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Galeria Plan B

a project by Mihai Pop and Mihaela Lutea

Image Copyright: Rollo Studio

Ian LawAdd a description

Opening June 10, 18 – 22 h

June 10 – July 30, 2011Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 18 hHeidestrasse 50, 10557 Berlin

A Rewriting of Decreation

Decreation: the movement of the structured society, and its descendants into parts; the

movement of the ‘I’s, away from a ‘we’, towards a perpetual position of the object as codified, or a paus-

ing of the plural object/subject relationships which make up the social. That is: the turning of the social

into the isolated subject/object relationship. In the ball game,1 this is, to an extent, a fetishization of

the ball by the player in the action of stopping the ball – ostensibly pausing the game (the social). This

pause also moves the ball into a spatiotemporal position where the subject (player) can realize2 the ball

as a socially encoded thing, or quasi-object (a term appropriated from Michel Serres). This ‘decreation’

is a shift in the orientation of the object, from a position of general social application (and unspecified,

if not unrealized, power over the players of the game) to the specified position or location inhabited by

the player as ‘it’, or ‘I’. This is a process of ‘un-creating’ the social as a nebulous mass, recreating it as

the defined aggregate, and creating the quasi-object (the ball) as the thing with the agency of the object

(the despot, the sun). The object here is that which is external to the thinking mind - a thing that the

quasi-object is related, but dissimilar to.3

Destruction: The shifting of the ball into stasis and obsolescence. If the ball is enacted

as socially encoded carrier of meaning, and bringing it into the ball game is its enactment, then stasis

which is not in proximity to a subject (a player) is the making-noting of the object – a process by which

the object-with-agency is reduced to the ‘inanimate’ and disregarded object.

This is the careless substitute for decreation.

Initiating the game—engaging the ball, engaging the social (not necessarily engaging the

meaning-value of either)—is an act, on the part of the player-subject, of libidinal and political investment,

and this turn is perpetual, chronic and ‘human’.4 As constant in the life of the subject, the quasi-object

emits availability to a co-creation of society and the political, which is made available through the quasi-

object or ball.5 This availability is an availability of the ball to its instantaneous becoming quasi-object

(and selfish?) and it employs the player to do this.

The existence of the subject/player, totally, is contingent on the quasi-object’s patience

in the subject/player accepting not to exist as singular6—as an ‘I’, as a player—and the acceptance of

intersubjectivity or the anti-social co-operation of the ball and the player (a kind of intercourse).

The object begs from the subject that existence which the object gives – that existence

that the object proposes through the negotiations of the quasi-object. With a sense of the strategic

construction of the ball as entertainer and tool, but also a sense of the ball as a subject in its own right

with agency, the ball is not a mouthpiece7. 8

The object gives this definable existence (the pause) to the subject in order to beg it from

the subject with, or vicariously through, the quasi-object.

The subject inhabits this relentless subordination to the object and the quasi-object. This

can be seen in religious dogma. The life of the beggar is the virtuous one. The suffering life is that of

godliness - that is: the subject’s pain is divine love – that is: the subject’s love for the divine - that is:

the players interest in the game, and then ultimately the fascination with the agency of the ball - that

is: the beggar’s poverty is the oxymoron embodied, and yet made sense of in light of the celestial per-

sonification. This ‘withdrawal’ from nourishment of the corporal self (starvation), relates to the subject’s

withdrawal from the ‘it’ or the ‘I’. This is where the player, enamored by the grace of the ball, turns into

a hoarder, and again turns into Moses. He brings stasis to the ball, drawing the game to a pause (not

necessarily a close, as Serres suggests) and igniting an abstract or symbolic order, or the order of the

ball, not the order of the game. The ball can be related to a whole lineage of artifacts: tablet, icon, rep-

resentation, image, aesthetic object, artwork. For if the subject were exposed to the direct radiance of

the object’s light (via the tablet or icon) without the barrier protection of the quasi-object (space / time

/ matter) the subject would evaporate into the object - in the unmediated sunlight.9 The quasi-object

holds the subject in the world. To be immediately present to the object is to be consumed by it, making

the ‘I’ of the subject disintegrate.

