Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Fri, May 12, 2023 at 9:28 AM

to feel abstract, to drag away, to proliferate and multiply, to leak out and stain, to edge and unfix, to exceed containment and slide.

You use verbs, and lots of them, very physical actions in relation to language and processes of signification. What kind of agency do these words/actions hold for you? Do you perceive of them as being almost methodological?

My own art making and thinking is very much guided by similar principles of malleability, that perceive meaning as something very tangible, tactile, material even, and yet as something endlessly slippery, precarious and volatile. Therefore these actions of twisting, stretching, dragging, folding, multiplying, cutting, enveloping do indeed become methodological. They function as methods to destabilize the familiar, drag legibility or even intelligibility into crisis, and usher meaning into a free fall, where it exists in a perpetual state of unfixity.

Not only do these actions hold deeply political implications for me; they also enable the work to exist in a space where it can hold on to something very precious, akin to an infinite potentiality, a continuous state of becoming.

Lex Morgan Lancaster

To: Jani Ruscica
Wed, May 17, 2023 at 8:48 PM

Jani,

I’m glad you picked up on my attachment to verbs! I did need to develop a kind of queer method for attempting to describe abstraction, and the verbs are part of that, not least because my thinking has developed so deeply through theoretical deployments of queering. I think this active language is needed to meet the interpretive challenge that abstraction presents, the way it resists language and signification and yet still does so much...the way it activates and produces certain conditions for things to happen or come into being. I like your description of this tension between how our perception of the work can be both visceral (very present and felt) and at the same time impossible to grasp. Describing artworks in terms of their actions can help us to account for this tension.

I also wanted to use language in a way that would shift away from a potential focus on stable form that people sometimes interpret as clear signs, and instead emphasize abstraction as process, action, and encounter. When queer abstraction generates meaning, it is not through an iconographic process, but instead through formal and material methods that are more destabilizing and contingent. This often does occur through a physical engagement with the object in a particular environment, so materiality is important to the work and my process of analysis.

Looking to your work, I can see that the slippage of signification is crucial in that it often starts to give us something we think we know, a familiar kind of image or sign, and then stops short of fully cohering or completing (or exceeds beyond something that might cohere or complete). I can even see how your work activates the dragging that I talk about in my book in terms of both the precarity of meaning production and the visual and material drag of a form expanding and flowing out through a space. This refusal of completion seems important... how do you think about your work and process in terms of its relationship to a finished thing, and also to ideas of mastery? That is, do you think your “free fall” also has to do with a queer refusal of artistic mastery and/or a finished product?

I also wonder about the contingency of your work in terms of space and place. You create large-scale architectural works that expand throughout a space in ways that help us to experience how our perception can depend on this physical context. There is also the precarity of form in your film pieces, where flesh isn’t presented as a fixed corporeal being but a kind of fluid vehicle. When you are conceiving and installing work, how do you consider issues of perspective or point-of-view alongside the material conditions of the site? How does this relate to your thinking on the simultaneous production and slippage of meaning?

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Fri, May 26, 2023 at 10:18 AM

Lex,

I love how you describe the ways in which queer abstraction generates meaning, not through an iconographic process, but as you put it, through formal and material methods that are more destabilizing and contingent.

And you are absolutely right, for me the idea of unfixity, that queer refusal of completion, control and mastery is indeed foundational. I think it is precisely this set of refusals that enables the “free fall” I talk about, that seems so generative in keeping the work animated, alive, relational and, I hope, in perpetual motion. Of course this
“free fall” happens primarily through the precarity of meaning the work addresses or embodies even, but also formally, through the questioning of various material and spatio-temporal conditions that are specific to the different mediums I work with. For instance, with video, the refusal to work with loops or linear formats, but also my insistence on deploying improvisation, fragmentation, episodic and non-consequential structures. With sculpture, the compulsion to work with “sculptures” that are always functional and therefore performative, that can be activated and animated anew, reiterated and reinterpreted endlessly, that are somehow mere vessels or avatars. And lastly, with the murals, confetti, wood cuts and other works that are mutable and defy permanence or singular form in myriad ways.

I think I perceive myself to be a collagist or bricoleur of some sort, and here too, I see a queer methodology at work. In his ‘Queer Art of Failure’, Jack Halberstam aptly describes collage as referencing the spaces in between, refusing to respect the boundaries that usually delineate self from other, art object from museum, and the copy from original. This pasting, metaphorical but also literal cutting and gluing, is another set of verbs that seem to imply fundamentally queer actions. These, on the other hand, seem like actions that enable a refusal of demands for wholeness, continuity, coherence, sense, legibility etc. The surrealists’ exquisite corpses always made the most sense to me, their hybridity resonated, simply cohered with my sense of self and the world at large...

There is so much more I wanted to write about; improvisation, unintelligible language, flesh as fluid vehicle, the contingency of the work to space and place, perspective and so many other things... but more soon...

I am also really keen to hear more about your deployment of those three key verbs you mention in relation to abstraction: process, action and encounter.

