Encountered here in this catalogue and exhibition is a body of work – photographs of situations and site interventions, together with a series of canvases and artefacts created during a month-long residency in Hamtramck, Detroit, two months ago – and a work created in Melbourne in the last week – a pile of ash and a canvas.
Collectively, these works draw on research James conducted as part of a doctorate titled rendering the [im]material. This research led to a shift in his practice from foregrounding space and interventions as spatial to working with duration and time through [im]material arrangements. This shift occurred through projects that involved an engagement with spaces in temporal transition – from a past and with a present in a state of suspension – and experiments with the immaterial in the material. Time can be thought in different ways. The most common is as a series of separate instants where time is subordinated to space as movement between given points. The concept of duration in contrast offers a thinking of time before space; time as flow where duration is the immediate awareness of the experience of this flow and a ‘“field” in which difference lives and plays itself out’ (Grosz 40).
Detroit’s temporality could be defined as a linear history of rise and fall, of a past utopian future and a desolate intractable present, however James brings a different orientation where Detroit becomes an encounter with temporal flow and duration as a ‘field’. In the catalogue, a photograph of Lafayette Park in downtown Detroit, designed by Mies van der Rohe, is an example. In the 1950s, it was built as part of an urban renewal project and buildings were cleared so it could be constructed; it was surrounded by industry and a population of five million people. Now in 2017, the industrial buildings that once surrounded it have been razed and the population declined to 600,000 people. Another example is the photograph of an empty streetscape where steam is pouring out from vents on the road’s surface, coming up from rivers and creeks that flow underneath. These photographs which document Detroit and the artworks produced during the residency are encounters and experiments with processes of becoming and unbecoming; as an immersion in time as flow and the force of duration.
Arriving to begin the residency, James observed the power of the ‘grandiose gesture of abandoned buildings’ that Detroit enticed. The scale of desolation is confronting and demanding with rows upon rows of abandoned houses, many of which are burnt-out as a ploy to get money through insurance claims so people are able to leave the city. Resisting this tendency, James says he waited to be invited and shown around; to encounter the city differently and to find the conditions of experience in relation to duration and temporality. The works produced during the residency convey an affective quality of immersion in conditions of experience and temporality; in the force of duration.
A series of photographs document the clearing of discarded furniture and debris, and the cleaning of a mirror-tile wall covered in grime. Reflections of light emerge producing a spatial doubling from which life erupts. A factory floor is swept and swept till texture surfaces and dust gathers in a circular pile that becomes a puddle as rain water seeps through from a leaking roof; cycling around and through another puddle a circular watermark emerges temporarily. A flag with a mulberry stain flutters out the front of a house, intervening in a given political present and policies with designs on the future. Leaning against a wall, twenty-eight sticks – one collected each day from different houses, buildings, roadsides – each a similar width, different lengths and marked seven inches from the top; and a collection of canvases, one produced each day and their surfaces, a composition of intensive repetitive markings of charcoal and stains.
The most recent work is produced from ash that comes from burning the contents of his studio; material accumulated over twenty-three years of practice including drawings, paintings, books, magazines and much more. Like the situations of the Hamtramck residency, the studio has the condition of a ‘field’ where life and matter are immersed in the dynamics of time as flow and the forces of duration. Unlike the burning of houses in Detroit where there is no sense of future, this act of burning liberates matter from given pasts and presents and celebrates the production of difference as an open future.
‘The becoming of life is the unbecoming of matter, which is not its transformation into (inert) being, but its placement in a different trajectory of becoming. Life intervenes into matter to give it a different virtuality than that through which matter initially generated the possibilities of life’ (Grosz 11).
Suzie Attiwill
Grosz, Elizabeth, ‘Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming’ in Parallax, vol.11, no. 2, 2005, 4–13.
supported by d___Lab, School of Architecture & Design, RMIT University, through the SRF Funds
catalogue as part of indeterminate duration Neon Parlour 2017