In the game, the players and the ball are differentiated categorically, not specifically.10

Whereas when the ball is stopped its skin can be examined; the barrier is visible, as exactly the ball.11

This attention is lent to the subject. Were it not for the ball all would be a game and no punctualiza-

tions.12

The ball has to be derived by the subjects and objects, or rather: the game and its players

have made the ball. This quasi-object is the projection screen for an imaginary divinity, available for

the players, so that they can define themselves in relation to this object (and objective). And the quasi-

object allows for object-hood to be renounced.

To give up voluntarily—as the player does with the ball in the ball game—we don’t want the

button, nor be the goose, or ‘it’13 – but that’s the imperative of the game. To initiate the renunciation by

the quasi-object of the object, as a mode of differentiation, the object renounces the quasi-object and

the subject. At the will of the ball the game is played, at the will of the game the ball is made, at the

will of the players the game is played with the ball (these in any particular order). “We should renounce

being something. That is our only good.

“We are like barrels with no bottom to them so long as we have not understood that we

have a base.” The moment of realization where the properties of the quasi-object are realized as that

dependant on negotiation, the subject catches a glimpse of their ‘self’ – a crystallization that must sub-

sequently be reversed. The ball is that which frames both subject and game. The ball is moved around,

being picked up, given and received. The game from the vantage of the subject/quasi-object is seen as

a process of aggregation - that is: the production of the intelligible particularities of the woven network;

translating the nebulous and uncharted activity into something charted.14

The abstract and symbolic reality—that which the subject enters into when realizing the

ball as a quasi-object—is the nexus of the decreation: the process by which renunciation takes effect on

the social. The stratification codes and organizes, while moving away from what has been encoded. We

number the crowd - a number allocated irrespective of the appropriateness of the number to the num-

bered (knowing that both have specificity). This subject who realizes the ball as quasi-object, adorning

the ball and the game with specificity, qualifying, drawing up the participating logics and unifying them

- she does not feel shame in this action, she does not reduce that infinity which surveys all things, to a

forced occupation of a tiny room. This is not a process of raising the ego, to a point of degrading it, em-

bellishing it with a confining meaning - but is rather a process of producing semblances to participate in

the reality of the game, and understanding the starry sky as possibly recurrent, as having consistencies.

It is not confined by constellations, nor broken by them, as of course the sky goes much further than we

can conceptualize or see. But this is still a process of abasement or the giving up of locatebility, as it is

separated from what it locates. The location is made trivial and symbolic - the ball is made trivial and

symbolic.

The self-aware subject, holding the ball, sees herself as a participant in the game, and

does not rupture the game if she is convinced that she is participating willingly. If a moment of self-

reflexivity occurs, the becoming quasi of the ball is made by her as a mode of differentiation – differenti-

ating herself from the simple role she plays in the game. The ball depicts with her an image of herself

retrospectively.

Everything that is understood by her, while playing the game, is essentially hypothetical.

It is only her non-game-diagetic15 fascination with the ball, which allows for the establishment of any

consistent meanings. Thus, she is a co-creator.

She participates in the decreation of the world by decreating herself (in realizing her

delineation in the game by the discovery of the skin of the ball).

She only possesses what she has renounced, that is: what she has defined and realizes with the ball in

her hands.16 What is not codified is likely to escape from her. In this sense, we cannot possess anything

whatever unless it passes through the quasi-real, arriving at the ‘real’; or that which is found after pierc-

ing the skin of the ball and becoming united with the meaning represented thereby.

The object is not made in the material of the quasi-object only in the ball. Every day the

object is produced as quasi-object, submitted to negotiation or consumption by subjects. Reciprocally—

by fatigue, affliction and death—subjects are made into the quasi and are consumed by the stasis of the

object. And by the light of the sun, she is disintegrated.

In being productive of the quasi-object, the object empties itself of its abstraction and

its divinity. In confronting the quasi-object, the player must empty herself of the nebulous ‘we’ from

whence it came.