- Jani

Lex Morgan Lancaster

To: Jani Ruscica
Thu, Jun 8, 2023 at 7:30 PM

Jani,

I think I arrived at a focus on process rather than settled image/ object because I’m so interested in artistic processes—as in, the way an artist makes something and the deployment of certain formal and material strategies. In my conversations with artists, the question of how is perhaps more important than what. This means that I take artistic processes as methodological and theoretical interventions, though not necessarily always in ways that align completely with an artist’s intentions. This isn’t about “skill” or “mastery” (because forms and matter often exceed an artist’s ability to control them), but how an image or object comes into being in the world. My object-focused analysis sometimes makes people uncomfortable because it seems to disregard an artist’s identity or queer agency, but so much can happen when we see how an artwork lifts off from our control and circulates in the world in ways we can’t predict. This makes it more exciting, and I think offers a queer approach where there is no singular producer of an artwork, but an artist who starts a visual and material conversation that can then play out in multiple ways. It also makes more space for the politics that are always there but could easily be sidestepped if we think only of a singular one-way move by an artist. So that improvisation you mention really resonates with the kinds of experimental processes and unruly mediums used in the kinds of work that compel my thinking and writing.

Thinking about encounter means paying attention to what happens between the work of art and the contingent spectators who come into contact with it and produce new possible actions or meanings in that space. There is always that space of encounter, space for action, with any work of art. But I think abstraction can be so generative because it can give extra attention to this time-space of encounter which then produces some kind of action. So, there are the actions of production like you describe, such as fragmenting, cutting, collaging, multiplying; there are actions we perform in art spaces that actually impact how the work affects us, how we physically move closer to or pull back from or sit with the work, staring and glancing and turning and following something visually; and there are ways that works act in conversation with us, to refuse, embrace, escape, play, disrupt, transform...the ways they can both behave and prompt certain behaviors in us.

You brought up the surrealist exquisite corpse and that really aligns with what I mean about how works are produced in conversation, and as you also said, relationally. David Getsy wrote about this in his 2017 ‘Queer Relations’ piece on abstraction, where queer possibilities are produced by activating relationships between forms and contexts, and this ties in with the relational thrust of queer politics.

So maybe we should talk more directly about politics. And maybe you can elaborate more on your ideas of language that is unintelligible and a kind of fluid flesh in relation to how you see the politics of abstraction and how that plays out in your work, and perhaps also in the work of others who inspire.

- Lex

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 9:55 AM

“Improvisation is how we make no way out of a way Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something” - Fred Moten

Lex,

Politics in the work is definitely always residual; the result of process and the actions taken to go through with the making of an artwork. My concern is never to portray something, but rather to test out how something behaves, performs, transforms, mutates, which, as we have discussed, comes with its implicit (queer) politics and a relationality that acknowledges the agency of the spectator. They are embedded in the actions I take, as well as add to the conversation a set of actions of their own design, as you pointed out. This is exactly why your focus on artistic processes as “methodological and theoretical interventions” resonates so deeply. There is such an overbearing emphasis on thematic content in art, which I find overly simplifying, as if “content” could be separated from the mediated and material conditions that enable any artwork to exist. For me too, art is first and foremost of the stuff it is made of, of the ways it comes into being; that is its content, everything is contingent upon that.

I relate to a very broad range of artistic practices, and the work I always find most compelling seems to specifically acknowledge the residual politics of its material conditions. Poetics and politics are indistinguishably tied in the practices of Phyllida Barlow, Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Claude Monet, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Agnes Martin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Agnès Varda, just to mention a few. Lately Phyllida Barlow’s sculpture, and her endless fascination with destabilizing the encounter with an artwork, as well as her interest in processes of naming and unnaming, have been particularly resonant. Barlow’s sculpture is performative, active and alive specifically because of its semantic precarity, the crisis in naming that it always relishes, and how it is all intrinsically tied to its material conditions and considerations. There is no gimmickry with Barlow’s sculpture, no pretense, no grand claims, material or other, it just is. I find it a very generous kind of art, because it always considers and respects some kind of reciprocity in its relationship both to the spaces it inhabits as well as the spectator that encounters it.

Unintelligible language, unintelligible form, unfixity. There seem to be a lot of ‘uns’ there. In another email conversation I have been mapping out the importance of different forms of refusal; the ‘Uses of Not’, after a poem by Lao Tzu translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Or not-knots, like most of my most recent works are titled. You mention that your object-focused analysis makes people uncomfortable sometimes. I think being uncomfortable or uncertain, another pair of ‘uns’ right there, can be very generative feelings when encountering art. I’m interested in creating doubt, working with uncertainty, frustration even. I’m not that interested in art that is illustrative. That’s why I find the verbs so useful too, since they imply actions, animacy, relationality. Lee Lozano named her paintings with verbs; they were intended as actions and hers was always a deeply political practice. Her work always inspires.

These ‘uns’ seem to also be in stark contrast with a lot of imperatives that control our lives, or what art should be, for that matter. I do my best to try to destabilize various categories or binaries, relish impermanence, ephemerality even. I perceive these as politicized actions, that counter the normative, that which seems to be foundational for various systems to function. At its most compelling, art can be a place of subtle subversions; it has the ability to counter expectations. Improvisation, unintelligible language and form, the presentation of the body as fluid flesh are all ways to trouble addressability, the codes we read into things (bodies among others) and the processes of naming and “capture” we so persistently adhere to. I think my interest lies in a kind of figurative abstraction, in things that maintain a certain muddied mimeticism, muddied indexicality even, or are approximations of sorts; almost like something, or exactly like something, but also something else!

As somebody working specifically with language, and particularly in relation to abstraction, what do you make of the politics implied by the use of unintelligible language? Can non-sense counter and subvert? And on what terms is sense defined in the first place...

- Jani

Lex Morgan Lancaster

To: Jani Ruscica
Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 8:31 PM

Jani,

Sensing is perceiving, but here we are really emphasizing processes of perception as opposed to “knowing” in any settled way (in other words, this is about a journey, not a destination). We’re talking about processes that destabilize meaning in some ways, but that also activate a sensual encounter that produces other kinds of meaning or embraces ways of knowing that aren’t about reading codes but instead feeling with and through the work. Feeling is certainly political.

