Inflamed Invisible by Toop David;

Author:Toop, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Goldsmiths, University London
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

In another world I am watching a stop-motion video, let’s call it a sculpture. A voluptuous woman weeps in despair, her abjection awarded marks, very low marks, by three bewigged judges whose faces are as ripe, florid and distended as the lurid bird beaks and psychedelic flowers of another sculpture, The Parade, in which a corpulent woman stamps like a sumo wrestler, long-beaked bird clutched between her breasts. A purple-skinned woman with red nipples and pubic hair lies on her back, naked, her body shiny with sweat; a man transforms into a bird; we see pink vomit, bright within a colour scheme that seems to contain every last colour from the paint factory. Elsewhere we see a pneumatically obese woman clap like a sumo wrestler, then give birth to a rhinoceros; a woman masturbating on a giant semi-peeled banana, her scarlet lipstick matching what could be blood stains splattering the banana skin. A man caresses a glittering blue fish; a couple ride by on a golden motorcycle, their faces twisted by desire mixed with terror. The materials could be excrement mixed with cream and fruit, painted to resemble a child’s dream house. Everything is somehow charming, messy and monstrous, erotically comically charged and materially fluid, as if the baby that was once us, capable of finding pleasure in playing with faeces or eating mud, is simultaneously the adult whose desire fixates on all that which is taboo and unobtainable and beautiful in our own eyes. In this world of plasticity and dream secrets, the circle of a doughnut may be sexy or cosmic, anal or faecal, tasty or sculptural, silly or profound, all at once.

I ask how these two heterogeneous worlds come together, how is their development as a unified work negotiated, tracked and shaped? “How do we talk about it? It’s not like the written or spoken language,” says Nathalie. “It’s really not my thing, so we are talking about, “Yeah, it’s mmmmmmm … and that makes me feel like wonnnng,” and then Hans is like, “Yeah, I’m thinking of making it more like woh, like swinging,” so we’re not intellectualising it when we are creating.” There is no reason on earth why artists should exchange high-level ideas through the language of the courtroom, the philosophy seminar, the news report, the restaurant menu, the scientific paper. Lovers and strangers communicate intuitively: a look, a breath, a scent, a private sound, the angle of an arm. Musicians can communicate through nothing other than the music itself, a type of instantaneous intra-action (to borrow a useful term from Karen Barad) that may seem to the outsider to be ESP in operation yet to participants is simply the cascade of meaning that can flow when verbal language falls silent.

Yet despite this cautionary force-field around language, a map of the process can be described: first of all a discussion in broad terms of potential themes – violence, for example – but without fixating on violence itself, considering instead the reaction people have to violence.

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