Once the subject co-produces the circumstances of the playing field as understood, or

understandable, and realizes itself as no thing, as not defined totally by these structures, the subject

can continue to produce images of every game, every player, and every thing she encounters. It is for

this becoming-nothing that she suffers resignation, and alienation; it is for this that she acts, it is for this

that she asks, not simply to pierce the skin of the quasi-object, but to decipher the object-like nature of

oneself, and to inhabit it as one with the quasi-object.

May the object be introduced to its subjectivity.

In so far as the subject becomes no thing (no thing, united with its ego), the object is

fonder of her.

There is a resemblance between the quasi-object and the object. Physical necessity, the

material quasi-object, is an image of the irresistible pressure of the object. The object is differentiated

categorically from the becoming understandable sign, that is, the quasi-object. Being understood and

understanding both rupture the screen or skin of the quasi-object and the passing of the subject into

decreation and total amalgamation of object and subject.

On this account it is necessary to seek out what is most definitely in a state of becoming

or decreation, what is most located as an image.17

May that which pulls the quasi-object into absolute terms become more absolute in itself

so as to allow for that which is most quasi-object-like to go further towards its decreation, for this

subject is born into a world moving towards the defined term. To re-establish this (subject) creature in

this instance is to undo the ordering of her subjectivity by the human-centric society. If a network such

as that of the game, acts as a single unit, the subject disappears. The ‘it’ state in tag is the antithesis of

this unity of the game. ‘It’-ness produces the heterogeneous game.

Reversal of the subjective and the objective.

Similarly, the reversal of the (negative) and the positive.

This subject is born and lives in an inverted fashion, for the ‘I’ of this subject is realized in being the ‘it’

in the game of tag, the paused ball protracted. That is, this subject is realized as a subject in her being

a member of a society, as being woven into the network present in the game. Her existence as such

begins in the moment of stopping the ball. Her first operation is one of reversal—Conversion—where the

moment of establishing the ‘I’ is also the beginning of its decreation.

The death of the seed liberates the energy it bears within it, so that with this energy new

forms may be developed.18

So the quasi-object produces the subject of the game as ‘it’, which in turn produces the

players of the game as members of its society. The society of the subject/object relationship is estab-

lished as separate. This is not necessarily ‘the true’ relationship of things.

“The extreme difficulty which I often experience in carrying out the slightest action is a fa-

vor granted to me” by the presence, and her cognizance of the quasi-object (the receiving society of her

actions). For thus—by ordinary actions, and without attracting attention—the subject can cut some of the

roots of the tree. However indifferent she may be to the positions of those in this society, extraordinary

actions—the pausing of the ball—contain a stimulus that cannot be separated from her. Whilst she holds

the ball, this stimulus is quite absent from the other players. To find extraordinary difficulty in perform-

ing an ordinary action is a favor, which the quasi-object provides. She may desire to be absolved from

such difficulty, but this could never be realized once she has picked up the ball.

Generally the difficulty (wretchedness) of dissolving the precursory self (that somatic self,

a part of a mass intersubjectivity) into the singular ‘I’ (shared inter-subjectively with the quasi-object in

this ‘it’ scenario) cannot be simplified, or prescribed in any fashion. The request for such a simplification

is in vain, for the ‘I’ is not all encompassing, and this transition is like a birth in that the severing of the

umbilical cord—amongst other severings—must occur, as the subject passes into the hot sun light of the

game as such. This decreation or rebirth is similar to death in that there is a kind of reverse birth, recoil-

ing into the womb, but it should not be conflated with death.

For this (brave?) subject who pauses the ball—this awkward state of disambiguation

therein, with physical suffering and seeming privation due—is a test of the subject’s origins and of her

societal ties. This requires a certain kind of passivity, a great affliction, which gives to this subject a

‘knowledge’ of her society’s discomfort of the mind.19 20

Even the pleasure found in this reconstruction (and discovery) of the social, likewise bears

testimony to this discomfort of the mind. In the game the ‘mind’ is found somewhat diffused and shared.

