Allison Katz and Camilla Wills
Perra Perdida
30/11, 2013 – 4/2, 2014
(Scroll down for English)
: Marginalia :
Pretexto:
Correa busca perra perdida.
Pretexto:
Encontrarse en movimiento. Volverse un habitual pero sin fijarse. Un flâneur; un transjeto. (1) Primera mitad del siglo diecinueve: Un poeta pasea a su langosta con correa. (2) Primera mitad del siglo veintiuno: Un artista vuela a Paris, y en un acto de voluntad, intuición y humor se quita sus calcetines de rombos, los anuda en forma de langosta y los amarra con una correa improvisada para arrastrarlos por el mismo jardín. (3)
Lo que queda es: la correa.
Contexto:
Restricción. Control. Cuerda. Distancia de cuero o metal hasta el cuello. Encuentro entre mano y cuerpo: entrenamiento. De cuero la obediencia. La suavidad trenzada. De nylon es ordinario. Hasta un arnés. Hasta un anillo. Con nudos que resbalan para mayor agilidad. Prótesis retráctil. La ley del dogal, de la rienda, tirante. Prevención. Protección de materiales compuestos. Limitación sin castigo. Material reflejante. Reducción de accidentes. Variedad, modelos, color, diseño. Sujeta. Una tercia. Juguete. Accesorio sexual. Conexión veloz jamás antes vista. Pendiente. Con- troversia. Laxo. Elasticidad. Tira y estira y afloje. Al tobillo. Aguante. Humillación. Extensión.
Contexto:
Elasticidad. La obediencia es limitación sin castigo. Variedad, modelos, color, diseño. Materiales compuestos. Anillo. Ano. Una tercia. De nylon es ordinario. Conexión rápida jamás antes vista. Cuerda. Extensión. Distancia de cuero. Accidentes. Metal hasta el cuello. Mierda hasta el cuello. Protección. Enganche ajustado y cómodo. Ley. Mano y cuerpo. Accesorio. Elasticidad compañera. Extensión. Mayor agilidad trenzada. Mandar con constancia.
Contexto:
Al tobillo. Al paso. Al paseo. Al paseante. El paseador no puede ser más que un local. Extensión-Restricción. Entrenando un anillo. Variedad sin castigo. Compuestos reflejantes. Sujeta al sujeto. Corre. Variedad. Mayor agilidad. Prótesis de color. Arnés de nylon ligero. Dogal y rienda. Sujeta el modelo. La suavidad.
Objeción:
Y sin embargo, la perra está perdida.
Abyección:
De hecho, la langosta es el yo animal, que sale desde las profundidades y es entrenado, domado, sacado a pasear en correa en pleno día. ¿Quién pasea a quién? Auto atarse con correa.
Contexto:
Correa busca perra perdida.
Pretexto:
Una capa gruesa de yeso. Un sobre. Una piel compacta. El yeso se había vuelto una restricción. […] un yeso que a la vez contenía y cohesionaba un cuerpo afectivo agonizante: un albergue clandestino. El yeso que hasta entonces había sido garantía de supervivencia, al punto donde podría confundirse con piel. (4)
Texto:
El yeso es una correa.
Subtexto:
Cómo ‘pelear contra este endurecimiento?’ (5)
Objeción:
El yeso tiene un cierto tipo de absorbencia.
Pretexto:
Cocteau ‘habla’ con su mural en Leicester Place en Londres: el material es poroso.
Contexto:
‘El yeso es un oído.’ Oír. Hoy.
Abyección:
Mezclar, ocasionar reacciones, efervescencias, espesamiento. Tratar con lo místico y lo perverso. ¿Acaso sigue el yo animal atado a su correa?
Burbujear.
Subtexto:
Lo grotesco: cuevas llenas con decoraciones al fresco, principal- mente marcos y otros ornamentos periféricos retratan el lugar donde lo humano e vuelve animal, donde la planta se vuelve humana: hibridación.
Pretexto: Pintar al freso implica frescura, algo crudo e inacabado. Y sin embargo: hay endurecimiento e irreversibilidad. La historia es este endurecimiento en la pintura de las paredes. También lo es la religión. El yeso requiere de tiempo: absorción, evaporación, cuajar. Y sin embargo hay resistencia. Resistir a través de marcas y mordidas. Tensión en la superficie.
