Catalogue Essay - The Garden
Epimethean caesuras, or, Seven ways to speak of silence
Eleanor Ivory Weber
During the hours of perdition I had the courage not to compose or organize. And above all not to look ahead. I’d never before had the courage to let myself be guided by the unknown and toward the unknown: my expectations preconditioned what I would see. They weren’t previsions of a vision: they were already the size of my concerns. My expectations closed the world to me.
– Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., 1964 [1]
1.0
The Garden opens with a letter from Irish artist Juliette de la Mer about the apple seeds she has helped Julia McInerney collect and wants to post to Australia. A figure emerges by the foregrounding of this epistolary event. This figure calls out and, in being heard, carries contingency—otherness, risk [2] —into McInerney’s artistic pursuit. McInerney’s ongoing collecting of apple seeds remains a constant, absent work, circulating The Garden indefinitely.
By way of the word, otherness enters a space of proclaimed perfection (the primal scene of art and Christian morality alike) and cannot be ignored. Whether it is named Juliette de la Mer, Marjorie Barnard, Eve, Emily Dickinson or something else (others appear), this figure emerges through language—in signs which announce and conjure some meaning, but which cannot fix or foresee its effect. It is the reader, the beholder—as much artist as viewer—who sees for herself what may be meant or not. Just as moving through life entails some understanding that pursuit and mastery cannot be synonymous.
McInerney pursues the apple, its seeds and what it seeds. The growing collection of apple seeds, only visible after oral devotion, extracted from each remnant core to dry, are an element of The Garden we do not see, and perhaps cannot. For what is the condition of a seed if not to avoid capture and remain in perpetual movement, whether in infinitesimal growth, slow expiration, sudden gravitational defiance or abrupt fall?
1.1
"Early Christian iconography showed Adam as already rotting, or the tree of knowledge as a tree of bones. Later depictions gave their figures weight, volume and personality, and their drama feels, as a result, more human and engaging, but it was not until the Renaissance discovered a nostalgia for Classical Greece that they were depicted as idealised, or majestic nudes. Impossible to keep lust out of Eden […] In it comes, like a snake into the garden, because the reader is one of the fallen, and cannot imagine what it is to love without transgression, or taboo. And this makes the story both clear and unimaginable, open and inaccessible. We cannot know what it was like not to know. (But know what? Know what?) Excluded from their state of innocence, we are all turned voyeur. "[3]
The Law is a black and white photograph of a fruiting apple tree. It is printed the size of the package sent from de la Mer to McInerney on 7 October 2015. This package contained approximately 150g of apple seeds collected and hidden inside teabags in order to pass through Australian customs. The photograph’s broad, white frame suggests that what the law describes is only as influential as what holds it up, what structures it, which conventions are in place to contour and determine it.
Aligning the convention of framing art with this tool for choreographing justice, McInerney places the image of the apple tree at the centre of the exhibition and names it The Law. That which regulates and symbolically delimits The Garden is the image of the fruiting tree (of knowledge), which simultaneously produces the possibility of sin (the apple) and prohibits against it. Bound in such a paradox, Eden is thus proclaimed and must endure the name “innocent”. Does not the law function just like this Eden?
The Law, the artwork, thus enacts an escape from innocent representation by way of tautology. Naming and framing are bound and what is seen inside this structure points back to the nature of containment itself. Here, essence emerges to the extent that content is precisely what is not present; what cannot be known in advance. The law ascribes structure, not content; content is the limit of law. In order for the apple seeds to reach Australia, the frame must be utilised and strictly adhered to, while the content—what is signified—can differ endlessly. As opposed to law, the question of justice haunts the body intimately, and does not leave.
"Ah, and I don’t even want anything explained to me that in order to be explained would have to be removed from itself." [4]
The garden is perceptible precisely because of where it is seen to be limited. The end, its cessation, is what allows us to know it is there. The words that surround The Garden make what is surface parse what cannot ever be totally explicit or explicable; subterfuge becomes the only correct way to say something, and indeed to say nothing.
