In Unwanted, Broken and Useless<\/em> (YYZ Artists\u2019 Outlet, Toronto, 2006) a desk lay gutted and splayed on the floor. Its joins had been refashioned into joints; its drawers sutured shut and cut off, transformed into mere surfaces; its legs fitted with casters; its four corners attached to a pulley system, counterbalanced by clunky weights made from chunks of an antique stereo. When two people pushed on the counterweights, they raised the flattened desk into its upright position. A surprising gestural vocabulary emerged; the desk heaved, wobbled, and undulated, passing through myriad animal-like motions\u2009\u2014\u2009rippling manta ray, scuttling sea star, teetering fawn. When it returned to the floor it acted as bellows, expelling a little puff of air. Playing with turning surface into volume, visitors mapped themselves into a comical, yet disturbing, animistic rite through which the desk came \u201calive,\u201d re-inscribing its commodity fetishism with an uncanny creature-like quality. The piece re-imagined sculpture\u2019s potential for anthropomorphic \u201cpresence\u201d as a visceral desire to breathe life into commonplace objects\u2009\u2014\u2009a desire played out in an absurd marionette dance that showcased the puppet masters as much as the puppet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In her recent show at Parisian Laundry, Grade<\/em> (Montr\u00e9al, October-November 2010), Spier exhibited flattened furniture at a remove\u2009\u2014\u2009photographically. Classroom<\/em> (2010) is a large, digitally composited photo which, from a distance, appears to be little more than a pleasing geometric pattern. Closer inspection reveals twenty-five flattened children\u2019s school desks distributed across a concrete floor as if seen, impossibly, from high above. Like Wim Delvoye\u2019s photographs of baroque marble floor designs made from luncheon meats, Spier\u2019s desks interrupt the pattern\u2019s abstraction with their familiarity. They touch each other with the points of their legs, constructing a diagram of social connection and questioning the relation of patterning to social thought (as if in dialogue with William Morris). Yet the photograph also draws us into the desks\u2019 idiosyncrasies: their missing pieces, their visible scratches, their graffiti. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These idiosyncrasies are the subject of an accompanying series called Inside Desks<\/em> (2010). Spier presents a set of twenty-four individually framed, life-sized scans of the one part of the school desks that does not appear in Classroom<\/em>: the interior surface of their cubbies. Once used to store textbooks, tests, and notes, these surfaces also provided pupils with a private microcosm away from teachers\u2019 prying eyes. Kids could stick their hands in\u2009\u2014\u2009scribbling their favourite band\u2019s name, declaring their country \u201c#1,\u201d proclaiming their love, or discarding a gum wad\u2009\u2014\u2009with no one to witness these acts except maybe the next student to use the desk, or maybe the desk itself. Evading witnessing, the desks\u2019 interiors present the opposite of the omniscient perspective that Classroom<\/em> invites us to contemplate. The multiple layers of graffiti\u2009\u2014\u2009funny, often angst-ridden, and oddly familiar experiments in self-presentation\u2009\u2014\u2009become found landscapes of text. Each inscription seems both aberrant and normative, reiterating the stereotypical tropes of graffiti while asserting itself as a rebellious and utterly singular mark\u2009\u2014\u2009an inverse to the official inscriptions of teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari write, \u201cWhen the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or arithmetic, she is not informing them… She does not so much instruct as \u2018insign,\u2019 give orders or commands.\u201d The \u201ccompulsory education machine\u201d imposes \u201csemiotic coordinates\u201d on the child; the language children learn, far from neutrally conveying common sense information, consists of order-words, which are \u201cmade not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 75-76.<\/span> Even graffiti on school desks\u2009\u2014\u2009a quintessentially minor, quotidian form of disobedience\u2009\u2014\u2009trades in order-words, reiterating established hierarchies of cultural capital even as its marks cancel each other out, chaotically layering over each other to the point of incoherence. Spier\u2019s quiet act of framing echoes the desks\u2019 act as silent witness to these inscriptions. It also speaks to the distribution of classroom activity in accordance with an arrangement of surfaces\u2009\u2014\u2009a volumetric warp and woof around which graffiti, grading, and other graphic acts accrue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Driving toward flatness, the spaces Spier presents open up again by means of a complex layering of characters and subjects, through which the desks acquire a spaciousness, a history. Yet just as Classroom<\/em> interrupts pattern with particularity, the Inside Desks<\/em> series challenges us to view heaps of particularity abstractly, as part of a pattern. Spier\u2019s works play with the points at which particularity folds into pattern, singular character meets overarching apparatus, and use-value turns into diagram. These perceptual points of tension hinge themselves to thought, subtly asking how pattern perception and concepts of social space might turn around\u2009\u2014\u2009and even overturn\u2009\u2014\u2009each other. Flattening themselves, Spier\u2019s desks bring these questions to the surface. <\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/73_AC02_Rosamond_Spier_Unwanted-broken-and-useless-scaled.jpg\")
Unwanted Broken and Useless,
<\/em>YYZ Artists\u2019 Outlet, Toronto, 2006.
Photos: Adrienne Spier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/73_AC02_Rosamond_Spier_Sick-Ass-scaled.jpg\")
Sick Ass & Pantera Fuck You<\/em>, Inside Desks <\/em>series, 2010.
Photos: Adrienne Spier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/73_AC02_Rosamond_Spier_Pantera-Fuck-you-scaled.jpg\")
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