CIRCULATION DESK

A dancer is positioned off-centre on screen, their back turned, arms repeatedly rounding the torso’s sides like pendulums. One movement extends out from the body, its force employed to traverse the flooring, morphing into the next, and next, and next – gesture. Soon thereafter the movements stretch from end to end, vertically and horizontally. The camera’s eye is trying to keep up pace, but falls through, falls behind in its capture. Limbs are being cut and exit given framework. It all started with a discussion on Yvonne Rainer, and subsequently the convenient mishap that this dancer notably became screen, became book, became an archive of movements flattened out, piled and multiplied, slid back in amongst the shelves – that this show became a library. Upon entering a library, one generally stumbles across the circulation desk; the piece of furniture to the top of which exchanges are referred. In targeted pirouettes, trade is introduced onto a stage, and leaves the way it entered – in circulation, and out of it. The efficient dealing of densely packed figures slides over the dedicated plane, stroked by hands of management. Data, value, goods, desire. Inscribed.1 Slip with your tongue and it’s all a discus2 of exchange, content and surface jammed into one. Phenomenologically, the surface is where the body meets the world, a point of connectivity. In Sara Ahmed’s twist the surface is formed through this very connectivity; the movements (of emotions) between bodies are the effect of interactions, of impressions.3 The surface holds the content, traces left by bodies, and so it becomes a collective border and social force rather than an inner state. Circulations in a system, blood in veins, timely cycles; hands are spinning. Emotions pushing heart, vessels, hormones – faster, tighter. Emotive rises, sun sets, the days consumed––condensed––into mere lines: horizons, contours, surfaces, shelves. Flatly packed and stacked. Our bodies, our shelves.4 Presented for display – on shelves, as shelves, the selves. 1 What is inscribed in painting? In a piece of work? Isabelle Graw has notably described the indexicality of painting; how the mark inscribes ‘subjectivity’, a fragment of its maker, and hence value relevant for commercial circulation. David Joselit have similarly pointed to the inscription of time; ‘One of the marvels of modern painting is that this tension between marking and storing time remains present on its surfaces, since its constituent marks, which are laid down over time, are always simultaneously available to vision’. David Joselit. ‘Marking, Scoring, and Speculating (on Time)’ in Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition, ed. Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Berlin: Sternberg, 2016. pp.11-20 p.14 2 Discus being the root word of both desk and disk/disc. 3 Sara Ahmed. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 4 John Kelsey. ‘Our bodies, our shelves’ in Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010. A text on the work of Rachel Harrison, in which he describes the rack or the shelf as ’where all things––trophies, magazines, cans, whatever––come together. It is where the language or communicativity of things display itself as such, most shamelessly, in the gallery or supermarket. Our bodies, our shelves.’. pp. 129–131, p.129