Perceptual, conceptual, physical, emotional and vocal shape resounds, not with what it holds but with how it resonates. I listen, holding words to my ear so I might hear syntaxes that resound and discover me. Irigaray writes, “What a feminine syntax might be is not simple or easy to state, because in that ‘syntax’ there would no longer be subject and object, ‘oneness’ would no longer be
privileged, there would no longer be proper meanings, proper names “ and she suggests that, “that syntax might also be heard, if we don’t plug our ears with meaning.”58
The crab on my face is a kind of question. Through a practice of leverage and observation it is prised away. The thing that is on the artist is also in the artist. In a reciprocal and paradoxical action it is simultaneously taken within the body of the beholder, ‘I’—the audience/artist. With a kind of reciprocity it is also the subject (a kind of endoskeleton). In and out are kind of equivalent, performing as both subject and object. It is as if the material and immaterial devolve from one to other, ever evolving as shape, breathing and engendering, rebounding and resounding. I listen. It seems more useful to listen than to understand.
The question art speaks of immateriality in a material way, giving dimensionality to what might otherwise remain immaterial (or at least flat). And yet what is answering is already, even in its materiality, inexplicable or not quite nameable because it is already returning as a question. What lived here? What caused this shape? One could also say that what is left in a work is what is leaving, or what has departed. It is only the home of what caused its shape and that is already returning as immaterial. A work in many ways is like a shell—a home for what is received and it is as if the container (or resounding shape) is most eloquent, most resonant, when it is empty of the material it beheld.
Each work is a material mark but artistic libido is part of the creative transaction. The acoustic and somatic materiality of language is an inscription of the immaterial experience of life and it continues … it occurs again and again on each occasion of audience.
In 1996 I heard a joke in Berlin. I used it for the opening lines of Knowledge and Melancholy. “The elephant said to the mouse, You are very small. The mouse said to the elephant, I have been sick.”59 The mouse stands in for ‘I’—also the ‘I’ of a larger body, the cultural
corpus. The mouse is a small self but nevertheless has a point of view of the elephant monolith that might imagine such a small thing is not very relevant. From her point of view difference in size is not the thing that makes the difference but rather it is the state of her self. In the practice of leverage and in the mediums of time and space and through actions of rebound and reception, the artist gives
audience to perceptual questions. By generating possibilities, resonance occurs in unexpected and surprising syntaxes of form and content. The artist is always first audience to these kinetic transformations. She is the ‘I’ yearning for a dimensional experience of the world, the ‘I’ that hears herself hearing herself hear, sees herself seeing herself see, feels herself feeling herself feel. She is the questioner.
I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation … [This] transformation of oneself by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience.60
Generating possibilities and delaying closure, opening a view elsewhere, art is a mutable knowledge practice unpinning the literal, footnote-able, el pied de la letter (foot of the letter) from fixed places of pronouncement, so un-owning origins and un-weighted by meaning, leveraged signifiers may dance a way.61
59 Cameron, see Knowledge and melancholy attached appendix p. 152.
60 M Foucault, Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings 1977–1984, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 14.
61
Cameron & Sharp, “The ‘way’ of love is not a path, nor is it a method. The way is ‘made’ in the breath meeting, in the encounter enunciating sensation, as it is perceived within, without and between. Being is becoming through breath. The movement of breath is in dialogue with the other and the other and the other.” Listening with Irigaray: The sound of the live, a performance event in response to French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s book The way of love, in ‘Falling behind: politics of body states’,a series of performance events curated by Elizabeth Dempster and Sally Gardner, presented by Writings on Dance and Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Nth Melbourne, 24 September 2009. Viewed 1 June 2012, <http://www.bodyvoice.com.au/html/artists__statement.html>.
[T]hese tales, stories, poems, and treatises are already practices. They say exactly what they do. They constitute an act, which they intend to mean … to say what they say; there is no discourse outside of them. You ask what they “mean”, I will tell them to you again.62