Beckett Walk III – What does capitalism burn? What burns capitalism?
installation with 'improper lumps'
* from the 'scrap-book' *
«Beckett Walk ...» is series of works with performances, interventions, videos and installations.
«Beckett Walk» in the title refers to many things: to a man of letters and his still current texts - Samuel Beckett -, to a work that belongs to the canon of art history - Bruce Nauman's video work «Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) 1968» - to the latent risk of losing balance, of losing face, to landscape and our relationship to nature and our relationship as a whole to life in all its stratifications.
Initial situation
During my explorations in Shetland I found plastiglomerates on the shores and for the first time I learned what this 'new' rock is all about.
Shetland consists of over a hundred islands and has many kilometres of coastline. Exposed to wind, weather and the currents of the North Sea, the ecological crisis here becomes radically clear when, for example, plastic pieces, which are washed to the islands in large quantities by the ocean currents, accumulate.
The legacies of human civilisation in the oceans have created a new type of rock. 'Plastiglomerates' is what geologists call the formations made of parts of molten plastic, lava, sand, coral and shell parts, whereby the plastic components often still show traces of the previous life of human tools such as toothbrushes, cords etc. «... plastiglomerate indexically unites the human with the currents of water; with the breaking down, over millennia, of stone into sand and fossils into oil; with the quick substration of that oil into fuel; and with the refining of that fuel into polycarbons—into plastic, into garbage.»* What physical materiality is formed in the face of these inauthentic lumps?
* Quote from e-flux journal #78, december 2016, Kirsty Robertson, Plastiglomerate; downloaded October 2019, translated into German.
over-text for the works shown in the context of the exhibition «Selbstklumpungen»
applies to all three parts that were shown and took place in the exhibition:
* performance
«BECKETT WALK IV - plastic bender»
Performance in search of traces of improper agglutinations.
Many thanks to Ingrid Käse for her support with the face painting.
* display-installation with plastiglomerates
«What does captialism burn? What burns capitalism?»
Display with with improper lumps
The performance and the display-installation go together and complement each other: I used the shelf to put down the plastic agglomerates, which in as part of the performance I was carrying in my pocket.
* kinetic image
«L'animoteur 12 - bender»
1 photo on Hahnemühle Baryta, mounted on stadur plate, 37 x 50 cm
suspension and drive for image rotation: gear motor with friction wheel
«Post-cyborg, what counts as biological kind troubles previous
categories of organism. The machinic and the textual are internal to
theorganic and vice versa in irreversible ways.»*1
«The
permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, and the inevitable
comic and tragic mistakes in that quest, commands me respect, whether
the other is animal or human or indeed inanimate.»*2
*1 Quote from Donna Haraway, «The Companion Species
Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness», Pricly Paradigm
Press, The University of Chigaco Press, 2003, Seventh Printing March
2020, p. 15
*2 ibid., p. 35