Your question about unintelligible language reminds me of Dada sound poems, where language becomes a tool of improvisation and chance as opposed to narrative structure. Making non-sense through language has long been tied to radical politics. So when I look at your video works with these fleshy amalgamations of body parts speaking words and sounds that don’t cohere, I think it shifts our attention to the relationship between language, sound, form and the body so that these tools of meaning-making become precarious and seemingly random. I think this might be what you’re referring to by a crisis of naming, as a refusal to “capture” a subject through language, while prompting us to think about the instability of the relation between a subject and what we might use to describe them to submit them to particular systems of power.

The question resonates differently in relation to academic writing. Though there are plenty of poetic academic writers whose work presses against the limits of linguistic intelligibility, and artist-writers who blur these categories, I have to work with language in a way that doesn’t lift off from intelligibility while still accounting for all that will remain unknown. I am often tasked with “making sense” out of works that refuse that expectation of a narrative or illustrative content, so in some ways I’m always trying to attach language to works that resist meaning. But I’m never really definitively claiming to know anything for certain, just proposing possibilities, and this seems more honest to me.

Also, as a professor, my students always make me aware of the difficulty of reading certain texts or interpreting certain works, and I work to help them find a way into it...which often involves reminding them that we cannot and need not understand absolutely everything. When a work or a text is charged with not “making sense,” someone might not be asking the right questions. The question of how and where meaning seems to come undone or fall apart seems more salient in certain cases than any version of “what does it mean.” I was trained by my queer mentors to ask, rather, “what does it do,” which takes us much farther toward understanding, as you put it, the “residual politics of its material conditions” while also taking into account the contingencies of production and encounter. And the process by which we might force meaning onto something is also one of power dynamics...who gets to assign meaning, and who has meaning projected onto them?

Your points about Barlow’s sculpture and your own use of a muddied mimicry led me to thinking about queer and non-binary practice in relation to ideas about “literal” deployments of materials versus something that seems to imitate something else. I was talking to a trans artist recently about the politics of mimicry and how trans people are often hated because cis people feel “tricked” by our gender non-conformity. I wonder if there is both an expectation that political work will operate didactically, and also that materials should be deployed “authentically” (in the minimalist sense I suppose)... and what that’s about, or whether you’ve come up against this notion at all. On the one hand there is a literalness to some of your practice, and then on the other I see the approximation you’re talking about... something that is both-this-and-that...where we experience a subversion of expectation. When you’re playing with mimeticism, or indexicality, is there a refusal of the idea of essential truth or a critique of notions of “authenticity” there...or is it something else?

Lex

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 10:57 AM

Lex,

Literalness and approximation, specificity and ambiguity, authenticity and mimicry.

My whole practice seems to be driven by a constant testing out of how these notions might coexist. I certainly identify a stubborn refusal to accept that they should exclude one another. As you pointed out, there is indeed a literalness to some of my work (to a lot of my work, I would say!). I think this is one of the reasons I have difficulty in fully embracing abstraction, but rather can work with something I already defined as figurative abstraction in an earlier email. I think I need that sense of recognition, to make that act of naming relatively easy, yet to persistently burden it with uncertainty and doubt. Indeed things have to be both this-and-that, that push and pull seems fundamental. I guess it’s another action... that destabilizes, keeps things relational. Needless to say, this strikes me as a decidedly queer and non-binary sensibility, a view point, an orientation almost, as Sara Ahmed would put it. Politicized too, for sure. Also perhaps a form of drag? Retrospectively I have realized a lot of my work, since very early on, has been performing a sort of drag in quite the literal sense, but also drag has become an increasingly potent action that helps usher the familiar into unfamiliar territory and begins to question the order of things, hopefully both materially and semantically.

The notion of drag, and the action of drag, is key to your thinking on queer abstraction. How does drag relate to notions of opacity, unrepresentability or unaddressability for you? I’d like to think the work is what it is, nothing more, no claims on what it does, certainly no claims on what it is about. I have my intentions, but it does what it does and that might be very different for different individuals that encounter it. “What does it do?” is therefore such a brilliant, and may I add, simple and inclusive question to ask when encountering an artwork. Regardless of “sensibilities” or “orientations”, it teases out our dispositions to read into things, our needs to mirror and generate meaning and to always be reflexive about the workings involved in these actions. It also takes so much pressure off the work; a lot of the time I find it frustrating how an artwork can never live up to the grand, categorical claims we as artists, or others writing about our works, make. Language can be so overwhelming, it is so specific, unless it is poetry ; )

A lot of art is branded and instrumentalized for various purposes these days; clear, unquestionable content is inscribed onto it. I find this problematic, uninteresting and reductive really. I think this also relates to what you said about the demands for art to operate didactically if it is to have any political claims, or for materials to be deployed “authentically”. I think there are very normative systems of value embedded in these demands.

I wanted to write a bit more about the indexical nature of printing and color purely as mass or shape, as well as elaborate on the importance of improvisation; non-linguistic expression, polyvocality and a space akin to Kristeva’s “Chora” in thinking about the videos. But if you are happy to continue a bit further with our dialogue, I can do that later. Also share some images of new works!

