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BERT RODRIGUEZ
Weeping Monolith and Where My Eyes Meet You
Weeping Monolith and Where My Eyes Meet Yours is the third installment of a twelve-part series of exhibitions entitled Has Art? Each month, for the next year, artists will be paired with a writer and a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés. The writer will provide a critical response to the work as it relates to the poem as well as offer scholarship about the artist’s practice as a whole. As the exhibitions progress, a publication will grow and an idea of a group exhibition will be the result.
You can follow the progress of the publication and the exhibition HERE.
A printable PDF copy of Has Art? is also available upon request
Simply email: scott@lawrimoreproject.com
WEEPING MONOLITHS
by Gean Moreno
1.
It’s late autumn, raining. A storm at the wrong end of the season. It surprised our raincoats in storage, our happiness on leave.
A banyan tree, glistening--leathered fingers pulling the town up from a swamp muck substratum.
I step out of the street. The door hinges squeak.
The Marble Index is playing. Lawns of Dawn.
Wrong side of the world--what else can one think?
Can you follow me?
I order a beer. I feel unenterprising.
Aside from leaving overdrawn caresses
The music seeps through bone, unmoors context. I’m sitting with my back to the window. Arcadia, not a second ago shoring up against the bar door, dissolves in the mind’s deluge. Or it’s a smudge against the strata of impenetrability John Cale arranged.
Aside from having thrown a joke on you and me
Glass, pregnant with the essence of kitchen rags, rubs against my nose. Guinness suds tickle.
Can you follow me?
I survey. Paneled walls, exhausted neons. Pool table clawed by drunken strokes. Beyond the rain-studded pane, a panorama of imprecise forms, replica of desire’s undoing. The town has taken on a provisional fragility. It misleads.
I cannot understand the way I feel
What Nico says, unbendable, matters half of what it seems to. Deciphering it, one risks no returns on the labor, the anger to charge fraud, moribund aesthetics.
Until I rest on lawns of dawn
“Describe not the object itself, but the effect which it produces,” a young Mallarmé’s advice and program. Nico complies, appropriates. It’s her cadences, then, the dark vibrations they draw from things, or sire despite them, despite our way of knowing them, that make sense negotiable, negligible; that drill into marrow, soften stern angles, advertise ineffability. It’s the “dread of the forest or the silent thunder scattered through the foliage” in her voice that sears.
(If pop were allowed the metaphor, would Nico be Mallarméan?)
2.
Je suis mort.
Leo Bersani’s The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé collects insights carefully pried from this tautological epitaph--written in a letter to Théodore Aubanel in 1866--among others.1
Imagine it in bas-relief. Uttered in Nico’s granite voice--a whispered slab floating on notes from an Indian harmonium.
Stéphane dead, we learn, he can get on with his poems--and with his silences. It’s not that all writing happens from--or is--a tomb of sorts, even if it is always, at some level, a mourner’s kaddish for the illusion that there is a correlation between what we can think and say and what there is. It’s, rather, that, perennially nimble at closing the world from itself, poems have to exceed us, our structuring limitations.
Yearning to “transcribe a sensation that no one has had, a sensation without a human subject,” Mallarmé rose from his deathbed a phantom-stenographer of the deeply impersonal. A call was put in to different kind of alertness.
“I am now impersonal and no longer the Stéphane you once knew, but one of the ways the spiritual Universe has of seeing itself and developing, through what used to be me. Given the fragility of my ghostly presence on earth, I can only develop in ways absolutely necessary for the Universe to recapture, in that self, its identity.”
Mallarmé stepped out of the tomb, or into it, to take down minutes from the Universe.
“Is it the same thing to describe our impression of the forest and to describe the forest itself indirectly and allusively?” (Bersani)
How does one sing the banyan’s sensations?
Perhaps Mallarmé didn’t rise a ghost, simply something that had left the human behind--a magnet, a spider, the tendril that follows the banyan’s tangle.
Restless, he understood, making irrevocable concessions to dispersal and dispossession, one takes on whatever “parabolic” shape receives the vibrations of these “sensation[s] without a human subject.” One’s ultimate inadequacy at the task notwithstanding.
3.
A monolith weeping is funny, especially if it’s the obscurely solemn one from Kubrick’s 2001. Hoisting on it an anthropomorphic sentimentality, a turbulent emotional life, resonates with us. We laugh because we relate. Giggles of empathy. There is something very right about it. Sometimes we want to breakdown like that, softly, un-apoplectically, without articulating a good reason for coming undone, Bas Jan Ader-like.
But Weeping Monolith, under shade cast by a different mood, is also affective in this way: it suggests the possibility of relations between things that exclude us altogether. That is, if the monolith can be affected the very same way that we are, does this happen in a world of relations that extends, since it includes things so foreign to us, like tectonic shifting and entire ice ages, into territories from which we are barred? Is this question ever there in Bert Rodriguez’s work?Maybe it isn’t. Or maybe not all the time. Maybe it’s the strange juxtaposition of Mallarmé with his work--a prompt to read against the grain, knot things up, emulate the banyan’s tangle--that has placed it in the middle of all this, like an immovable granite slab. Maybe the question (or the weeping monolith) is the “calm block fallen here from some dark disaster” making its way over from Mallarmé’s tombeau for Poe. Maybe it’s this strange bar, its drab light, Nico, the rain, the moratorium on the mercantilism of straight readings that these meandering lines obviously advocate that has lead us astray. Maybe it’s just an impertinent desire to draw a secret diagonal axis that intersects with the horizontal one of humor and winning cynicism that all interpretations of Rodriguez’s work appeal to. All I know is that at the moment, between beers, inhaling the decades of bar stench that line the glasses, one should want to push until the location of the sensation without a human subject in the work beams a signal. One should strive to reformat into the spider that can sense it, weave its alien lace. One’s ultimate inadequacy at the task notwithstanding.
