Kara Walker, "Cut"
"So our writing, as much as our living, becomes extensive, opening out pursuant to filmy trails of the unsayable, not closing down on the secret quivering in fear of imminent exposure. So our writing becomes an exercise in life itself, at one with life and within life as lived in social affairs, not transcendent or even a means to such, but contiguous with action and reaction in the great chain of storytelling telling the one always before the last. Yet how can you be contiguous with the not merely empty, but negative, space?"
Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative
The need here to think about the negative space of form, what cuts off and cuts into form as an idea of wholeness (of 'holiness'); defacement and decay and exposure. Taussig's distinction between "empty" and "negative" space, recognition that the negative space is never itself empty but contiguous, formative and trans-formative and pointing always to the de-formed nature of form itself. Here is a theory of writing and living, he says: open secrets, exposed borders, extensions, piece-meal, contiguity.
1 comment:
But the idea of empty space is so lovely in its incomprehensibility; the air is full of particulates, the universe has no end, our minds race when we sleep. Empty space is death, beyond our understanding: nothing.
Kara Walker grew up in my hometown, Stockton, CA, recently deemed the "most miserable city in America" by Forbes.
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