- Jani

Lex Morgan Lancaster

to: Jani Ruscica
Sat Oct 28, 2023 at 10:58 PM

Jani,

So great to see images of your show on Insta and to see our conversation as part of it! Honored to be listed as a source of inspiration :)

Some recent thoughts:

I used the term “drag” in my book to elaborate my insistence that abstraction is a process rather than a style or appearance. So, your use of both figuration and abstraction to trouble one another aligns with my thinking about how abstraction drags away from representation, to varying degrees and in variable directions.
But because drag registers in multiple ways as a labor of resistance, and a play with gendered signifiers on the surface of a “body,” I think this visual drag does queer political work by insisting on what Édouard Glissant calls “the right to opacity.” It’s a drag on knowability; abstraction puts pressure on the structures or systems by which representation generates meaning in the first place. So then, we start to question the terms and modes of address and engagement we are using to interpret all kinds of visual phenomena. This is important politically if we consider how representational codes have been used to serve oppression—scrambling the codes has become a crucial visual politics.

It might be nice to talk through a specific recent work, if you want to share images! I’d love to hear more about indexicality and how you think about and use that. I’m looking at images from your recent show ‘Not-knot’ and I’m also curious how you think of what I see as three kinds of works relating to each other or in conversation—the prints, the videos, and the murals (and you might have other ways of naming them). I definitely get the sense of things turning into other things, so a kind of formal mutability is at play which registers to me as a non-binary sense or orientation. I might add a play with iconicity to your thinking on indexicality as well, if that is of interest. We talked a bit early on about the slippage of signs, but also the relationship between these elements of semiotic systems and the formal/material aspects of your work seems compelling. I find material processes so generative for thinking through a language of queer abstraction and what it can do, so I can get a bit obsessed with how things are made!

Lex

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Thu, Dec 13, 2023 at 6:57 PM

Lex,
Thank you for your kind words, they mean a lot to me : )

Iconicity and indexicality are indeed some of the key notions that I compulsively aim to playfully collapse or trouble with various methods (as previously discussed). The method of dragging, as termed by yourself, or more generally, the method of disrupting various chains of causality seems to be paradigmatic of my practice. As you so succinctly put it, it is effectively a kind of labor of resistance and in the process also a claiming of that Glissantian “right to opacity”.

In thinking of ‘Polynotknot (and they bloom)’ in particular, I seem to have adopted an almost xenofeminist ethos, whether I like it or not! Bodies transformed into fluid vessels of flesh really seem to embody a technomaterialist, anti-naturalist, gender-nonconforming (not to be too extreme and say gender-abolitionist) hybridity. Through a rejection of known bodies/forms, legibility and nameability, a radical alterity (an unintentional reference there!) seems to have emerged. I’d be curious to hear more about how you think of these video works, of ‘Polynotknot’, in particular?

a link to an excerpt of ‘Polynotknot’: https://vimeo.com/890809616 and attached a few stills from the video

In my last email I briefly mentioned Julia Kristeva’s “Chora”. It is a notion I stumbled upon only retrospectively (as I mostly do), whilst finishing the video, and it immediately resonated. A pre-linguistic state, where distinctions between self and other, or between any binaries for that matter, simply don’t exist. For Kristeva, it’s a phase in psychosexual development, “in process”, where all forms of boundaries are yet to be put in place. I specifically thought of ‘Polynotknot’ in terms of subjectivities dissolving, polymorphing, polyvocalizing, the singular becoming plural, hybridized and nonlinear. Also its form, nonsequential and randomly played back, supports this striving for nonlinearity, fluidity and instability, incompletion too I suppose.

I’m starting work on a suite of four to five video portraits that focus specifically on iconicity. Through a clearly defined subject, and various previously discussed methodologies, I hope to activate the destabilizing potential or unfixity that moving images can produce in relation to portraiture or the depiction of a legible, coherent subject for that matter. I hope to realize this suite of works with an iconic figure, one firmly embedded in popular culture, a trans/non-binary/ queer icon to be more specific. I’d rather not mention yet with whom I’d like to realize this, as I don’t want to jinx it!! In any case I’m specifically interested in exploring together different methodologies of moving image making that have the ability to destabilize portraiture; a self-built pendulum camera that creates a kind of back and forth “glissando” movement, unsequential, shuffle or live editing, that endlessly reorganizes clips into a new order, non-repetitive gifs and live voice and image modulation/effects among other things.

I do realize none of these are actual terms or established methods per se, merely made-up ways of describing something I hope we can experiment with together. Once again, methods that I think deeply resonate with your thinking around queer abstraction. And perhaps this takes us back to the beginnings of our dialogue where I was so struck by how you described queer abstraction generating meaning, not through an iconographic process, but rather through formal and material methods that are more destabilizing and contingent.

If you feel comfortable sharing, I’d be really curious to hear more about the new work you are developing. If I remember correctly, you mentioned you attended a conference this autumn that you generated brand new work for?

And only material processes in another message, well there was a bit of what video or moving images can materially do here already!

Jani

PS. I sooo wish I could be in New York for David Getsy’s talk on Scott Burton’s work! Are you going?

Lex Morgan Lancaster

to: Jani Ruscica
Jan 24, 2024 at 9:32 PM

Dear Jani,

‘Polynotknot (and they bloom)’ does produce a somewhat alienating experience of seeing the body through both amalgamation and fragmentation. As a viewer, I feel myself trying to determine which mouth the sounds are coming from – who is speaking? – and because I’m hearing non-sensical vocal sounds rather than coherent language, I end up interpreting the affective resonance of the sound. There are times when the vocalizations are quietly rhythmic and musical, as well as dissonant, harsh, or even alarming; but, it’s not easy to “read” the affects I might attach to the sound with the fused part-bodies, eyes and mouths. Sounds are also generated in ways that point to the materiality of the lips, teeth, tongue, and throat (smacks, clicks, whistles, shhh), so that’s interesting in terms of how the work registers in haptic ways even though it is digital.

