Object Action Object Cool and Balducci

Begin action. Live. A woman sits on a standard office chair at what appears to be a rather typical office desk. In her hands she holds a very ordinary piece of string, which she uses to silently make shapes along the desks surface. A loop is thrown like a lasso, barely falling beyond the surfaces edge before it is coiled back and coerced into a circle, which is then pushed into the figure of an hourglass before being smoothed out again into a single line. These actions are repeated and developed as the string is folded, moulded and twisted into innumerable permutations. At first glance it could be tempting to view these actions as gestures of bored distraction performed absentmindedly whilst whiling away lost hours, for idly passing the time. It soon becomes clear however that the womans actions are not tactics against tedium, but instead have a definitive structure or logic, and a sense of intent or purpose that remains difficult to determine or define. Knowing what something is not is not the same as knowing what something is. It is possible to display certainty in the elimination and refutation of one particular classificatory order and yet remain uncertain about the validity of claiming other categorical certainties in its place. Rejection of one possible set of meanings might then operate in the space before other meanings have begun to fully form, in the nascent state before something can be wholly or coherently declared. The recent exhibition of the work of Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci at Site Gallery in Sheffield operates in the space of such indeterminacy, where the notion of uncertainty or inbetweenness might be applied as much to the status of the artists practice in general, as to the transitional shifts and fluctuating status of materials explored within the work itself. For some time now Cool and Balducci have shown work in the context of performance festivals and events, but this is the first occasion that their work has been interrogated over a sustained period within a gallery, where they have selected to frame it as a particular form of visual arts practice. The exhibition marks a moment of transition and transitivity for the artists as their practice shifts, and they relinquish the familiarity of one set of framing conventions and histories in favour of the as-yetunexplored possibilities of another. Over six weeks the artists propose to show a series of video works and a number of sequentially performed actions. The gallery becomes a space to rethink and explore their practice from a different perspective where unfamiliar surroundings enable a different kind of lived encounter with the work, in order that it might be explored afresh. Cool and Balduccis work often presents a prosaic inventory of commonplace materials - which has previously included string, paper, thread, salt, effervescent aspirin, scotch tape, a nylon bag - within exquisitely and economically executed live actions and recorded moments. The artists are certain about what the work is not, and the tightly choreographed statements that surround it deliberately exclude particular references that draw unwanted connections and parallels to certain types of performance or live art practice. The work is not about the ephemeral, transitory or everyday, they claim, but an interrogation of matter; an exercise in exploring elemental states and spaces of material transition. They request that their audiences attend to the material nature of the work itself that they remain as close to the facts or truths of the work as possible, resisting the temptation of elaboration or

interpretation, emotion or sentiment. The psychologically or associatively inflected reading does not appear to be welcomed by the artists. They assert that their practice functions in a system devoid of external signs. The frame in which the work operates thus is somewhat instructional in tone; we are told to curb our enthusiasm, reign in our errant imaginations. Pause. Cut to black. Begin action. A video is projected onto the wall. Untitled. A neutral space is framed within the shot. There is an open window letting in light towards the right of the frame, which affords an incongruent moment of asymmetry to an otherwise symmetrical scene. A woman sits at a table on which a large white sheet of paper lies, flat and inanimate. The woman inserts her hands beneath the paper, fractionally further apart than the width of her body. She begins to lift her hands, slowly drawing her palms and the two ends of the paper towards the centre, towards each other. In time the two ends of paper begin to touch and the paper shifts from a register of flatness to one of form as it actively envelopes space, crossing from two to three dimensions. Gradually, the woman eases the edges of the paper back down to the surface of the table, and it returns to its former inertia. Her hands remain beneath the paper. Pause. She begins to lift them once again but this time the gesture appears inverted. The paper folds in the opposite direction along a barely perceptible crease an action that inescapably echoes the gesture of closing a book. The woman coaxes the surfaces of the paper together between her hands, steering them towards verticality. Eventually the two planes of paper become synthesised, momentarily escaping the horizontality of the table to rise together as a single form. The flat surfaces of the paper run perpendicular to the angle of the filmic frame, whilst their paper-thin facet directly faces the camera. Carefully held in place, the paper seems to oscillate between visibility and invisibility. There are rare moments when it becomes virtually imperceptible, when it appears to almost disappear. Pause. Cut to black. In other work there is a similar sense of disappearance; the further illusion of solid matter melting into thin air. For example, in one work a single sheet of paper is inched along a table whose surface is striated by broad bands of light reflected onto it from an unseen source. As the paper enters the areas of reflected light, its whiteness and the white of the light on the tabletop become alike, equivalent. In this space, the table and the paper itself disappear: they are just white. It is no longer possible to discern the edges of either the paper or the table. There is only an unreliable and indeterminable white matter, extending the appearance of form into space. Distinct entities coalesce and blur; the inert begins to stir; directional trajectories change mid flow; flatness becomes form and then returns to flatness; light appears solid; matter is dematerialised; objects deliquesce into shadow. There is a strange kind of trickery or magic at play in the work, yet we are asked to observe this with empirical coolness. There are six video works shown in sequence that bear witness to similar actions, and during the exhibition a sequence of twelve actions will take place as a live and repeated occurrence in the gallery: daily and continually for six weeks. In the work, the woman (who is in fact the artist Marie Cool) functions as a form of catalyst or enabler, creating moments of energy or momentum that allow these silent transformations to take place. She is not there as a performer. Her role is rather more perfunctory: she is there to make something happen. Cool operates as the final or missing element in an existing circuit; her body closes the loop thus activating or charging the other objects in the space. She makes the other objects live, initiating

