Artist: Trisha Baga
Venue: Société, Berlin
Exhibition Title: Loaf
Date: September 8 – October 15, 2016
Images courtesy
of Société, Berlin
Press Release:
LOAF – A blurry eye exam, or
the sourdough hippocampus Contemporary technology allows a net mapping of
3-dimensional forms, a wringing out of volume to an expansive, but wholly
compressed 2D. Complex curved volumes – a tennis ball, a dog, an alien – might
be translatable as planar vector diagrams. Let’s say this Berlin apartment is a
brain, a mapped and flattened cognitive organ. It is compartmentalised in the
same way and there is symmetry: left and right hemispheres correspond to a
singular hallway that functions to structure flow. Light responds to bodily
proximity, a basic on-off sensibility approximate to the stimulating function
of the pituitary gland: hormones, blood, galvanic affectation are ushered into
cameo roles as more pedestrian objects. There are black holes and white walls:
the brain architecture is swiftly rearticulated as vernacular archetype. The
drawing of a floor plan can also be read as the abstraction of an idea. Fantasy
and philology allow mutation – sociological procedure, technological metaphor,
erotic image, or surreal apparition bond as a muttering mass.
In Trisha Baga’s LOAF, inside and out, skin barriers and seams are deliberately confused. In the
same way that mould might ravage a slice of bread, screens and ceramics ooze
with an implied sense of microbial growth, alive with all the exhaustive
permeation of the pathogen.
The apocalyptic eyes and ears fashioned (and necessary to deploy) seem hesitant
to make categorical distinction between nuclear implosion and natural
phenomenon. Hierarchies dissolve in an ectoplasmic fog where smoke, words,
speech and rhythm become ever-shifting signifiers in a more abstract pictorial
lexicon. Seeing through smoke is still more curious, a pre-retinal experience
more like seeing with the brain than the eyes.Perhaps it is a kind of dirty
behind-the-scenes akin to hearing the breath of the performer when listening to
classical music through headphones.
Bone dappled, lavender-light
spackle, holocaust pale, brothel apology, aroma-of-now, cucumber bisque, purple
tango – the faded reality of on-camera skin in all its alien variants is a
queasy exposé of our screens’ crackling velum. This is not a face, but a
bladder of lard. Like some prehistoric boiling, our bodies have near abandoned
all symbols of critical function, subject instead to the entropic temperature
and deviations of the screen. Perhaps the ongoing obsession with getting
skin right in painting is an appendage problem of contemporary technological
habits: the greasiness of fat offset against the mediation of a two-dimensional
plane. Oil is a surfactant jelly, a mediator of volume like alcohol is a
lubricant of language. We are spot lit in a weird plastic destruction, a hiding
in front of hello where the on-screen face is possessed of a light bulb flaring
inside the skin. Luminescence, iridescence, is contingency and as hard fought
as the battle for mimesis may be, real life’s resistance to photography
produces a precarious equilibrium between the giving and receiving of form.
In LOAF, The Invisible Man mobilizes a similarly anxious rhetoric: I’m not sick,
I’m not crazy. His words, spoken by Baga, but projected via invisible and
therefore hypothetical vocal cords trigger an immediate zipper-fracture between
solid and immaterial. Substance doubts itself: imagine the ongoing ontological
crisis of the Invisible Man’s brain and its endless struggle to assign
empirical weight or volume to its own indecipherable mass. Objects gain
faces and bodies are liquidized or husked down to geometric memories of themselves.
In one deft swoop, the tangible body we assume to know is catapulted away from
legible territorial outline and into a more abstract digital machine fragmented
by car journeys and endless shifting landscapes. The metaphor of toxicology
might be applied as flesh is poisoned and dissolved by its own shadow.
Nighttime phosphorescence operates like a photographic surface, tracing an
instant retinal fizz akin to receiving multiple neural Polaroids. Luciferin (from the Latin lucifer,
“light-bringer”, glow-in-the-dark) is a light-emitting compound comically
christened with Satanical undertones. Following this tangential logic, a slice
of toast in all its singed transitional glory might be a surrogate motif of
photography, a molecular oxidation of the body and the light: “function toast,
medium brown, oxygen level, critical”… We are sensitive to a phenomenon of
light that allows us to colour and distinguish otherwise identical objects and
television is a central proponent of this auratic delirium. Fluorescence continually
refers us back to the outermost surfaces of things and glaze chemistry in
essence conceptualizes an explicit corollary with heat, chemical and
metallurgical properties.