I’ve been wondering a lot about the materiality of the digital, thinking about my interest in forging theories of trans materiality (building of course on folks like Karen Barad) and how that might work when the “object” is digital media. My analysis is always really focused on the embodied visceral encounter with the work, so the work doesn’t necessarily have to take physical form in order to register materially (not that the computer screen or projection isn’t matter, but you know what I mean...we generally think of this kind of media as dematerialized). And the technomaterialist bent of xenofeminism is potentially helpful here in taking seriously the ways technology relates to and enacts material bodies and worlds. I’m also glad you’re holding onto feminism, when so many have cut it loose (I’m pretty defensive of feminism as an important intersection to hold onto with queer, trans, critical race approaches; we would lose so much by not engaging with it).

Back to the question of who is speaking, that Kristeva theory of “Chora” makes sense in relation to your polymorphous “subject” (if we can call them a subject—them registers as both singular and plural perhaps). There is something kind of pre-linguistic and primordial about these forms. The potential enmeshment is also frightening, in a world where individuation is so critical to our sense of self...it’s like an uncanny visualization of bad relational boundaries! I also find that people get very concerned about “trans” lifting off from particular experiences of singular subjects or communities, so the theoretical deployment of that term can cause some discomfort perhaps in the way that your videos might be discomfiting. Orientations between self and other aren’t easy to parse. But I also think this work can speak to the multiplicities of the self, the fluidity of the self that takes a much more malleable and changeable material form than most people want to consider, but that trans people understand deeply.

I look forward to seeing the project on iconicity and portraiture!

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Wed, Apr 2, 2024 at 6:26 PM

Dear Lex,

So much to respond to in your message, so many deeply resonant and interesting points of view in relation to ‘Polynoknot’, and yet, I’ve struggled to reply.

As you might have noticed by now, a lot of my making and thinking (my very being as a matter of fact), seems to be fueled by an endless set of contradictions, so perhaps it doesn’t come as a surprise that my relationship to language seems to maintain that very same equilibrium. The past few months I have struggled to write anything at all. Partly because I’m so invested in new works, which take on a slightly different approach in their use of video in particular, but primarily because I always seem to need to let myself soak in this pre-erbal or non-verbal state when developing new work. And too much language, too much awareness or knowledge even, simply feels disrupting. I seem to read and watch at random, erratically, instinctually, haphazard, what I quite literally bump into. Become almost frighteningly amnesiac about my past work. Recently I have been reading Sergei Eisenstein’s notes on early Disney films’ elasticity and unbound imagination, on Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Quantum Listening’ techniques and Maggie Nelson’s accounts on her and her partner Harry Dodge’s bodily transformations in ‘The Argonauts’ (quite obviously none of these totally unrelated to my practice!!). No theory, really, only some poetry, from T. S. Elliot, Coral Bracho, Eileen Myles and Mirkka Rekola. I think I have mostly craved indefinite forms of language, which lack too much specificity.

“Poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknown” - Georges Bataille

In any case, I will briefly attempt to return to ‘Polynotknot (and they bloom)’ and its precedent ‘About us (refrain to refrain)’, before moving on. I do think the new moving image works are developing perhaps more in relation to some older work of mine, even if they do carry some of ‘Polynotknot’ and other recent video works too. And this is another realization, hardly a new one, that when one’s practice spans for a longer period of time, some clearly cyclical structures start to become evident. “Progression” certainly isn’t linear, but a rather more looping affair, with endless twists, knots and turns.

In your very last sentence you write that ‘Polynotknot’ can also speak of the multiplicity of the self, and I think this very notion is at the root of how I perceived the kind of hybrid corporeality and materiality that is so intrinsic to ‘Polynotknot’ and ‘About Us’ before that. Central was precisely the idea of the self, more than the body, being porous, constantly assimilating and rejecting, incorporating and extracting, with its boundaries always permeable and fluid in an endless negotiation between self and other. A visceral, tactile materiality was certainly essential for these works; they had to be bodily, had to feel bodily, whilst rejecting the body as we know it; they had to have very sculptural attributes associated with them, like mass, volume, form, weight, scale etc, hence the use of the freestanding screen structure with its own materiality and machinic corporeality. I might have mentioned this earlier (?), I perceive these video works to be indeed sculptural, working like sculpture; they also are quite literally free-standing objects. So it really is of primary importance to make the materiality of the pieces felt (and heard!), be haptic, exactly to challenge any perception of the digital image as dematerialized. They have to be malleable in very tangible, material terms; present flesh like plasticine, not unlike the Barbapapas I loved so much in my childhood. Do you know them? Like them? They could morph into any shape, they could merge with one another, incorporate and extract at will. They embodied my idea of freedom from the constraints of the body, the singular self. I’ve found the writing of Eva Hayward and Jeanne Vaccaro very useful in relation to some of these notions too, perhaps more about those later. In the past, Jack Halberstam’s and Mel Chen’s writing, specifically on animation, has brought some useful theoretical insights as well. I love Chen’s joyous and wondrous description of Miyasaki’s Ponyo’s in- betweenness as exhilarating and exuberant rather than a confusing and distressing liminality. Chen perceives Ponyo’s enmeshment, or blending as they term it, as being partial and contingent and enacted across time, while being simultaneously robust and profound, effective and affective. This infinite potentiality, this boundless plasticity is precisely what I cherish and love working with in animation, be it in the form of moving images, murals, wood cuts or object-like works. This is the kind of materiality I am drawn to: polymorphous, fluid, transmutable.

