Nothing Found

In Restless Leg Saga (2012), Shana Moulton‘s female protagonist grapples with the oppressive symptoms of RLS, a nervous disorder defined by an irrational and intolerable urge to move one’s legs that no amount of subsequent movement can suppress. In Whispering Pines 9 (2009), a woman is so devastated by an estimate given by an Antiques Roadshow expert that her body breaks into pieces.

In Galactic Pot Healer (2010), a seer in a pink Snuggie tells a woman that her broken ceramic vessel is beyond repair. Instead, the entity offers her a “healing massage,” over the course of which the woman’s back is kneaded into a replacement pot. In the works excerpted here, Moulton confronts the melancholic corps morcélé, and looks to the mundane objects and practices at her fingertips if not to make it whole, then at least to make it new.

For this selection, I have adapted my introductory notes from existing texts written in 2012, corresponding to a series of PowerPoint (TM) presentations I commissioned in conjunction with the Global Art Forum’s “The Medium of Media” program, which took place at Art Dubai that year.

PowerPoint (TM) is a medium that connects some very basic means of communication: language, image, and action. These are fundamental, even archaic communicative modes that are not confined to any one medium in particular, but are deployed in various combinations and to varied degrees in all media. When seen in this way, a productive reciprocity emerges between the many ways in which we communicate – between ritual, print, the Internet, and so on. PowerPoint (TM) can be included in that broad spectrum. In fact, in its combination of text, image, and performance, it can be seen as a uniquely comprehensive medium, however oppressive, corporate, tedious or even absurd that may seem.

For “PowerPointing Your Creative Medium Potential (CMP),” we asked artists, collectives, writers and creative entities to produce original presentations that engaged that medium’s cross-disciplinary potential – to revindicate and revitalize a rejected, ostensibly “idiotic” medium. While we were strict with constraints – it had to be PowerPoint (TM), not Keynote or Prezi – the result was not so much about any one application per se as it is about medium-specificity as such. What we had attempted was a case study of how any medium might be emancipated, disinhibited, and pushed to its outer-most limits. Interestingly, what began as an exercise in the reclamation of PowerPoint’s corporate, at times corrupt, communicative infrastructure became a meditative, even spiritual matter. We found each commissioned work to articulate a ritual in its own way; its slides forming mantra-like, techno-devotional hymns that productively irritated and subverted what we have come to expect from mundane modes of communication.

Kari Altmann’s contribution was particularly notable in its mediumistic regard. Made as a response to and named for “Jemsheed,” a devotional love song by Ayshay (Fatima Al Qadiri), the work made use of the nonsensical glyphs created by human response to touchscreen interfaces, presenting them as sigils exhumed from the devices we animate with our fingers.

The repetition of the name “Jemsheed” in the song, like the repetition of hand movements portrayed onscreen, became an expression of devotional desire; these elements combined to narrate a relationship between our tactile selves and our reflective but impenetrable black screens that is distant and intimate, productive of a psychic yearning to somehow close the gap.

Search for the terms “3D tears” in Vimeo and you will find “Pointless Cloth Test,” produced when user Dominic Faraway began “playing around with c4d cloth and tearing.” The video inadvertently melds the liquid tears that one sheds, and the cutting tears that one inflicts, or shreds. Its title is defeatist if one chooses to read it as such, and its chosen model – the disembodied head of Walt Disney – a dark reflection on the genesis and decay of the “happiest” and “most magical” kingdoms on Earth.

Spooky Black is a high school student from Minnesota. His sexy music and visuals are straight out of the “mirror stage.”

This period occurs early in life and results in the creation of the ego through a mechanism of internal conflict: the infant confronts his image in the mirror, and is fooled by what he perceives to be his capacity for purposeful action. Lacan insists in Seminar I (1953-54) that “the sight alone of the whole form of the human body gives the subject an imaginary mastery over his body, one which is premature in relation to real mastery.”

Writes Kristeva in “On the Melancholic Imaginary,” reproduced above: “Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus: that countenance which – although it will carry him off into death – remains unperceived by him as, marvelling, he contemplates himself in a mirage.” This is the landscape of adolescence and the condition for Without You, in which Spooky Black smiles as he sings, “I’ll die without you.”

The magic of YouTube makes sharable the Disney adaptation of Goethe’s 1797 ballad, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which the eponymous character enchants a broom to fetch water for him, only to discover the limits of his magical abilities. The apprentice confronts his image, and his world fills with water: this is amniotic fluid, which suspends him between the whole of the world and the sharp shards of wood that litter the floor with each swing of the axe, only to reanimate again. This is Pessoa’s “dead life” of repurposing. This is the loss that tingles and aches between our fractured bodies and our fragile screens.