BREACH
Daniel J Glendening
May 2013
This is an essay written by guest curator Daniel Glendening, featured in the accompanying catalogue for The City and The City. This exhibition tethered two cities that have historically felt quite separate, in order to build a bridge between communities.
I've been trying over and over again to figure out what I want to say and how to say it. There's a definition of anxiety—I keep circling back to the same things: anxiety, relationships, the internet, art making, the novel The City & The City—that describes the feeling or the psychological state of anxiety as that of being afraid of some threat, real or imagined, that may or may not exist at all. Perhaps that "may or may not" is where the feeling resides: paranoia could also be designated to a threat real or imagined, but it's not paranoia if they're really coming to get you—then, maybe, it's anxiety.
China Miéville's novel, The City & The City, takes place in two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which occupy nearly the same geographical footprint: the two cities wrap about each other in a cold, tangled embrace. They remain distinct with tight borders, sharply delineated, except where they don’t and then they bleed together in overlapping "cross-hatched" areas.
Each city retains its own distinct visual aesthetic: they have different architectural tropes and histories. The citizens of each city dress differently, they adopt different styles and what was in last year in Besźel almost certainly will never be in Ul Qoma. They have different cuisines, different customs; they speak different languages. To the casual observer, however, the two cities would appear as one: there are no walls, no fences, no borderlines. The map of each exists in the minds of the citizens.
Each city's populace is trained, from birth, to recognize the signifiers of the other city and immediately, unconsciously, dismiss them: to unsee what has been seen. They are trained to un-cognize their surroundings, if those surroundings are not of their own. To violate this edict—to see the other—is an egregious offense. Children are often forgiven, or ignored, if they trespass, and they will often test the limits: Stand here, in this park, where Besźel and Ul Qoma overlap. You live in Besźel, and so you are standing in Besźel but, now, shift your thinking and for a moment, just for a moment and without moving, pretending you are watching a tree in the wind, you can stand in Ul Qoma. No one will know, but you will know, and you will breach.[1]
To view the other is to breach: to violate the terms and see the other, to see that which is to remain unseen.
This is not to say that within the logic of this exhibition, The City & The City, titled after the novel, that Portland is analogous to Besźel, and Seattle to Ul Qoma. There's some metaphorical harmony, there: two cities occupying the same general geographic area (the Pacific Northwest) and yet (in my experience and in the experience of others with whom I've spoken) somewhat blind to the goings-on within the borders of the other. But, in fact, I think the analogy extends further into some other territory, something larger.
The novel can be read as a parable for all populations and all citizens: in going about our daily lives we often un-see things that we do not wish to cognize: I walk past the panhandler or the petitioner with hardly a glance. Our country, and world, is highly stratified, and often it seems an impossibility to even acknowledge one's place in that system, and really see those above or below. In Miéville's novel there exists a rumored third city, Orciny: a secret city existing between Besźel and Ul Qoma—this is a city defined by Breach and outside of it.
There are rebels that live within Orciny, working to re-unite the two cities into one. These unificationists openly breach as a political act, tempting fate and the authority of the unseen-yet-omnipresent enforcers of such transgressions.[2] They routinely see what they should be unseeing, brazenly and without regard for the seemingly arbitrary laws against such action. They are working to expose.
It seems trivial to call Portland or Seattle Besźel and the other Ul Qoma, but it does not seem trivial say that artists are unificationists. This is what we work for: to make visible the invisible, to point out the errors in the code, to find the glitch in the system, to break windows and to breach.
Breach is the term used to describe a tear or rupture or the violation of the law, but it is also the leap of a whale out of the water, or the breaking of ocean waves. It isn't quite known why the whale breaches—it may be a tactic useful for stunning or scaring prey, to breath air away from the surface of the water or to dislodge parasites from the skin. It may also serve a social function: an assertion of dominance, or for purposes of courting or warning of danger. It may be a form of play.
As artists, we are fully and unapologetically breaching. We are pointing out those things—be they psychological, spiritual, political or aesthetic—that the world largely doesn't, can't or won't see.[3] We test the borders and, when they push, we push back. We push against medium, push material history toward an extreme: Rebecca Steele, Evan La Londe or Lydia Rosenberg's pushing of the sculptural into the photographic, the photographic into the sculptural, or either into language; the dislocation of a body out of place, or the psychological unmooring present in Steele's or Samantha Wall's work; the flexing of a medium to its most basic or most extreme, as in La Londe's photograms, Jason Lee Starin's ceramic accumulations or Patrick Kelly's collapsed spaces; the confrontation with the mortality of the body greeted with humor and violence in the works of Chase Biado or Sean Joseph Patrick Carney; the manipulation and exposure of invisible forces, in Laura Hughes' light works and Lisa Radon's manipulation, here, of the very molecular structure of a room's atmosphere; nearly everyone is confronting the overlapping of the digital and physical—from Starin's interest in the analogy of data as clay or Carney's internet fueled appropriations and juxtapositions—but here perhaps no one as directly as Zachary Davis, who constructs moving images out of code: sculptures in digital space.
