Despite many potentially usable networks detected by my Eee’s wireless card, I was able to connect to none of them. This is probably a good thing – I should be working and not playing on the internet. Still, I got out my computer for a reason, I wanted to make a blog post. So I will.
Just left the Power Plant art gallery. Located at the Harborfront Centre, I am beyond impressed with the quality of the exhibits at this small gallery costing only three dollars. Downstairs they have four rooms of pieces by Simon Starling. Starling’s collection, called “Cuttings: Supplement” engages our exerpience of nature, with nature, by dealing with technological objects. One of the pieces is about the recollection and commemoration of an unsuccesful but particularly interesting race car that ran in Le Mans in 1955. The car featured an aerodynamic radiator, which Starling replicated and installed above the hood on a Fiat panda, and drove it for 24hrs (presumably to prove it worked). The radiator really is a beautiful shape, but a failure as a piece of technical engineering – it failed to keep the race car cool enogh and flaps had to be installed to deflect more air down into it, compromising it’s aerodynamic slipperyness. Still, they achieved 219km/h – no small feat for 1955. (Although, I’m fairly sure the D types and Ferrari’s of the day were already touching 250km/h). Starlng seems obsessed with speed – the number (219km/h) appears in the exhibit over and over again – the number seems to signify something. Reading through the many excellent books in the library reading room, I found a conversation between Starling and two members of the Ferrari family speaking about this car. At one point, Feval Ferrari actaully brings up Nietzsche, recalling that the designer had quoted something he had said about speed – something about at speed you can reach a kind of clarity. The other Ferrari brother, however, dismisses the reference and says something to the extent “So, he went 219km/h, he got his record, he can move on”.
The notion of movement at speed is the crucial one – is speed movement or is speed standing still. This is the question of the nomad – the nomad does not move, the landscape moves around him, the nomad remains still. At speed, what does one reach? Is it a flurry, is the sensation of movement, of instability? Or, is the sensation one which brings one absolutely to the moment one is in, projecting directly ahead the moments coming in the next 3, 2, 1 second. As one travels faster one looks farther ahead in distance but less far ahead in time. Time shrinks – we inhabit the moment to the exclusion of other moments. This is why driving fast allows you to sometimes entirely shut out the worry of the police – the mind is so focussed on the immediate present that even possibilities that lie to the side of the road are covered up, effaced – the gaze (both perceptual and cognitive) is directed at “the road ahead”. It is precisely this kind of anticipation of only those future possibilities which are essential which allows drivers on the autobahn to spectacularly avoid crashes when someone pulls into the lane ahead of them. (Link to a youtube video of a driver breaking from 300km/h to avoid a vehicle pulling into the lane ahead).
I have given a one sided account of Starling’s exhibits, this is only one aspect of one of them. What is in that aspect which permeates into the others is not the dynamic of speed but the speed as a dynamic, as situation which brings clarity and focus to the situation. Clarity through dynamics (shift, movement, change). In the inherently unstable (what is more unstable than a light race car traveling at 219km/h?). Incidentally, I can speak from personal experience. On an American highway I once saw 200km/h in a compact american car. Driving with Mathias, the faster I drove the better, the clearer our philosophizing became. At a save 60 or 70 miles an hour, remained entirely within the cognitive, intentional, harm/rule based ethic paradigm. At 90, I broke free – “free thinking”, was able not only to understand the argument about being and primal Christianity, but respond to it, argue it. No – being is finite, I said. Where is this infinite plenitude? In presence – but presence is radically absence, limited. Limitless presence is an unfounded abstraction, at best, a propensity of reason, a transcendental idea.
What I am getting to is how dynamics, movement, shift, reveals clarity and stability to us as it truly is – as metastability, as stability as having a hold on the changing situation.