The players must be no thing, undefined, in order to be in their right place in the whole.21

After the discovery of the society as such, the quasi-object and subject community build

a sort of lookout point, from which all is deferred - all social links (possession, faculties, intelligence,

character, opinions, morality, stability, etc.) are disconnected, and something other to them persists,

a fusing together of the subject and quasi-object. These things are not destroyed, but they are turned

away from, or lost, or disengaged with.22 The subject becomes something of a non-human animal, a

parasite to the quasi-object, a kind of reverse cyborg, like a myth where a man becomes a rock.23 The

body of the quasi-object is extended through, and with, the subject.

The subject becomes vegatativly dependent on the quasi-object (Phèdre, Arnolphe, etc.).

This is not an illness - as the illness distracts, and returns the subject to the state of ‘knowing’ where

workings of the body are not concealed, but rather exposed as a complex network.

The object of desire being more necessary to the life of the subject here than the subject

is to the object. Rather: The quasi-object of desire is more necessary to the life of the subject than the

subject is to the quasi-object - necessary in the most literal sense of the word, as essential as food. But

of course this is hard to say for how to empathize with the quasi-object or the object?

Such a bond is able to become this vital, the subject undergoes the ‘ultimate’ violence:

committing herself to self-sacrifice (not suicide) - an ultimate ontological violence. She realizes her so-

ciety, and realizes that this illumination is dependent on the quasi-object, and finds she can’t discard or

forget this new found knowledge (which persists, like stains or marks of relief, on the quasi-object), and

in the same motion, becomes attached to the quasi-object, attached to a sheath, wall, surface, image.

The quasi-object becomes bread.

This is a non-temporal locale,24 but it is not a non-responsible (conscious of its effects)

locale, even tho there is no possibility of certain contextualization. This is the inadequacy of the term

‘decreation’ in that it projects a duration - we needn’t see it from this temporal vantage. What can be

seen of our quasi-object/subject aggregate from here, from my position as writer of the conceptual

model, is seen through an image plane, or screen that flattens the scene on the other side.25 The fused

subject/object can be understood as such from my vantage.

To isolate a moment in this way implies pardon, but this should not be an excuse for

absolute detachment from the scene, for those on either side of the screen. Instead the screen is

pronounced as something that was always there, in a way of naming or a slice of air.

While there are nodes of ‘perfect’ nudity in birth and death, the sullying moments of these

instances should be fissured and opened to a plurality of temporalities. The object as subject, as being

with agency is summoned as a possibility - and therefore the parameters of ‘life’ are also being drawn

into question, in a similar way as they might be with the cyborg. The death of the machine and the death

of the quasi-object and the death of the subject are not of dissimilar proportion.

The instance of union represented by the assertive pausing of the ball, is the now instanta-

neous event of death, without past or future. But this is not a fanciful gesture of eternity or invincibility.

This is the transformation and condensation of the subject into the eye, and the marrying

of the quasi-object with this subject position.26 A fullest fullness of joy here is in the realization that the

subject is not; that the subject has come to inhabit the screen that frames the quasi-object, a screen

that has become the visibility of the object - as though the subject has been injected into some skin.

After this becoming quasi-object / quasi-object becoming subject, what can be seen ... ?

Just as easily the other players of the game steal the ball from each other. One must be

quick!

There is still no temporality.27 The demoralization of the quasi-object at all requires the

comparison and distinction between the human subject and other kinds of subjects - which is exactly at

odds with what the initial fascination with the ball.

The presence of the object in this scene: This should be understood in two ways. As

central impetus or devised topic, the object is present in both the quasi-object and the subject. Is the

object is the game of tag, or the ball game - some discursive field? The topic for which the object re-

quires the co-operation of the quasi-object is the topic of the creature (the subject), where the object is

not conductor, but a multilateral commonality. The first topic is the topic of encoding. The second topic

it the topic of decoding or decreation. (The object that created the subject without the subject’s help,

will not save that subject without her consent.)

Each of the object’s devised topics gains formal qualities only by its obstructing of the

subject’s view of the object as such, otherwise there would be no punctualization, no playing field to

speak of. All would be indefinite.

The nature of the object is then hidden, and its being thus is the only way of understanding

the aim of decreation, and the only way of making sense of the afflicted disengagement.