the moments of transition and material slipperiness that, we are told, form the focus of the artists enquiry. However, there are other transitional moments and unstable states at play - other thresholds that cannot be ignored. In some senses, the work operates at the interstice between the physics of being and the philosophy of becoming; between ontology and phenomenology; between what something is and how it is then perceived. This shift between the actual and the perceptual might be understood in relation to the transition or translation that inevitably takes place between the artists intentions and subsequent interpretation of the work by the audience. In spite of its apparent control and precision and their insistence that it functions as a closed system - Cool and Balduccis work is a site of tensions, instabilities and critical inconsistencies. Whilst some of these form an integral and intentional part of the work, other moments of uncertainty appear more like glitches that rupture or unravel the logic of the artists rhetoric; functioning as a form of unanticipated and involuntary noise that conjures seemingly uninvited associations and creates space for the potentiality of other meanings that do not sit so squarely within the artists rather prohibitive framework of interpretation. Pause. Cut to black. Begin action. A video is projected onto the wall. Untitled. The space is silent. I am reminded of a sanatorium. A woman enters from the right clasping two sheets of paper between closed palms. The woman is Marie Cool - I already know this. She looks a little tired. There is a feeling of expectation, anticipation. Her hands seem caught in prayer, held at head height in a form of yogic salutation. She begins. The pages tremble. She remains expressionless; she does not give anything away. The pages continue to tremble; and this trembling becomes the site of a persistent human presence. Gradually she opens out her hands as though they were hinged at the thumbs, carefully retaining a sheet of paper on each palm in precarious balance. The pages flutter like butterflys wings warmed in the sun. I can feel her concentration, the sense of her breath held. These are actions borne of hours of repetition and rehearsal. Their simplicity belies the possibility of error, the potential for the clumsy or failed rendition. Simplicity can be terribly unforgiving. In spite of her emotional withdrawal or restraint, there is still a task to be performed, a precision required. I am trying to look only at what is taking place, but find myself thinking about other things. Paradoxically, Cools dispassionate and distanced presence becomes strangely compelling and resonant, her withdrawal charged. At times her mannerisms reflect the sense of evacuated subjectivity witnessed in the gestures of spirit mediums, where the body functions as a conduit for the passage of other and unseen energies; the passive transmitter or link between separated entities or worlds. Cools controlled and austere denial of self-expression also recalls a particular ascetic practice, where the disciplined withdrawal of individual agency could be read as either a punitive gesture or as a form of emancipation. Alternatively, her body language evokes that of a pageturner - the human prop within an orchestral context - silently and obediently enabling anothers performance; dutifully dulling her own stage presence so as not to upstage the main event. However, individual psychologies are not so easily repressed, reminds Denis Dercourts film The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de Pages, 2006), and a wilful sense of agency may still be harboured silently within the most passive and unassuming of guises. Still waters run deep.