Pretexto:
El yeso es un oreja. Marcar y morderla. Un acto de violencia o deseo. ¿Alquimia o boxeo?
Contexto:
El yeso cura. Piensa en los cataplasmas. Si es oído poroso tam- bién es hospitalario. Siéntete en casa hoy.
Texto:
¿Cómo evitar esta petrificación? Explotar y perdurar. Un acto de valentía.
- Gabriela Jauregui
(1) Lazlo Moholy-Nagy
(2) Gérard de Nerval
(3) Scoli Acosta
(4) La sección en cursivas es del texto de Suely Rolnik, ‘Deleuze Schizoanalist’ http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/deleuze-schizoanalyst/ (e-flux # 23 Marzo, 2011)
(5) Fragmentos entre comillas provienen de las notas de Camilla Wills y Allison Katz para la exposición.
* * *
: Marginalia :
Pretext:
Leash seeks lost bitch.
Pretext:
To find oneself in movement. To become a local fixture but not fixed. A flâneur; a transject. (1) First half of the nineteenth century: A poet walks his lobster on a leash. (2) First half of the twenty-first century: An artist flies out to Paris and in an act of will, intuition and humor, takes off his red argyle socks, knots them into a lobster shape, and ties them to a makeshift leash to drag them around the same garden. (3)
What remains is: the leash.
Context:
Restriction. Control. Cord. Metal or leather distance to the neck. Encounter between hand and body: training. Leathered obedi- ence. Braided softness. Nylon is ordinary. Even a harness. Even a ring. Knots that slip for greater agility. Retractable prosthesis. The law of the halter, of the rein, pulling. Prevention. Composite-material protection. Limitation without punishment. Reflective material. Cutback of accidents. Variety, models, color, design. Hold. Toy. Sexual accessory. Never-before-seen speedy connection. Pending. Controversy. Laxity. Elasticity. Push and pull. To the ankle. Resistance. Humiliation. Extension.
Context:
Elasticity. Obedience is limitation without punishment. Variety, models, color, design. Composite materials. Ring. Anus. In nylon it’s ordinary. Never-before-seen fast connection. Cord. Ex- tension. Leather distance. Accident. Metal up to the neck. Shit up to the neck. Protection. Comfortable and tight hook. Law. Hand and body. Accessory. Companion elasticity. Extension. Greater braided agility. Command with certainty.
Context:
To heel. To walk. To walk around. To the walker. The walker can only be local. Extension-Restriction. Training a ring. Variety without punishment. Reflective compounds. Get a hold of the subject. Run. Variety. Greater agility. Color prosthesis. Light- weight nylon harness. Halter and rein. Get a hold of the model. The softness.
Objection:
And yet, the bitch is lost.
Abjection:
The lobster is, in fact, the animal self, coming out of the depths and being trained, tamed, walked on a leash in broad daylight. Who is walking whom? To self-leash.
Context:
Leash seeks lost bitch
Pretext:
A thick layer of plaster. An envelope. A compact skin. Plaster had become a constraint. […] a plaster that both contained and
cohered an agonizing affective body: a clandestine shelter. The plaster that had until then been the guarantee of survival, to the point where it could be mistaken for skin. (4)
Text:
Plaster is a leash.
Subtext:
How to ‘pitch against this hardening?’ (5)
Objection:
Plaster has a certain level of absorbency.
Pretext:
Cocteau ‘talks’ to his mural on Leicester Place, London—the material is porous.
Context:
‘Plaster is an ear.’ To hear. Here.
Abjection:
Mixing, causing reactions, effervescences, thickening. Dealing in the mystical and the perverse. Is the animal self still on a leash?
To fizz.
Subtext:
The grotesque: caves filled with al fresco decorations, mostly frames, and other peripheral ornaments depicting the place where human becomes animal, plant becomes human—the hybrid.
Pretext:
Painting al fresco implies freshness, something raw, unfinished. And yet: there is hardening, irreversibility. This hardening of the paint on the walls is history itself. It is also religion. Plaster requires time: absorption, evaporation, setting. And yet there is resistance. Resisting through marks, bites. Surface ten- sion.