Possession is not exclusively a faculty of the subject, and the ‘being’ of the subject is

positioned behind the curtain (the curtain of affliction). What she can learn of herself is only what is lent

to her by her circumstances (society). In this society her ‘I’ is hidden from herself - this ‘I’ next to the

quasi-object, waiting for the arrival of the subject, and it is equidistance to the quasi-object as the ob-

ject is. Not only is the quasi-object the center of the game, but also the center around which the object

and subject ... dance.28 To pronounce oneself without the quasi-object is to discredit the game only for

oneself. The curtain is the subject’s societal discomfort of the mind – a mediation that blinds.

It is a question of a level of attention paid to the ball? This attention can be paid to sheep,

fields of corn, numerous children. It is also situated further off ... However deep this attention may be

there is a breaking point when it succumbs, and it is this moment which transforms, which wrenches the

subject away from the finite towards the infinite, which makes this quasi-object the crux of the subject’s

interests totally, and descends the newly-found ‘I’ and ‘we’. This is the death of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’,

and such a death happens with a certain subtlety, and lack of distinction – in fact, it is necessary that

everything happen without distinction, or the whole operation becomes futile.

Materiality clings to the quasi-object, and tearing them from one another ... is painful.

Whoever becomes ‘it’ descends imminently; disappears. Form chains the quasi-object

down.

This clinging and these chains can be meagerly described as non-eternal.

It is necessary to uproot the quasi-object, the tree, to pick the ball up, to make it into a

game, to use the tree as wood - to rupture the materiality, to make an attempt at the non-eternal. And to

then carry the ball every day.

It is necessary not to make the quasi-object isolated, still less to reduce it to being

subject-less.29

The city gives us the feeling of being at home.

The subject takes the feeling of being at home into exile.

The subject must be rooted in an absence of place.

To uproot herself societally and vegetatively.

To exile or disengage herself from every earthly country.

To do all of this to other subjects, as if from the outside, our subject makes substitutes

(ersatz) for decreation. This results in some (unreality).

But by uprooting herself, she seeks (greater reality).

Zayne Armstrong, 2011

1 I am not speaking of a specialized ball; this is a general game, the pre-’sport’ game, the ball game that hovers around

the established modern rules, but does not blindly abide by them; the pre-modern game. This is a game constituted by playing with a

ball in a way that we can only speculate has happened in some un-delineated field, in some unnamed land, some time prior to now.2 ‘Realize’ in the sense of it being a process of making or causing to happen.3 Through variations in its position—resting, being moved, set down, picked up—this thing is not as definite as an ‘object’

is (something external to the thinking mind), and is rather a becoming-object or quasi-object, an object with agency.

This quasi-object is produced both passively and assertively, and asks for a similar multivalent disposition from the

viewer. Similar to the thing that functions as a ‘ball’ in the pre-modern ball-game, our quasi-object co-facilitates the production of

its meaning with a society of players, by making its material available to the molding that takes place during the game. The game is

formed as the material for the ball takes on the attributes of what we now refer to as a ball. Once socially acquainted, its resting place

is not set, in that its body has become contingent on the various threads that show its relationships to its society.

The process of encoding is specific to subject/quasi-object relationships, but a multiplicity of these are possible and

probable simultaneously. Such pluralities find in the quasi-object the nexus around which a ‘society’ as such is formed.

But, increasingly, codes used to refer to the quasi-object can seem consistent within its society. Referential syntaxes may become

‘given,’ functionalities may become ‘local’.

This thing, set in a society of associations—the various infrastructures which inform its position and rendering—can easily

congeal and harden, leaving the subject no longer beside or parallel to the thing but in front of an object, finite and non-negotiable,

flattened out and (supposedly) totally seen. The quasi-object becomes impossible, and the object reigns.

Is movement towards an un-creating, or de-forming of the object’s implied social renderings possible? This needn’t be a

violent process of defacing, but one in which a face of the thing is re-searched for – a kind of excavation process.