And skin of course is one
surface and of one plane. It is dimensionally intelligent, wraps around us and
stops blood from leaking out – like enamel or glaze on a bathtub, it is an
encasement, an enclosing, a layer. Ceramic glaze proposes an even tighter
hermetic seal: it has no soft nervous tissue but instead offers vitreous skin
as a agitated surface behind whose violently stained and hermetic foil is
recourse to dust, to ceramic crumble. This metaphor of obfuscation is
perversely linked to our human dependence on light for all biological desires,
our need to illuminate to eat and work or else etiolate into a lousy bastard
paleness. And so alchemy, in its most primal medieval context positions the
artist as progenitor of an elixir that is both generative and
corrupting. The artist is drunk doctor and mad baker, a fictional auditor of
an economy where value is derived by figurative literalness. The same
phenomenological crassness might be imagined in the impromptu meeting of a USB
data-stick crushed in unwilling embrace with a mash of chapstick: a backpack
accident, an unfocus of the binaries of hard and soft, a mass confusion of the
possible use-value of utensil, cosmetic, diagram, data and lubrication. And so
for substance, as the video subliminally counsels: “Life’s a beach”,
Put-your-money-whereyour-mouth-is.
In all dimensions, Baga mobilizes a painterly rhetoric. Colour is remedy,
colour is poison, colour is queering obfuscation. Colour drips, swells,
flagellates, reverbs and collapses. Colour for Baga might be non-philosophical,
a decorative conceit, a maniacal musical structuring: we are pervasively
reminded that both light and sound occur in waves. Every atom is saturated. The
gesture of painting with all its theatrical predicates – the pointed finger,
swiping hand, pissy drips and fecal splurges – is apparent throughout.
Diagrammatic clarity coagulates under collaged expression, mutant abstract
lines author both a return to and mocking of painting. Baga’s marks are fuzzy
aggregates of a residual specificity – they have speech without language; they
are linguistic propositions whose default setting is to the logic of the
visual. Communication and information are no longer rational correlates. And
emerging on top of constantly moving video imagery, Baga’s instances of dust
and libidinous squiggles all stimulate the authoring of a style, but one that
is not predicated on immediate legibility.
Questions and promises are reflected back on themselves. Like the prismatic
refraction of pixel array, which occurs when water droplets magnify the primary
colours on a computer screen, language undergoes basic centrifugal separation.
Placards, paint typography, license plates, police tape and advertisements are
a constant graphic confusion of the aural and the oral. Here is yet another
rearrangement of body parts. The lenses of our eyeballs have become quite
literal projectors for an ongoing show reel of entertainment and
cosmetic enhancement; they are little logic boxes at the beginning of a
vast electrical and chemical machine. This is the circuitry of our circuitry
and retinal functions are flirtatiously engaged in an act of electronic
solicitation with the outside world. Voices exist without volume and words
emerge detached from an alphabet. The stammer of many languages emerges with
grace, but unhinged from content in a way, which provides it with inherent
structuring power. Our eyes reveal rather than demonstrate ideas.
Helen Marten, 2016
Trisha Baga would like to
thank Adam Welch and the fine people of Greenwich House Pottery, Marius Wilms,
Mark Stroheim, Zuzanna Supinska, Alicja Ewertowska, Teresa Laurenzi, Olena
Whipple, George Gittens, Mary Jean Sobiesiak, Vera Alemani, Susy Callegari,
Carol Greene, Helen Marten, Josef Granqvist, Phillip John Velasco Gabriel,
Vivian and her friend from the Egg, Paz Baga, Tito Pepe, Tita Nene, Tito Tommy,
Tita Eva, Ate Marivi, Boy, Buboy, Pam, the local NYC CBS news crew, Denise
Wyniger and the Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Samuel Lang Budin, Daniele
Frazier, Josefin Granqvist and Daniel.