In the work, Cool is proposed as matter alongside other matter, just another object in space. On occasion, she attempts to physically withdraw from the scene such that we only register the force or movement created by her body, or appears as a shadow, fluid and impalpable. At other times, her body functions as a line, or as an edge, or as the apex of a triangle constructed from masking tape. This desire to blend into the background or become equivalent can be understood as a form of existential osmosis, a categorical slur or disturbance at the boundary between body and environment. The gesture of camouflage or of becoming something other can then be seen as a paradigm of compulsion as well as of criticality, where the condition of similitude might provoke a crisis of being analogous to a form of psychosis, a sense of self becoming porous or formless. For Rosalind Krauss this crisis of distinction occurs as a body involuntarily responds to the ... peculiarly psychotic yielding to the call of space... a failure to maintain the boundaries between inside and outside, between, that is, figure and ground. A slackening of the contours of its own integrity, of its selfpossession ... the body collapses, deliquesces, doubles the space around it in order to be possessed by its own surrounds.i Here, the withdrawal of the body becomes psychologically charged. It is difficult perhaps for the body to remain neutral in the way that an object might. It always carries other and existing meanings; it can never wholly shed the associations that have accumulated around it. The human body functioning within a restrictive system or rule has the tendency to be read as submissive or as resistant; as alienated and oppressed or the site of latent revolt. In fact, the work itself occasionally emphasises the presence of Cools body or draws attention to the relentless duration of her inexhaustible and purposeless labour. This is particularly true of the sequence of live occurrences in the gallery space, where Cool can be witnessed in the process of engaging with various installed objects and arrangements: taut threads pulled tightly across the width of the gallery or intricately webbed in a corner like a cats cradle; geometrical structures and soft spheres suspended from the ceiling; two large tables displaying an innocuous array of stationery - paper, string and masking tape stationary, in waiting. In a number of the actions, Cools body is the measure by which materials become stretched or shaped, or against which a particular fit is sought. The reach of her outspread arms; the slight width of her body; the tentative angle between her neckline and elbow in a given position; the span between her finger and thumb, determine the distances and relationships between one object or movement and another. These correlations perhaps echo the idea of a canon of proportions in which the body is inscribed within a geometrical logic, epitomized by Leonardo Da Vincis Vitruvian Man where the measurements of the body optimally correspond to the dimensions of both a circle and a square, absolutely perfectly and with total symmetry. A system or structure is asserted into which the body is inserted and expected to comply; a system that perhaps fails to take into account the possibility of all too human variables. The idea of human variability (or even fallibility) becomes extended or enacted in the space of the gallery as the two sequences of actions play out; over and over, again and again. It is unclear whether the live elements follow or anticipate the actions performed to camera; whether the recordings offer a particular optimal articulation made possible only through innumerable earlier and unseen rehearsals and successful repetitions, or whether they present a unique moment caught on camera which the live actions subsequently seek to replicate, endlessly attempting to repeat the

unrepeatable. The videos at times appear as controlled experiments, produced in the knowledge that any error or discrepancy in the performance can be erased or wiped away. There is more at stake in a live context perhaps, a different kind of tension is established. Whilst Cool and Balducci have rejected the critical frameworks of theatre, they still appear to want to retain some of its conventions - the attentive silence, the controlled distance between an audience and the action itself. Encountering the work directly from the front would still appear to be the privileged position for viewing Cool and Balduccis practice, for not only does this offer the conditions for moments of a particular symmetry, but many of the transitions and transformations proposed only really work when viewed from certain angles and from a certain distance. The videos make the conditions of silence, distance and the frontal viewing position possible in a different way to the live actions. They begin to indicate a sense of the optimal manner in which the work might function; they set up propositional conditions of viewing which are impossible to attain in a live context. Whilst the live occurrences mirror the same sequential format of the looped video, they are unable to echo its capacity for endless and unchanging replay. The performative strategy of loop and repeat is inescapably not the same as that made possible through filmic technologies. Whilst the sequential nature of the live action does not change, neither does it stay the same. Certain actions seem more susceptible to these involuntary fluctuations. It is impossible to ever exactly duplicate an action or other time-based gesture. In an article on the philosophy of repetition within art practice, Brian Dillon draws on a rich history of ideas ranging from Kierkegaard to Deleuze in order to suggest to explore repetitions double nature: it names both an endlessly predictable recurrence (the relentless crawl to infinity that is the experience of boredom, for example; or the equally unreachable horizon of obsession) and a ceaselessly renewable starting-point.ii Here, rather than creating the condition of an endless equivalence or same-old sameness, The repeated experience, it turns out, is always something different ... Repetition, paradoxically, is always new.iii Cool and Balducci refer to both the video works and live occurrences as sequences, drawing on the terms filmic connotations where it is used to describe a piece of film showing a single incident or set of related actions. Whilst this might be seen as an attempt to contextualise the work in relation to a tradition of film and video, the term sequence has also gained currency within a particular strand of conceptual art practice, where it is used as part of the vocabulary for serial or systematic processes or methods. In The Serial Attitude Mel Bochner defines sequence as the state of being in a successive order.iv The term serial can also be used to describe a particular musical composition in which all twelve chromatic tones of the octave appear in strict order with no note repeated before the sequence is completed. Similarly, twelve actions by Cool and Balducci take place in the gallery, in a strict order that has been predetermined in advance like a form of grammar. The work seems to follow the logic of a particular conceptual trajectory of practice, echoing the tone of Sol LeWitts assertion that, To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.v Cool and Balduccis actions are equally pre-set, where unwritten instructions or plans for the work are followed with absolute precision, which prevents the gestures from collapsing into the territory of the habitual or improvisational. In his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, LeWitt suggests that, When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a