This work of un-creation or reversal of creation is facilitated in the gallery as a treatment, for instance, as a treatment of

the gallery’s existing architecture. The support structure, wall, trestle, etc., are supplied to the quasi-object, their relationship being

negotiated, as a kind of meeting. 4 There is a tendency in Ian’s work for ‘human’ or accidental processes coming to form something of a non-specialized

practice (he may very well not arrive with a paint brush). This practice is one of investing surfaces with a supply of treatments, rather

than just one. The relationship with a material is not as careless as the accident might imply – this investment of positioning and

repositioning, forming and reforming the same material. (The playing of the modern game being disassembled, de-stratified, and

broken up, in order to go through backwards into the de-codified pre-modern.)

Paper, with its image-like surfaces, has been put into the wash and is re-flattened and reframed by the exhibition’s

constituent parts. Images, or ‘texts’ in general (in the broadest sense of the word) suggest a position to the viewer; to read orients a

subject spatially.5 The pausing player occurs in a way that is akin to the historiographer, which writes history as the ball, and does this in

the light of the society of the ball game (re-writing and stratifying of the social as a coded social, rather than the nebulous gathering).

The ball is together a result and a symptom of the group. The ball is the manufactured object resulting from of a complex set of

processes, and it is bound to the complex of specific and collective fabrication. This is a process that the pre-modern game begs

for - it accumulates these attentions. The issue is the forming of what is found in the pause, and if it is kept.6 “…it will be easily granted that counting material objects means thinking all these objects together, thereby leaving them

[together] in space.” H. Bergson. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, translated by F.L. Pogson,

M.A. London: George Allen and Unwin (1910)7 With this mouthpiece, subject’s flock to be conducted by its clarity and its regime of symbols, its dedication to making

sense of, rational, and ordering. And they flock to the ball to produce an enunciation. The quasi-object is the vehicle of becoming

perfect, the incomplete and the handle-able entity of the object (or sun, or despot, etc.). 8 The objects in this show, like paintings set as horizontally on trestles, orient a viewer towards other works, to other

things, to other built environments. But the works are not provisional; they are a means to an end as their end (they are this deferred

end in themselves). 9 The work is happening on the same level as the clothing you’re wearing, in that the clothing you’re wearing has most

likely gone through some similar processes as the work.

10 It will be seen that we began by imagining, for example, a row of balls, that these balls afterwards became points, and,

finally, this image itself disappeared, leaving behind it nothing but an abstract number. But at this very moment we cease to have an

image or even an idea of it; we kept only the ‘necessary’ symbol.11 The washed paper is not forthcoming about its origins; it might play at being representational, and its form is understood

and unfolded through the other elements in the exhibition.12 “…something much simpler -- a working television, a wellmanaged bank or a healthy body -- comes, for a time, to mask

the networks that produce it. Actor network theorists sometimes talk of such precarious simplificatory effects as punctualizations,

and they certainly index an important feature of the networks of the social.” M. Serres. Parasite, Minnesota: University of Minnesota

Press. (2007)13 Serres’ idea of the parasitic being dependant on a process by which an animal is domesticated; the ferret is employed

by the hunter to catch the rabbit - as the ferret cannot catch it for himself if muzzled. The moving ferret defines the ‘we,’ and paused

produces the ‘I’. In tag, a motivation for playing is the fear of the not-we being transformed into a definite ‘we’, one in which the ‘I’

is, rather then being singular, realized as a conflation of the ‘I’ with the ‘it’. The subject realizing itself ‘in the world’, realizing the lack

of agency it has within the ‘we’, but also that this group ‘we,’ as a we that is exactly ubiquitous, undefined, unknown, and equally

terrifying when it is other than oneself. See M. Serres, ibid. 14 The work is charted by the exhibition in the society of others, each part of the show pointing towards or suggesting the

gamete of an other – but this is not explicit, these pieces are not signs, and the associations function as metaphors might, one icon

pointing to another, a deferral to a deferral, not at some ‘truth’. A frost blanket draws open the parameters of this network, attaching

it to other shows where other parts of this same material are located.15 The diegesis is the fictional world in which the situations and events narrated occur. That is opposed to the non-diegetic,

or the world outside of the fictional world – this world includes the cinematic score played on top of the diegetic action that the actors

are not privy to. See Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (2003).16 The most definite, located aspects of the works can be found in the room around the work where the process of

categorization takes place, or the coming-infrastructure of the exhibition space. The text takes on a position of pliability – being the

most accessible and most dubious negotiation of the work, with its knack for drawing into a location.