We're not all doing quite the same things—there are similarities, overlapping interests, but each of us pushes against the borders in different ways. We have different goals, different causes, but still we are all breaching: trying to push back against a culture—a system—that, while it does seek innovation, seeks it only within tight parameters and only just enough to carry a sheen of new-ness. This isn't to say that here we're working to destroy the system, but we are pushing.
I used to watch this old sitcom, Out of This World, about a teenage girl from another planet who could stop time in its tracks. She lived in a suburban home with an adopted suburban family and communicated with her alien father via a holographic projection in her bedroom.[4] We may not be able to freeze time, but we can, also, push against it: against that relentless forward march—that elemental property of the world that no one can yet claim to have mastered—it, too, is a structure, but a structure resistant to bending, warping. To step outside of time is also to step outside of what it is to be human—to be an animal living in a body that is changing, growing, and deteriorating under one's own witness: to live, and die, and be aware of the passage and that slow decline.
While we can't escape or alter time, we can record it, and hold on to those recordings as if they themselves were frozen pieces: blocks of time cemented and excised from the forward march. To push against time is to push against the systems of the universe.[5] We try to grasp a fleeting moment: to record the movement of light on surface; to mimic the scattering of the sun through raindrops—to turn amorphous mud into glass-flecked stone; to isolate a small, chance observation of denim in a drainpipe—to channel the anxiety of a dislocated body: the failing body, the animal. As a species, we're afraid of dying: of being, suddenly, inhuman. We're afraid of what it means to be un-tethered in time and space just as we desire it—it's an impossible conflict—desire and fear—being and not being.[6]
Breaching—stepping across from Besźel to Ul Qoma, asking people to see the unseen—carries with it a weight. It is a violation, a revolt, and with it comes adrenaline and excitement but also anxiety: the fear of some threat that may or may not exist at all. Everyone is afflicted, it would seem, by anxiety—so much so that it probably doesn't even need to be said. We, here, live in a world of constant surveillance imposed by not only external, unseen agencies, but also by ourselves upon ourselves. We broadcast our thoughts, or feelings, our social engagements out into the world continuously: we tag our friends and we tag where we got breakfast. Everyone knows everything we do. We photograph ourselves, we're photographed by others, and we carry GPS markers with us wherever we go.
When we breach, everyone is watching, even if they aren't paying attention. Every action, in this state, carries undue weight. This is the weight of risk, and the weight of mortality: the body dissolving into nothingness; the de-humanizing of the self by decapitation, the laughing in the face of certain doom. This is anger at a broken system, transferred into humor, or memorialized funereally—there's no way, yet, to stop time, as much as we strive to hold onto it, to capture it in light and shadow. The world, by and large, does not care, and it will keep spinning on and on, and people will keep living their lives, on and on, regardless of our efforts.
So, we do it for ourselves; we do it for each other.
We all live in the same town. We all know each other, even if we haven't met yet. Sean was maybe the first person I met after moving to Portland, through PNCA—we drank free beers at Music Millennium after he texted me by mistake. I met Samantha and Laura early on, also through PNCA. I met Jason when I was working on a show at a space he helped run, and later included his work, and Lydia's, in a show in a motel room. I met Rebecca somehow, maybe through Sean, maybe while getting a beer at Yur's. I met Zack through Appendix, and met Chase and Evan when I was in group shows with them at PSU. I met Patrick at an opening just recently, though I'd seen his work long before. I met Lisa maybe more than once, but it's hard to tell since we knew each other's work before we ever shook hands. I just met Sharon, and now we know you, so now we all know each other.
I'm not really a curator, I just play one, sometimes. I genuinely wonder if anyone, ever, really knows what they're doing: no one is ever really taught how to be, we're just expected to be, and so we fake it and hope that no one notices and we keep faking it as long as we can. I don't have a curatorial vision—a curatorial agenda—I will take the opportunity, though, when it arises, to work with those people I like and respect, and whose work I like and respect, and to tease out the connections I see there. For now, it's not really any more complicated than that.