4.
Can a sculpture be a horizon that recedes as we approach it, as if a secret string kept pulling it away, turning supposedly serious looking into stock slapstick?
5.
In 1969, Marcel Broodthaers filmed La Pluie: Projet pour un texte, an homage to Mallarmé. In it, Broodthaers sits in a backyard. He dips his pen in ink and, as he begins to write, rain starts coming down. Hard, straight-from-the-hose, no-budget prop rain. The rain makes the ink run. The text dissolves. Broodthaers attempts to start again. The rain makes the ink run. The text dissolves. Broodthaers attempts to start again. The rain makes the ink run. The text dissolves. Broodthaers attempts to start again. The rain makes the ink run. The text dissolves. Broodthaers attempts to start again. The rain makes the ink run...
Slapstick allegory of the sculpture that withstands our approach, that recedes whenever we come upon it.
Slapstick allegory, also, of a fleeing from established forms--poems becoming objects, objects films, films poems, neons jokes, jokes objects...Nothing ever settles where it should.
Slapstick allegory, finally, of what Mallarmé called the Work--that magical and impossible and exorbitant text, forever to come, that finally reveals an “intimate correlation of Poetry with the Universe”; a text, presumably identical with what there is, for which the channeling services of a writing subject will always be found wanting.
The Work puts us all in remedial medium class; in spiritualist after-school tutoring sessions.
6.
This could have gone astray in an entirely different way. If we’d started with Lovecraft, for instance. (Mallarmé by way of Poe and Providence?)
I’ve been reading “The Statement of Randall Carter.” A story full of tombs, it takes place in Big Cypress Swamp. A putrid Florida dampness lines it. A storm, kin to the one raging outside, surely prefaces its few pages.
In the story, Randall Carter tells of “rotting stones.” He knows the description makes little sense, like weeping monoliths, but he needs it only as an index of forces that defy our cognitive reach. The “rotting stone” is that which casts a “dark cloud over the mind,” rendering all the things at (or past) the edge of our accessibility the same “nameless thing I cannot describe.” An apex of opacity. The thing-ness of it is important. It suggests a world that is out there, concretely so, even if we’ve no mastery of it. A world, alien and alienizing, in which things relate to one another. It turns all we know into strange, lively, communicating substance; it turns it into things we do not know. We intimate this plenitude, abuzz with affective transactions. We attempt to log impressions and sensations, chase a frequency. Not our impressions and sensations of it, but impressions and sensations in it. That is, impressions and sensations that may exist there, where we are not able to go. The sensation of, say, a cliff-face suffering the slow impression of erosion’s cuneiforms; or of a banyan responding in its idiosyncratic way to gravity and dispersal; or of a “far-off hyacinth” licked by a gale’s “silence of sickles;” or of a monolith pressed breathlessly under a glacial layer. Nico may be able to sing this pressure without naming it; grant us temporary license to believe such liberated singing possible, the suffocating yoke of our inadequacy at the task notwithstanding.
NOTES
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1.Bersani, Leo, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge: 1982). All Mallarmé and Bersani quotes, as no doubt a number of ideas about Mallarmé, have been lifted from this book.
BERT RODRIGUEZ - Selected C.V.
Born 1975, Miami. Lives and works in Miami
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2010 - The Man Called Bert | Annarumma 404 | Naples, Italy
2010 - I’ll Cross That Bridge When I Get To It | Fredric Snitzer Gallery | Miami, FL
2009 - IN YOUR OWN IMAGE: The Best of Bert Rodriguez Greatest Hits Vol. I | Bass Museum | Miami Beach, FL
2008 - For Sale | Snitzer/Arregui Projects | Hamptons, NY
2008 - Espace Experimental | Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France | Paris, FR
2007 - Advertising Works! | Fredric Snitzer Gallery | Miami
2007 - Intervenciones 2007 | MARTE | Museum of Art El Salvador
2005 - Almost There: Portrait of a (Lazy) Genius | Artek Contemporaries | NYC
2004 - The Gifts I Could Never Give You | Fredric Snitzer Gallery | Miami
2000 - Bert Rodriguez: A Pre-Career Retrospective | Centre Gallery | Miami
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2010 - New Work Miami 2010 | Miami Art Museum | Miami, FL
2009 - Beg Borrow and Steal | Rubell Family Collection | Miami, FL
2009 - Parenthesis | Western Bridge | Seattle, WA
2009 - Spite House | Lawrimore Projects | Seattle, WA
2009 - Convention | MOCA, North Miami | North Miami, Fl
2009 - The Endless Renaissance | Bass Museum of Art | Miami Beach, FL
2008 - Frieze Projects | Frieze Art Fair | London, UK
2008 - Whitney Biennial | Whitney Museum of American Art | New York, NY
2005 - At This Time | Rubell Family Collection | Miami
2004 - Domestic Arrivals | White Box | NY
2004 - Becoming Father, Becoming Infant | Bronx Museum | NY
2002 - Miami in Manhattan | Wooster Projects | NY
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Rubell Family Collection | Miami, FL
Museum of Contemporary Art | North Miami, FL
Kemper Museum of Art | Kansas City, MO
EDUCATION / RESIDENCIES
2010 - University of Washington Visiting Artist and Lecture Program | Seattle, WA
1999 - Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture | Portland, ME
1998 - Bachelor of Fine Arts | New World School of the Arts | University of Florida
