This project is about histories, as opposed to history - the affect of multiple points of view on events – and uses objects as witnesses to the layered and implicitly politicized stories common in Cyprus.

In the summer of 2009 twenty-two objects, and two interior architectural elements were fitted with prosthetic drawing styluses and suspended in the colonial-era powerhouse of Nicosia (the Nicosia Municipal Art Center). The objects were borrowed from people living on both sides of the divided city of Nicosia - objects as diverse as a metal bed frame, an architect’s stool, a hat rack, and a kitchen table - but all at least thirty years old. The personal stories about the object become a sound installation that is intended to make a distinction between the human story, and the object’s own.

Viewers trigger hidden motion detectors as they circulate in the exhibition, and these activate appropriated motors. This passive interaction with viewers over the course of days produces drawings unique to each object, and also sounds, both of which were later exhibited separately. The interaction also illustrates the not-so-obscure relationship between objects and personal narrative.

Originally the project was commissioned and realized with the full support of the Nicosia Municipal Art Center Associated with the Pierides Foundation, and elements of the installation were included in Suspended Spaces, at the Maison de l’Architecture in Amiens France during the winter of 2010.

download : mp3 file 02:25min - 3,5mb

download : mp3 file 02:25min - 3,5mb

scribes of time and space
2009

Drawings by Εlizabeth Hoak Doering, presented at the Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art under the general title amanuensis, originate from the installation things, witnesses!, that took place at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with The Pierides Foundation in the context of the Open Call # 1 in June 2009.

For this installation, Doering suspended from the ceiling of the Art Centre, various household objects - chairs, tables, a bed, a chest and a ‘hat rack’ - which were loaned to her by acquaintances in Cyprus. The suspended furniture was linked with motors that in turn were activated by motion detectors. Human presence in the installation tripped the detectors which started the motors. Each object was fitted with a drawing stylus. Motion of the objects made the styluses draw on paper set out on the gallery floor, resulting in the drawings presented in amanuensis. At regular intervals the artist replaced the paper, clearly labeling each with its ‘object-creator’, the date and time-span of the work. In an adjoining small room occupied by a sole object - an old suitcase on the floor - there was a sound installation where Doering narrated the owners’ stories about the objects.

In Doering’s installation we have two parallel notions of action: that of the suspended object - its wavering - and that of writing down and drawing, both of which are produced by the object as a result of viewer interaction. In Ancient Egypt, scribes had leading roles in the social structure and were considered part of the intellectual elite. Their role was to record social, political, economic and religious procedures and their precision in recording could be compared to current mechanical standards. At the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Sumerians’ need for record-keeping was also at the source of written human history. As the exhibition’s title amanuensis suggests, the drawings refer to reactions to human presence as recorded by three-dimensional household objects through mechanical or as Doering calls them, ‘low-tech’ means. The stylus functions as a prosthetic extension of the object, empowered to record the objects’ gestures.

Significant discoveries of the 20th Century, such as the automobile, aviation, x-rays, radiation and electromagnetism, created an entirely new world perspective. These tumultuous advances in the sciences suggested for a moment that the metaphysical side of nature could also be explained or rationalized. At the same time artists like Marcel Duchamp expressed and explored a mechanomorphic vision of the physical world and the esoteric. One of the main features in Duchamp’s Large Glass (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 1915-1923) is the pendu-femelle - the female pendu[lum] - which dominates the bride’s domaine of the Glass, emanates energy and is the motor and life-driving force of desire. Le pendu-femelle is the eternal choreographer, the connecting link between realities above and below, visible and invisible . Duchamp’s readymades, like In Advance of The Broken Arm (1915) and Hat Rack (1917), were hung from the ceiling of his studio, casting threatening shadows, like drawings on the wall. A photograph of these shadows was signed and dated by Duchamp and became another artwork, Ombres Portées (1918). Here we have a projection of three-dimensional objects onto the two-dimensional plane of the wall and onto the photographic paper. The shadows of the readymades Bicycle Wheel (1913), Hat Rack (1917) and the unrealized Corkscrew dominate his painting Tu m’ (1918), which now hangs at Yale University Art Gallery. When asked by Arturo Schwarz whether Corkscrew was also a readymade, Duchamp answered, ‘One may consider the shadow of the corkscrew as a readymade rather than the corkscrew itself.’

An interpretation of Duchamp’s enigmatic experimentations at the beginning of the 20 th Century relates with his interest in the geometry of n - dimensions and especially the fourth. According to this geometry, perception of the world is very different, viewed from a higher dimension. Just as the section of a three-dimensional object is a plane, in the same way the three-dimensional object constitutes a section of the four-dimensional space. Essentially, Duchamp sought contact with the beginning, the source, the starting point; a point where neither space nor time exists, a mythical point before history. In a Duchampian world, a work of art is an antenna receiving signals from another dimension, another reality. A work of art connects the spectator with the Beginning.

One might associate Doering’s drawings with Jean Tinguely’s Meta-matics (1959) which are drawings derived from the mechanical works of the artist. Variations therein depend, in contrast with Doering’s works, exclusively on the imperfections in the movement of the mechanisms and on chance. A kinship might also exist with the work of Rebecca Horn, as in the upside down, suspended but self-contained piano of Concert for Anarchy (1970) or Pencil Mask (1972). Doering may indeed be attracted to the anxiety and sensuality of the mechanomorphic installations and the prosthetics of Horn but in the case of her moving objects that draw on the floor, there is clearly another dimension, which I might dare to say is closer to Duchamp’s explorations of dimensionality.

Having observed the way Doering set up the work, I realized that through these mechanisms she was seeking the ‘frequency of communication’ of each object. Objects are often characterized as extensions of the user-owner. Here however, it was as if she discovered how each object could be coordinated with human perception, and how to set up an essential communication between them.

Seeing these objects drawing reminded me of the uproar that was created after the 1973 publication of the book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, where they present the physical, emotional and spiritual relations between plants and humans. Watching the furniture move according to human presence, I remembered the corresponding reactions of plants that were connected with electrodes while listening to the human voice.

Having experienced the installation almost throughout the duration of its two-month life in the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, I tend to believe that the drawings of Elizabeth Doering exceed the term ‘mechanical’. As Henri Bergson emphatically states in his work Matière et mémoire , memory exceeds matter and is of a spiritual, not material nature.

Doering’s drawings are not mechanical but magical because in the synergy of person-mechanism-object, a mystical relation is created - almost alchemical - that portrays realities beyond the three-dimensions. The suspended objects become artist-scribes of an esoteric truth. They project, on the two-dimensional plane of the paper, a complicated and sensitive system that involves notions and senses beyond natural and mechanical perception. As electrographies of the beginning of the 20th Century ‘impressed the aura’ of objects onto photographic plates , so the drawings of suspended furniture in Doering’s installation impress, with sensitivity, the relation between the physical and the spiritual world.

By means of the object-artists, Doering conducts an unorthodox, subversive, anthropological research with socio-political ramifications (owners, history and objects’ provenance). On the surface one could say that the drawings record history and emotions, as much of the objects as of their owners, as well as the spectator who sets them in motion. Essentially however a magical link is created between above and below, material and immaterial, and physical and spiritual.

Dr Yiannis Toumazis
Director Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation / Cyprus

cf. Toumazis Yiannis, Marcel Duchamp, Artiste Androgyne, Thesis, Amiens, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 2009

Schwarz Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York, Delano Greenidge, 2000, p. 657

Bergson Henri, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit , [1939], Paris, Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1965.

cf. Narkiewicz-Jodko Jacob von, Effluves d’une main electrifiée posée sur la plaque photographique, March 1986. Gelatin silverprint.