Ultimately, this is what it comes down to. We make work about disparate but overlapping things.
Point, line, plane.
Anxiety, whispers, death.
Humor, language, mud.
Light, a body, positive energies.
We do these things for ourselves, and we do them for a world that, quite often, doesn't really need them, or want them.
Mostly, I think, we must do them for each other.
I've been trying over and over again to figure out what I want to say and how to say it. There's a definition of anxiety—I keep circling back to the same things: anxiety, relationships, the internet, art making, the novel The City & The City—that describes the feeling or the psychological state of anxiety as that of being afraid of some threat, real or imagined, that may or may not exist at all. Perhaps that "may or may not" is where the feeling resides: paranoia could also be designated to a threat real or imagined, but it's not paranoia if they're really coming to get you—then, maybe, it's anxiety.
China Miéville's novel, The City & The City, takes place in two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which occupy nearly the same geographical footprint: the two cities wrap about each other in a cold, tangled embrace. They remain distinct with tight borders, sharply delineated, except where they don’t and then they bleed together in overlapping "cross-hatched" areas.
Each city retains its own distinct visual aesthetic: they have different architectural tropes and histories. The citizens of each city dress differently, they adopt different styles and what was in last year in Besźel almost certainly will never be in Ul Qoma. They have different cuisines, different customs; they speak different languages. To the casual observer, however, the two cities would appear as one: there are no walls, no fences, no borderlines. The map of each exists in the minds of the citizens.
Each city's populace is trained, from birth, to recognize the signifiers of the other city and immediately, unconsciously, dismiss them: to unsee what has been seen. They are trained to un-cognize their surroundings, if those surroundings are not of their own. To violate this edict—to see the other—is an egregious offense. Children are often forgiven, or ignored, if they trespass, and they will often test the limits: Stand here, in this park, where Besźel and Ul Qoma overlap. You live in Besźel, and so you are standing in Besźel but, now, shift your thinking and for a moment, just for a moment and without moving, pretending you are watching a tree in the wind, you can stand in Ul Qoma. No one will know, but you will know, and you will breach.[1]
To view the other is to breach: to violate the terms and see the other, to see that which is to remain unseen.
This is not to say that within the logic of this exhibition, The City & The City, titled after the novel, that Portland is analogous to Besźel, and Seattle to Ul Qoma. There's some metaphorical harmony, there: two cities occupying the same general geographic area (the Pacific Northwest) and yet (in my experience and in the experience of others with whom I've spoken) somewhat blind to the goings-on within the borders of the other. But, in fact, I think the analogy extends further into some other territory, something larger.
The novel can be read as a parable for all populations and all citizens: in going about our daily lives we often un-see things that we do not wish to cognize: I walk past the panhandler or the petitioner with hardly a glance. Our country, and world, is highly stratified, and often it seems an impossibility to even acknowledge one's place in that system, and really see those above or below. In Miéville's novel there exists a rumored third city, Orciny: a secret city existing between Besźel and Ul Qoma—this is a city defined by Breach and outside of it.
There are rebels that live within Orciny, working to re-unite the two cities into one. These unificationists openly breach as a political act, tempting fate and the authority of the unseen-yet-omnipresent enforcers of such transgressions.[2] They routinely see what they should be unseeing, brazenly and without regard for the seemingly arbitrary laws against such action. They are working to expose.
It seems trivial to call Portland or Seattle Besźel and the other Ul Qoma, but it does not seem trivial say that artists are unificationists. This is what we work for: to make visible the invisible, to point out the errors in the code, to find the glitch in the system, to break windows and to breach.
Breach is the term used to describe a tear or rupture or the violation of the law, but it is also the leap of a whale out of the water, or the breaking of ocean waves. It isn't quite known why the whale breaches—it may be a tactic useful for stunning or scaring prey, to breath air away from the surface of the water or to dislodge parasites from the skin. It may also serve a social function: an assertion of dominance, or for purposes of courting or warning of danger. It may be a form of play.