Pretext:
If plaster is an ear. To mark and bite it. An act of violence or desire. Alchemy or boxing?
Context:
Plaster heals. Think of cataplasms. If porous ear, then it is also hospitable. Make yourself at home here.
Text:
How to prevent this petrification? To blast and to make last. An act of vitality.
- Gabriela Jauregui
(1) Lazlo Moholy-Nagy
(2) Gérard de Nerval
(3) Scoli Acosta
(4) All italics are taken from Suely Rolnik’s ‘Deleuze Schizoanalist’ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/deleuze- schizoanalyst/ (e-flux # 23 March, 2011)
(5) Fragments in quotation marks are taken from Camilla Wills and Allison Katz’s notes for the exhibition
Lulu is proud to present the first collaborative exhibition between Allison Katz and Camilla Wills.
For this occasion, Lulu has expanded beyond its usual confines to include a new room in the apartment, in which the artists have created a large-scale wall painting out of pigment with a cactus base, based on a traditional Mexican method. The original gallery space of Lulu features a series of lost dog posters (perra perdida) and a new video.
Combining their inimitable approaches toward painting, printing and image-making, the artists explore the idea of the lost dog as a symbol of deferral of content, in which depiction (say of the absent pet on a poster) functions as an index of estrangement and disappearance. As such, the missing animal can be read as a kind of analogue or even metaphor for art making (the impetus behind it). “The dog is always, already, lost.” Given the exuberance with which the artists approach the subject, the loss at the center of it is perhaps less a source of trauma than of jubilation.
The posters take as their starting point a found “chienne perdue” announcement, which Katz picked up in Quebec during the summer of 2011. Parodying the codes of information, the telephone number of the frantic owner is replaced with that of the curator. Katz and Wills take further liberties with the function of a poster: advertising the show becomes the show itself, another deferral, as a variety of information (title, names, venue, dates, city, contact information) circulates throughout the series of announcements, none of which take precedence as the official version.
The video in the same room as the posters, “Leash Seeks Lost Bitch (Perraquitas)” takes its title from a line in Gabriela Jauregui’s text written for the exhibition; the misspelling of perroquet in brackets aligns the video’s subjects with the mimicry associated with parrots. Using themes from D. H. Lawrence’s “Mornings in Mexico,” the grouping of human, dog and parrot forms an intricate pattern of naming, call and response, original and copy. Jauregui’s inverted title allows for a reconsideration of our devices and agency in relation to another species; as well as in art-making. Imitation, built up with colour and extra texture, and slowly panned across in the video, signals the functionless surplus at the core of desire; directly at odds with that other generative impulse announced by the posters, that is, loss. The video is deliberately silent, as the motif of calling out is not meant to be answered directly. Instead the exhibition produces a series of visual subterfuges, that link two rooms, on opposite sides of the apartment, together.
Down the hall, the action of the wall mural is a repetition and rearrangement of the posters. Redacted and abbreviated, they are a shorthand plea. Through the persistence of repetition, the trauma they announce is reclaimed as a source of pleasure; the decorative absorbs the loss. The pattern is indexical of the walk, the rhythmic call, the lack, and equally the excess of the search. Similar to propaganda textiles fabricated during WWII, an unlikely theme is promoted inside the usually safe, or neutrally, decorated interior. In a direct refutation of the flâneur or the tourist, Katz and Wills insert themselves into the context of Mexico City through a fantasy insistence that they have a pet, as only someone local could have, and by extension, are not lost or temporary, but already rooted in a sense of daily life.
An initial reference for the project was a small stone dog, carved at the corner of a medieval tomb next to the toe of the deceased, a Flemish noblewoman. The little dog is shown undoing the lace of her shoe. What does it mean to be ‘undone’ even in the most formal situation of a tomb portrait, in death? Marginal details can become whole stories and elaborate patterns. The decision to paint on a textured, porous, plaster wall originates in Katz and Wills’s shared visits to see Jean Cocteau’s mural for the Notre–Dame de France Church in London. Cocteau was said to be heard chatting to the characters he was painting, invoking the wall as a kind of ear. The exhibition Perra Perdida thus proposes new models of conversation, to shift expectations about what constitutes a sentient being, where content can be found, and how an authentic voice unfolds.