You mention trans materiality. How do you see it manifest itself in art in ways that are particularly meaningful or resonating for you? I understand there is no easy, simple or quick answer to this!!

Jani

PS. There might be a part 2 coming, or not, depending on how the new work starts to take shape. It might be useful to try to articulate a bit more how I want to approach a kind of visceral materiality with the new suite of video works through the very apparatus of the camera and the portrayal of a single subject. Alongside the suite of videos on iconicity, another suite of videos has started to emerge...

Lex Morgan Lancaster

to: Jani Ruscica
Apr 19, 2024 at 5:17 PM

Dear Jani,

On trans materiality: in my essay for the trans issue of ‘Texte Zur Kunst’, I wrote about how Kiyan Williams’ and Young Joon Kwak’s de- composing approaches to figuration and uses of raw, base materials open up a space for fugitive materiality which I understand as trans. So I guess I can quote myself and say that I deploy “understandings of trans or transgender that do not cohere around binaries and instead are about fugitive movements, contentious multiplicities, unmanageable matter, and wild materializations”—participating in a more recently expansive thrust at the intersection of trans and visual studies. This essay is the launch pad for my current writing project and eventual book on trans materiality...and I think now it’s more “about” materiality for me than about abstraction. Though I’m continuously compelled by processes of abstraction in this work, I’m focused on contributing to new materialist understandings of vital matter that don’t universalize or dehumanize but help us to think through material processes that are harmful, unmanageable, or in some way marked, and create opportunities to lift off from that toward trans ontological excess or even freedom. I’m compelled by work that is very messy, uncontained. You mentioned Mel Chen and Eva Hayward—they’re similarly influential for this current project, and help me to find a place for myself at the intersections of trans and queer studies and new materialisms, biopolitics, and ecologies.

So some of this might connect to your thinking on articulating a visceral materiality in your video/sculpture work. I’m interested in how you might think about a singular subject, and its visual manifestations, in relation to environment. Figure-ground relations is another way to think about this...is there something about articulating a boundlessness or enmeshment for you that also presses the boundaries between self and everything around it, and how does that register or become visualized/materialized?

I had to google ‘Barbapapa’—what an incredible shape-shifting character! I love this as a potential figure for identification as a child. At least I always looked for points of potential identification, characters who I viewed as “like me” in their strangeness or inability to fully cohere or fit in. I don’t think I ever really found it, but I did and still do find animation to be an exciting site of possibility, utopian play even, and Miyazaki’s films are my absolute favorites (along with the work of Tomm Moore, the Irish animator). Thinking about animacy and animation together, it’s about bringing things to life and making things move, perhaps also the ability to morph in and through the unmanageable or unimaginable, being alive to possibility.

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Wed, Apr 29, 2024 at 11:13 AM

Dear Lex,

“Being alive to possibility and being able to morph in and through the unmanageable and imaginable”, I simply LOVE our description of animacy and animation.

And I do think the fascination with animation is indeed essentially about a need to bring things to life, but also, and perhaps more pressingly, about a need to keep them alive. So, even though I don’t work explicitly with vital or sentient matter/forms, I am endlessly interested in what you describe as fugitive movements, contentious multiplicities and wild materializations among other things. All of these seem to set off animacy; the potential to endlessly shift and morph, to destabilize and unfix, to playfully reiterate, transmute and recontextualize, all ways to question the finiteness or presumed settled form of an artwork. I do think for me this is often more of a formal concern, about how the work is or operates, rather than a strictly material or representational one, even though it does obviously branch out into those too at varying degrees. It is a concern that is contingent on the encounter with the work, as previously discussed, the precarity of that encounter, and the refusal of fixity, that need to retain a vital sense of uncertainty and doubt, non-mastery and non-completion. To not cohere around binaries doesn’t seem like a choice, but is rather more likea circumstance, a condition.

Figure-ground relations, what an interesting question! Certainly I seem to have a preference for the singular subject, the isolated figure. I guess primarily because it can serve as a particularly potent conduit for considering notions of plurality, multiplicity, containment, enmeshment and boundlessness, but also because, pictorially speaking, such a figure always functions indexically, as symbol, sign, in relation to language, and this seems like an elemental relationship to maintain in the work. I think hybridity assumes an important role here too; the exquisite corpses I mentioned earlier, the uncontained, or this oddly Frankensteinian/fragmentary sensibility that seems to persistently always emerge. Hybridity and fragmentation are innate experiences, intrinsic to my own being and therefore also to my perception of everything, language included. The enmeshment you mention happens exactly through hybridization and fragmentation, through the processes of incorporation and extraction I was describing in my last message. The boundlessness is indeed about acknowledging boundaries that are more permeable and porous, muddied, and therefore perhaps at times also able to incorporate the self into everything around it. The figures in ‘Polynotknot’ and the ‘Not-knot’ wood cuts are certainly hybrid, they transcend singular form and materiality; they grow furry tails, flowers, branches, and incorporate all kinds of other matter too; like bolts, drill bits, broom heads, extension cords, zippers etc.

