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My initial impulse to take rubbings was to document moments of damage, repair, rupture, wear. A transcription, a record, a history, a language of mending and alteration, of time passed. Resonant encounters on the dérive if you want to get all Debord about it. I generally do.
And also, it is me walking around in the place I live, doing the mundane things of daily life. I don’t live in the place I do by accident. There are a variety of aesthetic, political, and historical factors that add up to me being where I am in time and me seeing what I see. The oracle is the oracle through the lens they have been taught to see through and the material they are given for divination. Not to blow vapors up my own nose. I take rubbings using lithographic rubbing ink and fabric interfacing. It is a vernacular technique used by folks heavy into frottage. I was attracted to this method because it utilizes invisible structural components of two physical languages I speak, sewing and printmaking, to make visible details of structure and surface. The dimensions of a rubbing correspond to the limits of my body - how far I can reach, how long I can crouch, how much I can carry. These dimensions increase exponentially with the support of others. With The Cinch I literally became obsessed. I walked into The Cinch in the middle of the day and the sun shone just right on the slick sticky topography of the floor and I lost my mind. Kind of how it is when the sun hits the water, or, this one time where I was in Iceland and it was daylight at 11pm because it was July and the sun was bouncing off these volcanic rocks. That moment with the floor was mythic and hallucinatory and resonant. Like when a note rings out and reverberates in a specific way and then catches itself in an echo or feedback loop. I always feel these things in my teeth and in the part of my brain that gets hazy when I eat a good meal. I can feel myself salivate. Obsessed. Like talk about the floor incessantly obsessed. Like show up and hang out just to be near the floor obsessed. Like introducing myself to everyone at the bar to try and get an in with the floor obsessed. Like what have you been up to oh I have this thing with the floor of The Cinch obsessed. It’s not really defined at the moment but I know it’s going to happen obsessed. Thank you to all who indulged my obsession. The list is long and I am grateful to you. The physical dimensions of this rubbing were made possible through the labor of Ani Ahlberg, Shrey Purohit, Ben Sap, and Victor Saucedo, who attended to all the details of production, while I dragged my increasingly sweaty body across the floor, stopping occasionally to ask for water or orange slices, like a dazed boxer between rounds. • |