![\"Stark_BicornateBicornous-ThatwhichisBelowcorrespondstothatwhichisAboveandthatwhichisAbovecorrespondstothatwhichisBelowtoaccomplishthemiracleoftheOneThing2\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO04_Rosamond_Stark_BicornateBicornous-ThatwhichisBelowcorrespondstothatwhichisAboveandthatwhichisAbovecorrespondstothatwhichisBelowtoaccomplishthemiracleoftheOneThing2-scaled.jpg\")
Bicornate Bicornous (That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish<\/em>
the miracle of the One Thing)<\/em>, 2013.
Photo : courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin\/Cologne\/New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The digital print depicts the drawing tacked onto a rough, off-white studio wall. A figure\u200a\u2014\u200aStark herself\u200a\u2014\u200acrouches at the base of the drawing, in sneakers and a white dress with a long white zipper, holding a pencil in her right hand, which rests on the edge of the drawn bin. The photographed and drawn figures\u200a\u2014\u200aone right side up, one upside-down\u200a\u2014\u200aoppose one another. Stark\u2019s hair is swept into an up-do fashioned so that two small, horn-like tufts of hair stick up on the top of her head, intersecting with a diagonal line that punctuates the bin\u2019s centre. This draws attention to the term \u201cbicornate\u201d (two-horned), appearing in two forms in the title; the drawn legs echo the hair\u2019s two-pronged-ness, and foreground the relationship between the drawn and photographed figures. The subtitle (That which is Below\u2026) <\/em>hails from The Emerald Tablet, <\/em>one of the Egyptian-Greek Hermetica<\/em> written in the second century BCE; these wisdom-texts are attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who founded the hermetic tradition of esoteric thought, and they describe how the microcosmic and macrocosmic are interconnected. Here, \u201cBelow\u201d and \u201cAbove\u201d latch onto the image, to playfully explain the relationship between the differently described bodies of the drawing and the drawer.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Stark\u2019s composition nods to Diego Rivera\u2019s 1931 San Francisco mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City<\/em>, which features a trompe l\u2019oeil scaffold layered over the image of painters working on the mural that depicts workers making the city. Rivera\u2019s ample backside, perched on the painted scaffold, occupies the centre of the image.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The lower body, by way of the pencil, practises a communion of sorts with the drawn and collaged image above. The photographed and the drawn (then photographed) figures extend and undo one another\u2019s temporalities\u200a\u2014\u200alayering the drawn instant onto the photographed instant, for a fleeting, multi-layered stillness. This suspended, momentary stillness of the Below and the Above opens up a complex reflection on the relations between subjectivity and medium. Why, after all, refer to drawing\u2019s performative dimension in this way? Why represent both the drawer and the drawn figure?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both the drawer and the drawn become characters within the print\u2019s layered narrative structure, speaking to a breakdown between the literary (here, drawn) character and the author-as-character. A commentary on media far beyond drawing and photography, this piece anticipates a much greater erosion of the distinction between fictitious characters, on the one hand, and authors and readers, on the other, that is endemic to the contemporary media landscape. As Wendy Chun has argued, \u201cWe are now characters in a universe of dramas putatively called Big Data,\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, \u201cBig Data as Drama,\u201d ELH <\/em>83, no. 2 (2016): 363.<\/span> with the corollary that the distinction between literary characters and readers no longer stands. D. A. Miller wrote, thirty years ago, that readers and characters, however alike, could never blur into one another because the reader, reading in private, was not \u201cinside out\u201d like the character\u200a\u2014\u200aan interiority watched from the outside.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 208, cited in Chun, \u201cBig Data as Drama,\u201d 368.<\/span> Today, in an age in which readers are easily tracked\u200a\u2014\u200atheir reading, clicking, and highlighting habits closely analyzed online and on Kindles and other devices\u200a\u2014\u200ano such distinction exists between readers and characters; big data makes characters of all of us. Stark\u2019s photographed figure\u200a\u2014\u200aworking between the older technologies of drawing, collage, and digital photography, but with its eyes also fixed on newer means for disseminating images and data\u200a\u2014\u200aproduces a means to watch the drawer, and thus cannily explores the shifting relations that new media afford between art and life, author and character, artist and figure. The drawn figure, held in the orbit of the paused, almost-drawing hand, holds these tensions in its suspended moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Stark extends the sketch by photographing the drawer, Jacolby Satterwhite extends sketches by building animated worlds around them. In Satterwhite\u2019s Reifying Desire <\/em>series, sketches, bodies, and