Another way to think of figure-ground relations, with the murals in particular (but perhaps also with some of the videos), is to perceive ground as merely the space of encounter with the work, the site itself. I guess this becomes evident in the way I install these works; they always have to keep a relationship to the ground, to gravity, to their weight. I always insist they carry themselves, sit on the floor so to speak, stretch to architectural dimensions, and are always contingent upon the space they inhabit. I guess this is also to heighten their physicality, their presence; to enable their performativity, their acts of rebellion and acrobatics of evasion. Your question seems to make explicit my relationship to medium as well; regardless of what I make I seem to think of it in sculptural or performative terms, rather than pictorially; thus the figure-ground relation seems to be present in my work in oddly contradictory terms.

I know we have to wrap up our conversation soon, as you have already been more than generous with your time.

If it’s ok with you, I’d like to share one more email specifically about a body of object-based works I am currently working on, as I’d love to hear your take on them. I have new videos, wood cuts and murals in the making too, but those we have already discussed at great depth... which I will be forever grateful for Lex, thank you.

Speaking of enmeshment and boundlessness, here is one of the most heartfelt performances ever, of ‘Cripple and the Starfish’ from Anohni. This is one that keeps leaving me breathless every single time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvQxmmbUefY

in Eva Hayward’s words, from her brilliant essay on the song ‘More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves’

“Starfish points to the limits of representation, where ‘like a starfish’ has corporeal meaning. The starfish referent is constantly touching me and devouring its representation. Antony’s starfish is fiercely present as a regenerating body in the song about it.”

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Wed, May 3, 2024 at 11:24 AM

Dear Lex,

As I mentioned I have embarked on an odd little venture that involves crafting/assembling objects, sonic objects to be more specific. I have shared information about this body of work already with Diana and Taneli, with whom I have been lucky to engage in dialogue within the past year also. As an experiment I will actually copy, with the slightest additions and modifications, some of what I already wrote to Diana about this work in progress. As these two conversations, ours and the one with her, have circled around rather different contexts/concerns, it could be interesting to see how speaking about this work could potentially take on rather different tangents or simply be situated within multiple contexts.

I have started working on a body of works which is specifically related to making as a form of thinking (again much art is a form of thinking with the hands, thinking or shaping through making, rather than a rational process of idea followed by execution, but I guess the amount of language we retrospectively attach to our visual languages makes one sometimes believe otherwise). I’m working in ways and with materials I have no mastery of, with rubbish and detritus too. I really want the materials I use to ostensibly hold on to their own will and material behavior. To push against my wishes, to really cherish the boundlessness non-mastery has to offer. Again, I guess material always does this, pushes against, but we learn our ways to control and contain it. As a high school student I studied applied art, so I’ve had a go at pretty much every possible crafts technique there is; from felting to porcelain, enamel and silk painting, from batik dying to metal, wood, leather work and ceramics. I never mastered any of these techniques in ways a crafts professional would do. Yet, by merely having a go at them, I could feel how much material history and knowledge they could hold. I’m interested in making objects that are meant to be used, are functional, that become active through their interaction with the body, and specifically through the sounds they make.

So besides a form, they have to have a “voice” too. They will be sonic objects, thus it will be essential to eventually hand these objects over to performers, to have them activated, to ward off any sense of fixity and subject them to endless subjectivities and processes of interpretation, bodily “incorporation” even. I’m attaching a few images of sketches I have made using language prompts with image generators. These have been mere visual sketches or propositions of hybrid objects, aids for getting started in my aforementioned material tests in non-mastery ; )

Besides material qualities I’m hoping these objects embody some kind of futurity as well. So, alongside material properties, I used in the language prompts allusions to sci-fi literature (to feminist and transfeminist utopias) merely as a way to quite literally, through language, insert a sense/promise of futurity and utopianism that I need these objects to embody. In any case, as I’m working on them, as materials push against me, have their own ways, I can see how these objects start to speak for themselves, and in ways and of things I was entirely unaware of as well.

Sketching using language, or the emergence of AI generators that produce images from language prompts, has created a rather interesting, and certainly complicated speculative space. Not only has it altered the notion of working with archives, which is something that I have done in the past with my object-based works, but it also oddly renders visible the limitations of language itself. The images that have emerged from my language prompts somehow always seem to lack determinacy, seem like approximations, only like something or almost like something. Perhaps it’s because of how I’ve approached language? They lack definition too; seams and welds are messy, materials come across as melting, polymorphing, disintegrating, boundaries or material categories as a whole certainly seem porous. The more contradictory the language, the more indeterminate the objects and their relationship to containment seems to be, and that strikes me as a really valuable starting point for embarking on adventurous material endeavors. These objects become haphazard amalgamations of uncontainable/ unmanageable archives, almost as if they collapsed time somehow, neither past nor future, regardless of how much they materially seem to contain or embody. They have no precedents, remain unnameable, and thus hopefully will hold on to their perpetual and unburdened potentiality as objects to be interacted with.

So... much like the murals, print works and videos I have been working with, I’m hoping these objects too usher processes of naming into crisis, and joyfully and playfully embody a similar kind of shapeshifting hybridity, animacy and elasticity as the rest of my work. Once again I find myself trying to bring something to life and trying to ostensibly keep it alive, beyond the reach and capture of language, but also beyond the reach of settled form and function.

Jani

Lex Morgan Lancaster

to: Jani Ruscica
Wed, May 3, 2024 at 5:30 PM

Hi Jani, before I compose a response, I wanted to clarify what I’m looking at, because I don’t know much about digital production and want to be sure I get it...so these are not photographs of material objects you have assembled, rather they are AI-generated images that you made using particular language prompts? And AI can only produce images based on the (as I understand it very extensive) archive of images it has... but then you are going to use these as sketches for objects that you will actually assemble and that will be activated via physical performance that produces some sound or sonic component?