17 The angles of viewer-ship and the positions of the body of the viewer or author, considerations local to the photographer,

function here as considerations of the exhibition viewer, and specifically the way in which surfaces co-orient a viewer to their view.

The view is not a sum of the work, a disclosure of parameters, or a perspective that might allow for the exhibition to become a survey-

like image - the view is rather the induced image.18 In the death of the seed, death constitutes the dismemberment of the somatic, whence a re-assessment of the semantic

is required. The work may no longer exist, while the form may remain. The chaff of the seed persists, but the thing we referred to as

a seed, is no longer there. There is a transferal of our attention, from the properties of the seed to the properties of the chaff. This

transferal is slow, never ending. The decreation process is not one which destroys what is removed, but goes from a plurality of views,

to a view which sees the aggregate as un-defined, and nebulous, making a mist or lens of the encoded social world, through which

some thing, surface or material can be seen. 19 If pausing the game could be seen as an affliction, then we can see the pausing not as a process by which misery is

produced, but which reveals misery. Misery being, that which is discomfort, ill fitting, the poorly situated.20 There is a vantage here of the player, finding themselves not bound to a position in the game, a role or a responsibility.

The work seems to create this sense of disambiguation in its drawing from one surface to the next, unmaking and making

simultaneously. The viewer is not required to be a passive onlooker, but a kind of susceptibility must be available. This uncertainty is

often cut short due to the availability of crutches like texts, explaining, defining, canonizing and selling. 21 “How they manage … to conceal for a time, the process of translation itself and so turn a network from a heterogeneous

set of bits and pieces each with its own inclinations, into something that passes as a punctualized actor.” M. Serres, ibid.22 Can we think of the artist as a co-worker together with the materials he works with – so as to make for a non-conceptual

positioning for the artist, one where there is a formal negotiation together with conceptual apparatuses? 23 I actually can’t think of any. Suggested are welcome. 24 The pausing of the object in the game offers a kind of opposition to the truth of postmodern historiography, where the

‘fact’ is only such in as much as it is contingent on its context. The act of pausing the object is simultaneously the antithesis of the

social codification while also being its epitome. The ball becomes a discrete subject, while also being destratified, decreated and

removed from its context.

25 The duration, suggested by the decreation process, is inadequate, in that it formats this state as a temporal one, guided

by a telos. But this is not the case. The decreation is a kind of impasse – there is a perpetual definition and simultaneously this

decreation.

The point to which this refers is making a nod at my position as drawer in this diagram.

In a similar way to the bread going stale, the work has a temporal positioning. This positioning is not endowed with an

expiration date per se, but is endowed with a readiness. 26 The condensation of the subject into the vantage point, or eye, allows for a view of position of the production of the

authored work; we have the chimera of the author hovering around the work as a kind of narrator, lens, or mind in which the viewer

can see a logic – an imagined subjectivity that takes the place of the sense-making text. This condensation of the subject (a kind of

synecdoche) is also a way of pointing to the actor-network that comes to substantiate this subject (artist, viewer, etc.). The object, in

the conventional sense, is given up for the quasi-object, which is in turn a medium for the object and subject. This is then replaced by

the amalgamation of the two, making the object into a subject (not simply a personified one) and the subject into an object (a reverse

cyborg). A work is not the conventional object, nor is it simply the quasi-object, but it is also a quasi-subject. 27 “In history every “doctrine” which represses its relation to society must be regarded as abstract. It denies the very

matter with respect to which it is elaborated. Thus it undergoes effects of distortion owing to the elimination of what in fact situates

it, but without its either being expressed or brought to consciousness: a power which has its own logic; a place, which grounds and

“maintains” a discipline in its development in successive works, and so forth. “Scientific” discourse which does not speak of its

relation to the social “body” could never establish a practice. …” from Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, Columbia University

Press. (1988).28 This is not about dragging anyone to the dance floor. 29 The installation shows a point at which Ian puts the ball down, to rest.