2.0
The Garden is littered with words, ones that cannot be seen but which nonetheless provide definition. These words are often, though not exclusively, composed by women whose writerly work in its time and today posits a distinctive understanding of human subjectivity. This subject is not defined by coherence, logic, ability to make sense. This subject instead moves in circles, backwards, contradicts herself, repeats. She cites many others; she knows of old that she has never been alone, not in her thoughts or body, both being defined largely insofar as they align with male property law. Being inside The Garden is a privilege she largely experiences negatively, which is to say precisely to the extent she is not at peace with its pretence to holistic containment.
"And though I’d gone into the room, I seemed to have gone into nothing. Even once inside it, I was still somehow outside. As if the room weren’t deep enough to hold me and I had to leave pieces of myself in the hallway, in the worst rejection to which I’d ever fallen victim: I didn’t fit."[5]
2.1
The garden’s attire of peaceful, orderly and controlled “outside” belies a desperate, inhibited, representation of an inescapable inside—pointing solely to the contained impossibility of getting out. Stuck inside, imagining the beyond as one of horror or salvation, without knowing, we create a garden (the image of perfection) to calm us. We do not see that the image of calm we create is the exact reflection of the fear that bred this instinct in the first place. It follows that what is under the nose, on the tip of the tongue, in-between the teeth, is plainly much worse than what can be imagined outside.
"My first physical movement of fear, finally expressed, was what revealed to me to my surprise that I was fearful. And it ushered me into an even greater fear—when I tried to leave, I tripped between the foot of the bed and the wardrobe. A possible fall in that room of silence caused my body to shrink back in profound revulsion—tripping had made my attempt to flee an abortive act in itself—could this be how “they,” the ones by the sarcophagus, had of preventing me from ever leaving again? They had kept me from leaving and just in this simple way: they left me entirely free, since they knew I could no longer leave without tripping and falling." [6]
The Garden presents an inevitability of being in physical contact. It makes a demand to be trodden on, touched, damaged, worn—performing an action of literal, albeit slow, self-effacement that undermines the physical distance traditionally desired to establish an overview, to survey an object, to detach from vitality as much as entropy. The Garden’s adaptability means it can travel and modulate according to the host in question, bringing the outside in. In this way, it becomes a garden in circulation, gathering a history as it is moved, stored, exposed, as the pavers weather, encounter new steps, wait.
3.0
Accepting contingency, we discover, tentatively at first, that each step can only be seen after it is made, and that therefore legibility is an afterthought. A bit like Epimetheus, we must also confront the possibility that nothing we have done or put in place was wholly intentional. And yet a world unfolds from each gesture.
McInerney’s work proposes a structural move and therefore demands a restructuring of interpretative habits. It shifts away from classical dependency on the notion of intention, which imposes the Promethean so-called power of foresight upon the subject—as if all could be known in advance and this would be the most desirable scenario. Foreclosing possible responses from viewers, too, the rubric of intention decides in advance what will have been, and means anything that falls outside of that plan must be read as loss, waste, failure.
The Garden refuses a hierarchical system, wherein the logic of the most-rare, most-exceptional, most-unique prevails. Instead, the concrete pavers adapt in number according to context. They are the same in the way the pages of each copy of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. are the same. Not quite. Every copy has integrity because of its minimal, radical singularity; because its existence is contingent upon its involvement with others. So too for the pavers, which could never be shown alone, and never without contact with each other and the given architecture.
The alikeness of the pavers underfoot opens the space of minimal difference, the most important kind of difference. The fact the pavers are almost-identical, but not truly, does not fetishise the handmade as artistic ideal, but rather insists on and stands for infinite minimal difference, ruling out the possibility of differentials creating relations of subordination.