As artists, we are fully and unapologetically breaching. We are pointing out those things—be they psychological, spiritual, political or aesthetic—that the world largely doesn't, can't or won't see.[3] We test the borders and, when they push, we push back. We push against medium, push material history toward an extreme: Rebecca Steele, Evan La Londe or Lydia Rosenberg's pushing of the sculptural into the photographic, the photographic into the sculptural, or either into language; the dislocation of a body out of place, or the psychological unmooring present in Steele's or Samantha Wall's work; the flexing of a medium to its most basic or most extreme, as in La Londe's photograms, Jason Lee Starin's ceramic accumulations or Patrick Kelly's collapsed spaces; the confrontation with the mortality of the body greeted with humor and violence in the works of Chase Biado or Sean Joseph Patrick Carney; the manipulation and exposure of invisible forces, in Laura Hughes' light works and Lisa Radon's manipulation, here, of the very molecular structure of a room's atmosphere; nearly everyone is confronting the overlapping of the digital and physical—from Starin's interest in the analogy of data as clay or Carney's internet fueled appropriations and juxtapositions—but here perhaps no one as directly as Zachary Davis, who constructs moving images out of code: sculptures in digital space.
We're not all doing quite the same things—there are similarities, overlapping interests, but each of us pushes against the borders in different ways. We have different goals, different causes, but still we are all breaching: trying to push back against a culture—a system—that, while it does seek innovation, seeks it only within tight parameters and only just enough to carry a sheen of new-ness. This isn't to say that here we're working to destroy the system, but we are pushing.
I used to watch this old sitcom, Out of This World, about a teenage girl from another planet who could stop time in its tracks. She lived in a suburban home with an adopted suburban family and communicated with her alien father via a holographic projection in her bedroom.[4] We may not be able to freeze time, but we can, also, push against it: against that relentless forward march—that elemental property of the world that no one can yet claim to have mastered—it, too, is a structure, but a structure resistant to bending, warping. To step outside of time is also to step outside of what it is to be human—to be an animal living in a body that is changing, growing, and deteriorating under one's own witness: to live, and die, and be aware of the passage and that slow decline.
While we can't escape or alter time, we can record it, and hold on to those recordings as if they themselves were frozen pieces: blocks of time cemented and excised from the forward march. To push against time is to push against the systems of the universe.[5] We try to grasp a fleeting moment: to record the movement of light on surface; to mimic the scattering of the sun through raindrops—to turn amorphous mud into glass-flecked stone; to isolate a small, chance observation of denim in a drainpipe—to channel the anxiety of a dislocated body: the failing body, the animal. As a species, we're afraid of dying: of being, suddenly, inhuman. We're afraid of what it means to be un-tethered in time and space just as we desire it—it's an impossible conflict—desire and fear—being and not being.[6]
Breaching—stepping across from Besźel to Ul Qoma, asking people to see the unseen—carries with it a weight. It is a violation, a revolt, and with it comes adrenaline and excitement but also anxiety: the fear of some threat that may or may not exist at all. Everyone is afflicted, it would seem, by anxiety—so much so that it probably doesn't even need to be said. We, here, live in a world of constant surveillance imposed by not only external, unseen agencies, but also by ourselves upon ourselves. We broadcast our thoughts, or feelings, our social engagements out into the world continuously: we tag our friends and we tag where we got breakfast. Everyone knows everything we do. We photograph ourselves, we're photographed by others, and we carry GPS markers with us wherever we go.
When we breach, everyone is watching, even if they aren't paying attention. Every action, in this state, carries undue weight. This is the weight of risk, and the weight of mortality: the body dissolving into nothingness; the de-humanizing of the self by decapitation, the laughing in the face of certain doom. This is anger at a broken system, transferred into humor, or memorialized funereally—there's no way, yet, to stop time, as much as we strive to hold onto it, to capture it in light and shadow. The world, by and large, does not care, and it will keep spinning on and on, and people will keep living their lives, on and on, regardless of our efforts.
So, we do it for ourselves; we do it for each other.
We all live in the same town. We all know each other, even if we haven't met yet. Sean was maybe the first person I met after moving to Portland, through PNCA—we drank free beers at Music Millennium after he texted me by mistake. I met Samantha and Laura early on, also through PNCA. I met Jason when I was working on a show at a space he helped run, and later included his work, and Lydia's, in a show in a motel room. I met Rebecca somehow, maybe through Sean, maybe while getting a beer at Yur's. I met Zack through Appendix, and met Chase and Evan when I was in group shows with them at PSU. I met Patrick at an opening just recently, though I'd seen his work long before. I met Lisa maybe more than once, but it's hard to tell since we knew each other's work before we ever shook hands. I just met Sharon, and now we know you, so now we all know each other.