machine that makes art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is simply intuitive it is purposeless.vi Whilst rule-based actions and serial repetition have perhaps become synonymous with a particular conceptual vernacular, this anti-subjective logic can still be complicated or disrupted by the presence of alternative (and at times contradictory) theoretical, psychological or even existential associations. Potentially there is a risk that the gesture of endless repetition might be interpreted through a psychoanalytical register, as indicative of an obsessive behaviour or a form of compulsion-repetition. Alternatively the model of endlessly repeating an action is inflected with a sense of the absurd, where it can be seen to evoke the Sisyphean model of indeterminable or purposeless labour. In the essay, Bound to Fail, Christy Lange suggests that, Conceptual art, despite its associations with objectivity, acknowledged and mined the subjectivity and flaws of its own methods.vii She points to a particular statement made by LeWitt where he states that, "Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times only to be ruined."viii Here perhaps, the rule or instruction can as easily become the rules of the game, whilst the repeated gesture might allow for a form of ludic infinity and the possibility of incalculable permutations or improvised rehearsals within a given structure. Similarly, in the catalogue for the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 exhibition, Johanna Burton also notes the apparent contradiction or counter-intuition evident in early conceptual art, as recourse to systems enabled rather than denied access to the rhizomatic, perpetually variable and vehemently nonlinear, while making visible the myriad structures designed to contain and order.ix These various inconsistencies and double readings are not necessarily incompatible then, or indicative of the failure of the conceptual work to communicate effectively. In fact the incongruent meanings produced by these different perspectives can at times be understood as points of desirable friction; an integral and welcome part of the work rather than unnecessary interference at its periphery. Pause. Begin action. Live. Cool places her hands over two sheets of paper and then slowly draws them towards each other until their edges meet. She continues to apply pressure until the touching edges of the paper lift together in a peak and break away from the tables surface, striving towards verticality. Over and over, again and again, the paper refuses to become fully upright and instead collapses - flaccidly - towards the left or right, forcing Cool to unceremoniously draw a close to the action and move on to the next task in her sequence. It is almost possible to sense the artists frustration at this stubborn, repeated failure; the barely perceptible moment of rupture as - against the rules - a sense of Cools enduring and individual endeavour becomes palpable. Whilst I can imagine the precarious elegance of a successful rendition of this action, I still like its failed counterpart and its resultant, if reluctant, state of endless and indeterminable rehearsal. It operates as one of the more poignant moments of desirable friction in the work, which I hope will not become too smoothed out in time. For me, I suppose it is these difficult and resistance moments that have encouraged me to repeatedly return to view the work over and over again, for ironically it is often the glitches and blips in the logic of a seemingly objective or even closed system that become most compelling.
Copyright Emma Cocker, 2008 Response to the exhibition by Cool and Balducci at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 3 May - 14 Jun 2008. Commissioned by Dance Theatre Journal, 23 (1), pp. 18-23.

Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1994), p.155. Her reflections draw on Roger Caillois analysis of insect mimicry in Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia, trans. John Shepley, October, Vol. 31 (Winter, 1984), 30 (originally published in Minotaure, Vol. 7, 1935). ii Brian Dillon, Eternal Return, Frieze, Issue 77, September 2003. iii Dillon, Eternal Return, 2003. iv Mel Bochner, The Serial Attitude, first published in Artforum, December 1967 v Sol LeWitt,Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, first published in Artforum. September 1967 vi LeWitt, 1967 vii Christy Lange, Bound to Fail, Tate etc, Issue 4, Summer 2005, http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/boundtofail.htm viii LeWitt cited in Christie Lange, 2005 ix Johanna Burton, Mystics Rather than Rationalists in Donna de Salvo (ed.), Open Systems. Rethinking Art c.1970 (exh. cat), Tate Publishing, 2005.p.67.