3.1
Intentionally blank pages from the front and back of The Passion According to G.H. are photographed for the series named Passport. Referencing US-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (passport) (1991), an infinite edition of piled blank paper, McInerney’s Passport photographs evoke a legal document for going nowhere. A passport for and from nowhere points back to the law itself, the container that structures or denies access to territory, but empties out the notion of justice that is its stated aim. A blank passport (legal document) can only signify latency, and in itself has no intention that is not precisely its own confinement, ultimate silence.
When “intentionally left blank” is stated, intention undermines the act itself. In other words, paradoxically, intention is undermined by its being worded. In Lispector’s books, the blank pages are not named, and thus sit as gaps, markers, queries wherein we can only wonder at the intention, never fulfil it or even presume it was ever there. Nothing masked as error, or error masked as intention—the minimal difference marks the extent to which one can live with what is unnamed remaining so.
4.0
The Passion According to G.H., like Genesis, imagines that knowledge emerges through confrontation with another. Of necessity, this other offers something that cannot be known in advance—precisely what is meant by seduction. The serpent who promises to open eyes by way of the apple, and in some versions bears the face of Eve herself, thus supposedly inaugurates human sin, otherwise known as knowledge. Seduction, what cannot be known in advance, transforms into a cockroach in The Passion. By biting into the creature, G.H. imbibes both the carrier of knowledge and the knowledge itself. But what is to be known?
"I was being seduced. And I was going toward that promising madness. But my fear wasn’t that of someone going toward madness, but toward a truth […] Don’t let me see because I’m close to seeing the nucleus of life—and, through the cockroach that even now I’m seeing again, through this specimen of calm living horror, I’m afraid that in this nucleus I’ll no longer know what hope is. The cockroach is pure seduction. […] And in this desert of great seductions, the creatures: I and the living roach. Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist." [7]
Knowledge, here named cockroach, can be attained only through a confrontation with what it is not. “Don’t let me see because I’m close to seeing …” “I had reached the nothing …” What is the substance one passes through, what thoughts occur, in order to reach precisely nothing?
5.0
To eat is to understand far from the brain. To orally ingest makes way for a kind of bodily knowledge that bypasses the brain in favour of the gut and—by extension—the ass. Mastication and digestion, the fall from grace as the unbecoming image, what we don’t want to or cannot see. Certainly that to which we find giving words difficult. The downward movement that is said to oppose all that is heavenly, but upon which the latter depends. Gravity prevails.
It is this inevitable downward confluence that is evoked to justify every image of human rectification built into the world. It is as if we need the bannister to literally sideline the constitutive fall, understood not as fall from but a fall to—a fall that never starts nor ends, but endures. A fall to knowledge, perhaps, but not from innocence, which never existed. The downward movement that costs a lot to forget, in whose name we pay to maintain ignorance of its depth. In anticipation of the upward and outward image, many lives are lived.
"Caught there in a web of vacancies, I once again forgot the plan I’d outlined for arranging the room, and wasn’t sure where to begin. The room didn’t have a point that could be called its beginning, nor one that could be considered its end. It had a sameness that made it endless." [8]
5.1
A fall to the floor may be eluded by a Rib, a handrail-like piece of applewood lining the edges of the room as a ribcage holds a heart. But don’t touch these bannisters. Here they signify the need to touch, the need of support, our inevitable attachment to the fall; while, in their being as artworks, they also demonstrate the prohibition on such touch being fully achieved.
Support for the bad of knee or back, the elderly or the small, the nervous or the out of breath, the clumsy and the careless, the handrail usually points to a limit, a point where capacity is augmented and thus questioned. It is an object whose existence is solely due to a specifically two-legged, human incapacity, which it replenishes dutifully. When not in use, these structures take on—ironically, perhaps—a bodily, lonely stature. They wait to punctuate some ascent or descent, to border some precipice, give decoration where it is presumed to be needed, prevent an organisation being sued for negligence. They are more or less worn, and differently depending on the chance location of their birth—on the edge or the bottom or the corner or the steep part.
"… to announce simply that she had fallen down was out of the question." [9]
And there is at least one Rib for a mother, introducing explicitly the figure of mortality, and that of reproduction—a synonym for duration, no less. Being caught on the way down is ultimately out of our control.