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Wed, May 3, 2024 at 6:18 PM

Hi Lex,

Yes, these are AI generated images made using language prompts, and yes AI can only cull images from whatever, usually very extensive archives it has, like a google search engine or something of the kind. So these are not the actual objects I have made, I don’t feel like I can share yet actual objects I am working on, plus I think the materiality these images propose is quite interesting to discuss as well.

So in all simplicity, these function just as “sketches”, propositions of sorts, to start making something. And once I start making something material, my ability or lack of ability/skills to work with it, or on the other hand my imagination to come up with unorthodox crafting/making techniques, starts to take the work somewhere entirely different, so the objects I am making are in no way copies of these images; I let material direct the outcomes.

And yes, eventually I want to present this body of works as an assembly of objects to be played/performed with.

Jani Ruscica

To: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Wed, May 3, 2024 at 6:59 PM

one more thing to add, actually I don’t quite know myself what the role of these images is in the final works. I guess that’s part of why I am curious to discuss this process. I think I like this idea of inserting language into these works, seeing how it morphs, forms, visualizes, fails even, and language to image generators are a concrete way to experiment with this.

Maybe these images are more like a distant or vague/indistinct memory in relation to the material hand-made/assembled objects?

Lex Morgan Lancaster

to: Jani Ruscica
May 5, 2024 at 6:23 PM

Dear Jani,

This made me think right away of Sheila Pepe’s ‘Votive Modern’ objects, little assemblages of found materials and objects that take shape through intuitive process and a multiplicity of sources (an archive, perhaps). It’s a kind of queer making that is in some ways precise but also open and undetermined, formal experiments in and through everyday matter (which I write about in the fourth chapter of my book). The desire for materials to dictate their own form has such a feminist, post-minimal legacy in the history of art, and this legacy is really important for how I also think about the significance of materiality and abstraction in current queer and trans practices. We don’t just manipulate matter; rather, matter does and un-does us. So, your embracing the ways materials push against us resonates.

There is something deviant and delicious about the element of chance, a useful process for eluding capture. You’re combining multiple processes that are significantly beyond your control, both digital and analog. The AI language-to-image generator produces an image that is not “yours” but combines indeterminate elements from its archive in an act of translation that also necessarily fails. This returns us to the slippage of signification with which we started: the failure of the sign to fully attach to meaning, or the way language breaks down in relation to abstraction. So, the outcome couldn’t be taken as an expression of you, but rather presses the limits of an archive of available images or matter to give us something “like” or “akin” to materials and objects we could recognize, but then starts to come undone.

The material objects you produce might do something a bit different. I’m wondering what it means or does to translate a digitally- produced image into a material object, what will happen in the process of composition and whether the objects will bear much relation to the images, in the end. If the process is part of the final work, it will be interesting to set the digital works alongside the physical ones, because the process is to remove even further from language, or even to witness how and what language generated the image. Especially if you’re using materials that are associated with the everyday or detritus, then that “low” matter will also carry its own histories that are still alive. But I wouldn’t disregard the part of this that is agential – your choice of materials – because some materials take more fluid shape and are less containable than others, and some materials hold on to more difficult histories than others.

And if they are “sonic” objects, what will it mean to listen to them? To have them activated by a performer who also interacts through listening could start to allow the objects to produce their own sort of language, which is also generated relationally rather than from a singular source—an active and embodied listening-with. I wonder about the presence of maker or performer in relation to the object, which acknowledges that processes of making and interpreting and activating are particular and specific. There are multiple possibilities, but it’s not just that objects formally “speak for themselves”—we have to also be responsible for our making/viewing/enacting positions and behaviors. As much as we work against limits, it can also be helpful to notice where the limits do show up, or even what burdens us, what burdens the materials we use toward something like a utopian futurity. I think this way because I’m really dedicated to holding onto some degree of difficulty in my interpretive approach, and finding the possibilities in and through those hard spaces. But playing in the messy space between the maker or performer’s actions and an object’s capacities for hybridity and mutability seems like a vibrant site to explore the relation between our desires for what artworks can do in the world and what artworks can show us that might exceed or prompt new desires, new ways of working in and through that which conditions us.

Jani Ruscica

to: Lex Morgan Lancaster
Thu May 16, 2024 at 11:01 AM

Thank you Lex for this last, deeply meaningful insight into a body of work that is still very much in process, still in a rather fragile state somehow. Because of this, I won’t venture further into it here, as I don’t want to burden the work with too much language.

I definitely agree that it could be interesting to incorporate the kind of language that was “responsible” or set forth these material experiments and processes into the final work/objects. Perhaps something that could be incorporated in the titling, certainly something to think about.

I love Sheila Pepe’s work, and the ‘Votive Modern’ objects in particular! It really resonates how in your book you frame this kind of making as “deforming distortions”, as a queering or dragging of Robert Morris’ “anti-form”. Lately, perhaps not surprisingly, I have found renewed interest in Eva Hesse’s work as well; that feminist, post-minimal legacy you also mention, that desire for materials to dictate their form (and lifespan even!) that is so radiantly present in her work. I guess as I intend these objects to point at functionality via sound making (how remains undefined), I am willing to accept that they might break or simply not last in their interactions with performers, especially given the ways in which they are made and the precarity of the materials they are made of.

I am so grateful for this dialogue Lex, it has been nourishing in every possible way, thank you. I look forward to hopefully many new encounters in the future, but for now I wish you all the best in your current and future ventures!

Jani