For example, one of his other works was a massive sheet of steel, imported from Romania after the US steel import tarriffs were struck down by the WTO, although produced by a company in Romania formally nationalized, but subsequently sold to an American interest who supported the Steel Tarriff in the US. The massive, many ton piece of steel is supported on three helium bags. Held there was if it was nothing, “floating in space”, the piece remains absolutely still. But only on the basis of what appear to be rubber bags, full of a gas. The piece at first appears static, not only not moving, but not moving-you, not affecting. “Not a very succesful piece of art” you think. But as it begins to get on your nerves, as you dare yourself to put your foot under it – trusting your ability to walk to what appear to be normal rubber bags, inflated to a pressure high enough to support the massive sheet of steel, you begin to get what’s going on with it. Marx said about commodities, “Everything solid vanishes into air” – what does this mean? It means the solidity of the victorian industrial revolution is the opposite of how it appears – it is not that the works are solid, stand the test of time, because of something we put into them – rather, because of how they appear to us, because of economic and personal interests, the most solid of things come into and pass out of being. Brunel is a good example of this: many things he built still stand today, as solid as the earth on which they stand. For instance, the Great Western Railway, many bridges, etc.. But on the other hand, the Great Eastern – the largest ship in the world, was cut into scrap long before it’s size record was eclipsed by the Lusitania. Why? Bankbooks – there was simply no demand for it. And it was the same story with the SS Great Britain – it was likely only saved because it had been run aground, was used as an offshore warehouse for coal for decades, and eventually rescued and restored (you can see it today in a permanent drydock in Bristol, England). Is this just, as Hegel said, Capitalism in order to sustain itself must leave the solidity of land and venture onto the unpredictability of the sea? Perhaps, but certainly such stories could also be told of things on land (Brunel’s wide-guage railway, for instance), what is essential is that what appear to be the most solid of things are in fact as light as air compared with the interests and powers of cooperations, states, and perhaps more so in the 19th century before share-capitalism, individuals.
To get back to Starling, another of his pieces is an island of invasive weeds, a floating false island intended to show up the problematic relation of society to nature in the age of species invasion, in a park in Scotland. The piece was rejected, which is why it’s in Toronto at an art gallery and not in the water on a Scottish lake. The rejection of the piece is now part of it – it further emphasizes the fact that even the bringing to light of these questions is controversial. But this isn’t what I want to say about this piece. What it is is a false island with rocks and plants – it is false because it floats. It floats on a series of air filled pipes. It is, however, quite ingenious – it automatically detects if it is sitting too low in the water, i.e. because rain has saturated the soil and made the barge heavier, and forces water out of some of the pipes to increase its flotation and remain stable, in the water at the same level. Now, to me, the idea of a barge become island of plants is nothing new. On Barrier lake there is no shortage of old docks abandoned and become small forests (thanks to bird droppings for the most part). I once found a dock that had a tree perhaps 5 years old growing on it. But this is a different sort of floating island – whereas the docks on East Barrier Lake were manmade devices re-appropriated by the winds and the rains for nature’s own purposes, this is a representation of something natural, articulated with technology for the sake of showing up a partcular aspect of how we relate with nature. It is interesting to imagine the lake in Scotland, which is surrounded by a landscape which has had the invasve species in question removed, and think what if, what if an abandone swimming dock on that lake became populated with just this plant – would this be a work of art? But the mistake, in the end, is to think these situations are so different – in both cases the island is a metastability produced by dynamic processes and is itself a dynamic process. While the man made island dynamic in its simulation of a “real island” by varying the amount of flotation through technological apparatus, the swimming dock become pland and dirt covered thing is dynamic as nature dynamically re-approrpiating the boards (as they rot and feed the plants and bugs). In both cases the principle activity is a dynamic flow – another mistake would be to consider the man made articulation of flotation to be somehow more complex than bird droppings, seeds in the wind, etc.. If anything, the natural flows are infinitely more subtble and intricate, although less determinate. We should not get caught up on the determinateness, because it is the becoming-indeterminate that both works have their being, being as nature-island-thing.