6.0
McInerney sees the sectioned apple tree branches as dashes—hyphenating thought, making logic tenuous, complicating clear subjectivity, inserting abrupt halts and changes of tack. The dash does away with the authority of the complete sentence by integrating negation into its essence.
"To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras. But the dash provides instruction in them. In the dash, thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character. It is no accident that in the era of the progressive degeneration of language, this mark of punctuation is neglected precisely insofar as it fulfills its function: when it separates things that feign a connection. All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising."[10]
6.1
Where art means being towards representation, not essence, an art that elides intention works intimately with gravity. McInerney’s artworks collaborate with this defining force in ways that draw attention to the subtleties of chance, a bit like any throw of dice is at once the closing of a door and the opening of infinite more.
"The book, opened thus at random and by no human hand, is full of the silent promise of the previously unthought: both because it contains words which may convey new ‘ideas’, and because this chance display of its physical aspects may have brought into the poet’s mind a way of envisaging the book which is also new. As both language and container of language, the book may be about to give new voice to the world." [11]
Though invisible, words surround and infiltrate McInerney’s thinking and making, proposing an art practice that cannot be totally separated from what it means to be a reader: someone who facilitates the act of writing by their very absence. In order to write, some reader, however tenuous, must be imaginable. The very task demands an other be conjured; a non-existent, undefinable and necessarily partial being thus comes to be the very essence of what becomes tangible in writing. Writing produces a space that supposes a reader even, crucially, if one never appears. The minimal difference that delimits the space between the two views, which is not a question of perspective but of relation—a space of indeterminate encounter—is thus precisely the space where art can occur.
"Writing: touching the mystery, delicately, with the tips of the words, trying not to crush it, in order to un-lie." [12]
7.0
"Each page has the fullness of a book. Each chapter is a land. To be explored. To be surpassed. Each step distances the “I” from its ego. At each step, a wall. Opens up. An error. Unveiled. G.H. meets a cockroach. But there will be no monstrous “Metamorphosis.” On the contrary: for G.H. the creature is the real representative of a species that has persevered in its roach-being since prehistory. The morsel of life, horrifying, repugnant, admirable in its resistance to death. Of this body, the body of the other, on which she dares, must, does not want to inflict death, she violently asks the secret of the living, of the prehuman material that does not die. What is life, death? If not a human mental construction, a projection of the ego? Prehuman life does not know death. The passion according to G.H. is this crossing of the shell, of all shells, into the unlimited, neutral, impersonal substance . . . material, unlimited, neutral, impersonal. . ."[13]
Beyond this impersonal, monochrome space named The Garden, another absent work. A Super-8 film of applewood being cut and turned, once processed and developed, reveals only a faint image. The image of nothing, a container for invisibility. “Lost footage”, McInerney calls it. Lost footing, falling, downward it goes and because of not knowing what will have been we see what is. A thought that can only come after, and after all shows us the nothing outside our own containment.
1. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey, New Directions, New York, 2012, 17.
2. In an email to Julia McInerney on 7 October 2015, Juliette de la Mer writes: “Would you like me to risk sending them inside some tea bags and if so can you tell me your address please?”
3. Anne Enright, ‘The Genesis of Blame’, London Review of Books, vol. 40 no. 5, 8 March 2018: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n05/anne-enright/the-genesis-of-blame.
4. Lispector, 17
5. Ibid., 51-52
6. Ibid., 57
7. Ibid., 70-71
8. Ibid., 52
9. Jane Bowles, ‘A Stick of Green Candy’, Jane Bowles: Collected Writings, Library of America, 2017, 337
10. Theodor Adorno, ‘Punctuation Marks’, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The Antioch Review, vol. 48, no. 3, Summer 1990, 302
11. Roger Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence, Oxford University Press, 2004, 256
12. Hélène Cixous, ‘By the Light of an Apple’, ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 1991, 134
13. Ibid., 134-5