate itself in relation to the architecture of the space in question by holding and compressing, by substituting itself for an architectonic element. It underlines a sense of contingency, of temporariness and reinforces the arbitrary status of the work as foreign body - that which is not intrinsic to but grafted onto the space. These works therefore belong to an opposing territory from the projects that grow from their environment - they come with variable dimensions and condition the space rather than are conditioned by it. |
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