I'm not really a curator, I just play one, sometimes. I genuinely wonder if anyone, ever, really knows what they're doing: no one is ever really taught how to be, we're just expected to be, and so we fake it and hope that no one notices and we keep faking it as long as we can. I don't have a curatorial vision—a curatorial agenda—I will take the opportunity, though, when it arises, to work with those people I like and respect, and whose work I like and respect, and to tease out the connections I see there. For now, it's not really any more complicated than that.
Ultimately, this is what it comes down to. We make work about disparate but overlapping things.
Point, line, plane.
Anxiety, whispers, death.
Humor, language, mud.
Light, a body, positive energies.
We do these things for ourselves, and we do them for a world that, quite often, doesn't really need them, or want them.
Mostly, I think, we must do them for each other.
[1]"We used to throw stones across the alterity, walk the long way around in Besźel and pick them up again, debate whether we had done wrong. Breach never manifested, of course. We did the same with the local lizards. They were always dead when we picked them up, and we said the little airborne trip through Ul Qoma had killed them." —China Miéville, The City & The City (New York: Del Rey, 2010), 70.
[2] "How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besz maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realize that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. There were folktales of renegades who breach and avoid Breach to live between the cities, not exiles but insiles, evading justice and retribution by consummate ignorability." —China Miéville, The City & The City (New York: Del Rey, 2010), 133.
[3] This isn't to say that all work is about, say, social inequity or foreign atrocities or something—this is about something else: something less tangible.
[4] The presence of her father's disembodied holographic head hidden away and casting its gaze across her bedroom strikes me, now, as a particularly loaded set of circumstances, but that's a topic for another time.
[5] "Time is always gnawing at us and corroding all our best intentions and all our most beautiful thoughts about where we think we're at. It's always there, like a plague creeping in, but occasionally we try to touch on some timeless moment and I suppose that's what art's about to some degree, lifting oneself out of that continuum. Maybe it's good that it's discontinuous and segmented and fractured, those little chunks of recognition floating around offer some kind of compensation. In the end too art always turns on the artist, you know. Anybody who makes art is being put on the spot by his own art. It's mostly a matter of finding your own limits. Most people like to imagine that art is somehow done with some kind of lack of limitations, but everything's circumscribed, it's already locked in, trapped." —Robert Smithson to Kenneth Baker, ca. 1971; Kenneth Baker, "Talking with Robert Smithson." Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder and Bettina Funcke. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 155.
[6] "The production of identity of the image over time constitutes what we refer to in our culture as 'high art.' In our usual, 'normal' lives, the time dedicated to contemplation is clearly dictated by life itself. With respect to real-life images, we do not possess sovereignty, administrative power over the time of contemplation: In life, we are always only accidental witnesses of certain events and certain images, whose duration we cannot control. All art therefore begins with the wish to hold on to a moment, to let it linger for an indeterminate time." —Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 88.
[2] "How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besz maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realize that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. There were folktales of renegades who breach and avoid Breach to live between the cities, not exiles but insiles, evading justice and retribution by consummate ignorability." —China Miéville, The City & The City (New York: Del Rey, 2010), 133.
[3] This isn't to say that all work is about, say, social inequity or foreign atrocities or something—this is about something else: something less tangible.
[4] The presence of her father's disembodied holographic head hidden away and casting its gaze across her bedroom strikes me, now, as a particularly loaded set of circumstances, but that's a topic for another time.
[5] "Time is always gnawing at us and corroding all our best intentions and all our most beautiful thoughts about where we think we're at. It's always there, like a plague creeping in, but occasionally we try to touch on some timeless moment and I suppose that's what art's about to some degree, lifting oneself out of that continuum. Maybe it's good that it's discontinuous and segmented and fractured, those little chunks of recognition floating around offer some kind of compensation. In the end too art always turns on the artist, you know. Anybody who makes art is being put on the spot by his own art. It's mostly a matter of finding your own limits. Most people like to imagine that art is somehow done with some kind of lack of limitations, but everything's circumscribed, it's already locked in, trapped." —Robert Smithson to Kenneth Baker, ca. 1971; Kenneth Baker, "Talking with Robert Smithson." Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, with Barbara Schröder and Bettina Funcke. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 155.
[6] "The production of identity of the image over time constitutes what we refer to in our culture as 'high art.' In our usual, 'normal' lives, the time dedicated to contemplation is clearly dictated by life itself. With respect to real-life images, we do not possess sovereignty, administrative power over the time of contemplation: In life, we are always only accidental witnesses of certain events and certain images, whose duration we cannot control. All art therefore begins with the wish to hold on to a moment, to let it linger for an indeterminate time." —Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 88.