objects float together in an ever-changing animated space. Satterwhite assembles, animates, and reimagines multiple elements to create three-dimensional video collages: starry backgrounds; animated part-bodies; elaborately rendered three-dimensional spaces; illustrations from medical textbooks; family photographs; and excerpts from his mother\u2019s extensive collection of rough sketches, which she made by the thousands, detailing ideas for products that she could sell on The Shopping Channel. In fact, this series could be described as a collaboration between Satterwhite and his mother, whose drawings expressed her entrepreneurial designs, but also, as Satterwhite recounts, her mental illness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Satterwhite translates his mother\u2019s drawings\u200a\u2014\u200awith their accompanying scrawled notes and characteristic forty-five- and ninety-degree-angle grids\u200a\u2014\u200ainto colourful animations suspended in impossible spaces. Animated, naked figures pause next to bright, hovering sketches for \u201cblowers for the house and yard,\u201d \u201cbody bands,\u201d or \u201cfire poles to escape.\u201d A voguing, cat-suited dancer\u200a\u2014\u200aSatterwhite himself, captured in front of a green screen\u200a\u2014\u200adances above partly assembled animated bodies, poised inside one of his mother\u2019s drawings for a \u201cwater tub seat\u201d to soak in. The animated figures have huge, flaming-bush merkins and fantastic, disproportioned hair. Satterwhite\u2019s small, dancing avatar showers them with an animated bubble bath labelled \u201cPussy Power.\u201d The viewpoint pans around and the strange, collaged space shifts. Multiple Jacolbys, riding animated drawings of a levitating bed and car as if they were chariots, now wield animated, glowing laser-swords that send light beams onto the animated women as Picasso\u2019s Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon <\/em>speeds by. Passing family photographs, hair sculptures, strangely elongated Louis Vuitton bags, and other impossibilities, the scene arrives at an animated hermaphroditic woman, who ejects multiple tiny Jacolbys from her enormous, mouthed penis, next to a male attendant holding a drawing for \u201ca slicing tray.\u201d Glowing, pink notes float in the air: \u201cLipstick for the [sic<\/em>] between the legs, the genitals, flavours, scented.\u201d Strange, pulsing tumours move through the hermaphrodite\u2019s animated flesh. The tiny, ejaculated Jacolbys dance in silver suits, slowly assembling themselves onto the \u201cslicing tray\u201d sketch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The Reifying Desire <\/em>series is an extended meditation on sketching, its relationship with the body, and its relationship with desire. Extended through animation, Satterwhite\u2019s mother\u2019s sketches (which were his introduction to drawing as a child) take on a new medium, a new suspended-ness in space, and a new sense of time. His improvised voguing performances, transferred by the handfuls into animated worlds, are loosely based on re-enacting the products in his mother\u2019s drawings. Fascinated by dance as an extension of drawing\u200a\u2014\u200aas a way of quickly conjuring into being what is not there\u200a\u2014\u200aSatterwhite creates rituals through which he explores how to rethink his mother\u2019s products through motion. The fleetingness of the gestures offsets the relative stasis of the animated figures, and the slowly circling viewpoint through which they are presented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Satterwhite queers the drawings\u2019 desire: whereas his mother\u2019s sketches pledged allegiance to the world of The Shopping Channel, Satterwhite transforms them into strange, outsized emblems in a landscape of queer, shopping mall, video game utopias. Cake designs become towers; water tub seats become vehicles for animated characters. Bodies are continually stretched and reinvented, brandishing new growths and anatomical features at every turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A complex meditation on how desires come to be reified, \u201cset\u201d in a certain form, Satterwhite\u2019s works question what it takes to reinvent the desires associated with the world of The Shopping Channel. What subjects most desire is often symptomatic of the structures and strictures in which they must live; the desire for commodities, for instance, articulates a widespread power relationship in capitalist societies. However, as Jacques Lacan argued, some subjects can rework their symptoms through the sheer pleasure of language or form\u200a\u2014\u200atranslating symptoms into sinthomes<\/em>: a subject\u2019s own <\/em>symptom, which has the power to reposition the subject with respect to the symbolic order.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 23 <\/em>(Hoboken: Wiley, 2016).