JULIAN SIMMONS: WITHOUT HORIZON

“ Perhaps it is an ability to touch, in the darkness, this coming elsewhere, this breaching of time, of space, and of all orientation, that will have defined a character trait specific to modernity. Modernity knows itself to be exposed (this is both a threat and a desire) to what is not itself and is not there, but is nonetheless very close or continually approaching.”
Jean-Luc Nancy A Finite Thinking

There is a point at which the lines begin and the lines end. This decision at either point is suspended in space, the pure space of beginning. The lines that accrue in- between weave together to form to create an oscillating pattern that fluctuates between image and figure. This could be described as the difference between visibility and pulsation or between form and force.

Something is moving and never stops moving. Forces have been assembled and then released. A moving being.

The Japanese Zen drawing of an Enso could be described as a one second drawing that capture, through the medium of a single gesture, the essence of the notion that all is mind. These drawings are nuanced in another way, namely that the oscillating frequency of finite and infinite is mirrored in the working of the mind. We might think of mind as existing between two points drawing a continuous line in between but then we are subject to illusion. Simmons is going round and around to meditate upon such an illusion and suggest another figure. The practice of doing this is what leads to the discovery. Abstractly such perception does not occur of its own violation. These drawings present what representation cannot grasp.

They are drawings that stage the dissolution of a horizon.

Attending a sound performance by Simmons recently at Cafe OTO, there might have been a like apprehension of sound filtered through a vacuum of silence that reached its audience through filters locked at the other side of technological amplification or schema. It suggested that eyes might be closed, in order to be looked upon instead of seeking to survey what is.

The work might appear both intimate and close up to us and yet contain an almost bitter aftertaste introduced by a strange spinning remoteness. What is at stake here is that the work installs within us. A rare dialectical reversal indeed.

Imagine a mental space in which the diagrams of Robert Fludd (1534-1637), the Suprematism of Malevich, Tibetan Mandalas and Modernist Monochromes coalesce into a single form. Although not an exercise such as this, it nonetheless points to a complex imaginary of temporality and figure that disturbs the flaccid circularity of the contemporary.

In his novel ‘White Noise’, Don DeLillo said: “The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time.” It is not such a disembodied eye (like those of Redon) that might look back us in these drawings but the portrait eye of the artist woven into the infinity of space. This is a look composed far beyond the region of the dead. Light touches and weighted thoughts co-mingle with ease.

Miles and miles of line: constant alertness of the mind. The graphite dust still collects in the fabric of the paper. Not everything falls downwards: something falls upwards as well, although there is no evidence of this. The drawings figure that which is without evidence.

There is a paradox contained with the appearance of these works between the figure of ‘at the same time’ which is an outcome of attaching a naming of the thing in question and the idea of event which transforms what follows next. Kiaros (generation) is such a rupture in time and as such opens temporality. Antonio Negri states that: “Kairos is the modality of time through which being opens itself, attracted by the void at the limit of time, and it thus decides to fill that void.” Thus the work places us on the brink or edge and yet sucks us into a centre. This points to the fixing of the gaze and within this experiences the potential leap into the yet to come.

Suspensions, oscillations, pulsations: the figure forms and deforms, circling around, drawing in and pushing out, constructing and discharging, forever restless but with a still point also.

Everything appears back to front. We progress from fullness to the void. When at the centre we are on the edge. The passage that is before us, installs in ways that precedes our constitutive power of seeing. The drawing is a drawing that undoes common sense. A new way of sense then comes but falling upwards. That it is art is registered in all of this and trembles on the edge of this being so.

Besides being composed of lines and dust these drawings collect many different winds. Some of the winds blow from an archaic region of deep time, some cross winds swirl around the present, others spiral outside of their own orbit. Time, wind, dust and lines joined within a (chaos) matrix reaching out for a point of emergence.

Drawings on a wall: that is all, a doing and figuring in a common frequency.

Jonathan Miles

Antonio Negri (2003) Time for Revolution Continuum P.143