Long live the rehearsal - Fiona MacDonald
In the process of painting, the lick of the brush is a gesture of advancement or transformation. A lick that expands into the world as thought. In Brian Massumi’s What Animals Teach Us About Politics, the ‘-esqueness’ of a play gesture “creates analogy, signalling a minimal difference. A wolf cub who bites his litter-mate in play “says,” in the manner in which it bites, “this is not a bite.”’[1] A dancer moves around a room containing painted objects. She is thinking, chatting, observing, improvising. At some point her action becomes a gesture, and her gestures become dance. At some point the understood movement slips into the unpracticed, performance becomes improvisation, improvisation becomes play. These vibrational shifts of intention and attitude are the foundational material Darren Nixon waits for. How do we perceive that snap into presence, the energetic shift in a room when ‘stuff’ ‘works,’ when new thought is being created? How do we capture it? It lingers, but for how long?
Nixon’s ‘stuff’ starts with painted objects that occupy spaces. These objects act as opening gambits, into which he invites one or more people, who may or may not work with movement professionally. Nixon quickly abandoned the use of scripts or rules. The objects have also been increasingly pared back, simplified, and shrunk: “I am conscious of wanting to lower my voice.” For Dislocate, a project with CCA Derry-Londonderry, working with dance artist Janie Doherty, photographer Hannah Davis, dancer Lydia Swift and others, the work was constructed from materials that he found on site in the gallery stores and returned there after use. In a more recent work with Charlie Morrissey, the colours painted on wooded objects were from tins thrown away by others. These de-amplifications of agency are perhaps acts of generosity, the artist extending an open (ever more empty) palm to his collaborators – ‘make of this what you will’. But they are also acts of challenge – ‘make something extraordinary happen’. Play improvises, not by being pushed from behind, but by being pulled from ahead.
These collaborative actions are performances (or unperformances) to camera. The resulting videos become material for Nixon to work with further: to edit, score, layer, interrupt, and collage. How much of the original space, and the movement contained by it, survives these processes is variable. Nixon says it that a “fluctuation between clear communication” and “creating textures and connections that are totally surprising and quite unlike being in the room” drive his editing process.
In Dislocate, patterned objects meet patterned projections in an op-art dazzle of monochrome with primary colour pops, full of overlapping geometries, grids and lines. We are flipped in and out of logical relation to the world, through Escher-esque conflicting perspectives and scales, and by colour, layers and patterns used to flatten, dissemble and undermine space. The slice and dice of obsessive video editing creates a screen space so dense and noisy that the human body continuing to move through its hatch of lines seems nonsensical. It lends the human form a peculiar superreality to continually gain and lose its gestalt. I can only liken it to watching an imaginary magician cut his partner in half, then quarters, eighths and sixteenths. Even if the diced person seems comfortable, even though I know it is a trick, I can’t help but squirm, then gasp.
Nixon’s Instagram description is ‘restless painting,’ and watching his videos is watching a plethora of restless questions, challenges and decisions, each of which ask and contribute something pertinent to a cohesive statement about the world, the better to be undermined by the next. When something works, best not to repeat it.
[1] Massumi, Brian (2014) What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 4
In the process of painting, the lick of the brush is a gesture of advancement or transformation. A lick that expands into the world as thought. In Brian Massumi’s What Animals Teach Us About Politics, the ‘-esqueness’ of a play gesture “creates analogy, signalling a minimal difference. A wolf cub who bites his litter-mate in play “says,” in the manner in which it bites, “this is not a bite.”’[1] A dancer moves around a room containing painted objects. She is thinking, chatting, observing, improvising. At some point her action becomes a gesture, and her gestures become dance. At some point the understood movement slips into the unpracticed, performance becomes improvisation, improvisation becomes play. These vibrational shifts of intention and attitude are the foundational material Darren Nixon waits for. How do we perceive that snap into presence, the energetic shift in a room when ‘stuff’ ‘works,’ when new thought is being created? How do we capture it? It lingers, but for how long?
Nixon’s ‘stuff’ starts with painted objects that occupy spaces. These objects act as opening gambits, into which he invites one or more people, who may or may not work with movement professionally. Nixon quickly abandoned the use of scripts or rules. The objects have also been increasingly pared back, simplified, and shrunk: “I am conscious of wanting to lower my voice.” For Dislocate, a project with CCA Derry-Londonderry, working with dance artist Janie Doherty, photographer Hannah Davis, dancer Lydia Swift and others, the work was constructed from materials that he found on site in the gallery stores and returned there after use. In a more recent work with Charlie Morrissey, the colours painted on wooded objects were from tins thrown away by others. These de-amplifications of agency are perhaps acts of generosity, the artist extending an open (ever more empty) palm to his collaborators – ‘make of this what you will’. But they are also acts of challenge – ‘make something extraordinary happen’. Play improvises, not by being pushed from behind, but by being pulled from ahead.
These collaborative actions are performances (or unperformances) to camera. The resulting videos become material for Nixon to work with further: to edit, score, layer, interrupt, and collage. How much of the original space, and the movement contained by it, survives these processes is variable. Nixon says it that a “fluctuation between clear communication” and “creating textures and connections that are totally surprising and quite unlike being in the room” drive his editing process.
In Dislocate, patterned objects meet patterned projections in an op-art dazzle of monochrome with primary colour pops, full of overlapping geometries, grids and lines. We are flipped in and out of logical relation to the world, through Escher-esque conflicting perspectives and scales, and by colour, layers and patterns used to flatten, dissemble and undermine space. The slice and dice of obsessive video editing creates a screen space so dense and noisy that the human body continuing to move through its hatch of lines seems nonsensical. It lends the human form a peculiar superreality to continually gain and lose its gestalt. I can only liken it to watching an imaginary magician cut his partner in half, then quarters, eighths and sixteenths. Even if the diced person seems comfortable, even though I know it is a trick, I can’t help but squirm, then gasp.
Nixon’s Instagram description is ‘restless painting,’ and watching his videos is watching a plethora of restless questions, challenges and decisions, each of which ask and contribute something pertinent to a cohesive statement about the world, the better to be undermined by the next. When something works, best not to repeat it.
[1] Massumi, Brian (2014) What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 4