<\/span> Satterwhite, hovering around the desire encapsulated in sketching, repositions the sketches\u2019 desire, producing his own symptom in an altogether queerer form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sue Tompkins, too, produces idiosyncratic relationships between subject and symbol. In conjunction with her show Milk, Gluck, Handel, Fame<\/em> at DKUK Salon in Peckham, London, Tompkins presented a new performance, Mob de Mob<\/em>, at the nearby Four Quarters Pub on January 23, 2018. The attendees crowded into a small basement chamber. Tompkins, in sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, and holding a microphone, reads from a thick sheaf of sketches. A3 newsprint sheets, lined notebook pages, and other slightly weathered sheets of paper form a disorderly pile of loosely scrawled phrases, typewritten words, and quick coloured-pencil lines. On one sheet, the phrase \u201cA holiday in time\u201d has been hastily scrawled in pink. \u201cMiddle,\u201d says another. Tompkins reads from these quickly sketched phrases one after another\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cthe noise,\u201d \u201cbehind gates,\u201d \u201cwant it louder,\u201d \u201cfossils,\u201d \u201ctop of the bench chemist,\u201d \u201cstrange how things work\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aas she runs on the spot, back and forth a little, in the small space in which she performs. Some of the phrases are chanted repeatedly in a childlike, singsong loop. Her performance is punctuated with pauses during which she runs on the spot or shakes her microphone back and forth around the edges of her performance space, as if to ask the building to speak up, too. At points, she races through several sheets of her ersatz score in one go, leafing through in quick succession. After each sheet is sung or spoken, Tompkins lets it fall to the ground. By the end of her reading, she is running through a pile of loose-leaf pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tompkins reanimates the temporalities of her quickly scrawled sketches through sing-running, matching scrawled and spoken quickness. Assembling a provisional whole from these fragmented parts, she draws attention to everything that is fragmented about the relationship between language and thought\u200a\u2014\u200asounding, at times, almost like a radio tuning in to bits of half-familiar tunes and phrases that always come from elsewhere. She tunes in to each sketch and scrawl, thinking alongside it in utterances and phrases that say nothing about the subjectivity of the artist (except, perhaps, through their exuberant singsong style of delivery).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about the multi-voiced quality of language\u200a\u2014\u200athe sense that language always comes from elsewhere, and always contains echoes of many voices, even when it is spoken by only one voice.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky\u2019s Poetics<\/em>, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).<\/span> Tompkins extends these reflections, presenting a dialogism that is more suitable to our hyper-fragmented yet hyper-connected times. Radio-like as much as subject-like, tuning in to sections from her own scrawled script, Tompkins\u2019s multi-voiced phrases fragment their own subject. They seem aimed to reposition the utterance in an information-saturated age: to try to find and replay an utterance\u2019s point of origin, but always after the fact of its production.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Stark, Satterwhite, and Tompkins each extends the sketch, its temporalities, and its relationships with other media. In doing so, these artists think through the complexities of how the sketch relates to subjectivity and desire\u200a\u2014\u200aand how, indeed, these relationships might be repositioned, given changes in the contemporary media-scape. On the one hand, they reify the sketch\u200a\u2014\u200areproducing sketches as images or ideas of themselves. On the other hand, perhaps this capture of sketching opens itself to new forms of acceleration between subject and symbol, subject and object of desire, drawer and performer, drawer and drawn.<\/p>\n![\"Satterwhite_Reifying](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO04_Rosamond_Satterwhite_Reifying-Desire-3-Appendix.jpg\")
Reifying Desire 3 Appendix<\/em>, 2012.
Photo : \u00a9 Jacolby Satterwhite, courtesy of Mor\u00e1n Mor\u00e1n, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Alpha_triptych\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO04_Rosamond_Alpha_triptych-scaled.jpg\")
Alpha, Reifying Desire 6<\/em>, 2014\u2009
Photo : \u00a9 Jacolby Satterwhite, courtesy of Mor\u00e1n Mor\u00e1n, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cellular_triptych\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO04_Rosamond_Cellular_triptych-scaled.jpg\")
Cellular, Reifying Desire 6<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : \u00a9 Jacolby Satterwhite, courtesy of Mor\u00e1n Mor\u00e1n, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Tompkins_Milk,](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO04_Rosamond_Tompkins_Milk-Gluck-Handel-Fame-scaled.jpg\")
Milk, Gluck, Handel, Fame<\/em>, installation view, DKUK, London, 2018.
Photo : Alex Zimmer, courtesy of the artist, The Modern Institute\/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Tompkins_Milk,](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO04_Rosamond_Tompkins_Milk-Gluck-Handel-Fame2-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Tompkins_Milk,](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/93_DO04_Rosamond_Tompkins_Milk-Gluck-Handel-Fame3-scaled.jpg\")
Milk, Gluck, Handel, Fame<\/em>, installation view, DKUK, London, 2018.
Photos : Alex Zimmer, courtesy of the artist, The Modern Institute\/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n