The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but proceeded by a declination. Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Darkness falls in a century that begins as it may be remembered. A deep-water harbor to anti-narrative tendencies whose morbid desolations can be found in efforts as diverse as the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, the music of Sunn O))) and the sculpture of Banks Violette, it's a place that refuses to weave the old trajectories and plots into their descriptive armatures. In their hands they have become forms whose tendency towards enclosure, to the effects of feedback, of looped linearity and spatial disfiguration have become as condensed and self-referential as a Rubik's cube. All, in one way or another are landscapes constructed around the effects of endless horizon. Movement is registered as the pursuit of the event as it recedes towards an unapproachable condition. The structure of this kind of music, art and literature is without resolution, without clear beginnings or end. It starts as it begins on a road, a chord, or a white cube. And while it harkens to places other than its own – a destination, melody or history – its deviations are merely the effects of narrative, drawn into the chill of their recession.

A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me the only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. The Road

To enter either space is to be inside the idea of something that is without beginning or end. It is genesis not in reverse, in the way that Nabokov, JG Ballard and Robert Smithson would describe the future as the obsolete in reverse, but rather something without claim to order at all. A monument perhaps to an inactive history.

The small wad of paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark. The Road

McCarthy's novel is set in a sprawling, horizonless vale of drifting ash and spindly rubble. It's tempting to describe 'The Road' as the story of a man and his young son's southwesterly trek through an unnamed nuclear-winterized landscape in search of warmth. But the journey goes nowhere and would be better described as a migration, the perpetual motion of man's search for moral traction within a featureless landscape. "The ponderous counter spectacle of things seeking to be" is startling for its lack of customary descriptive detail and the relentlessness of a world blasted gray and featureless by human folly and cosmic indifference. Flames flare briefly and then die. O'Malley's sound and Violette's sculptureare also articulated around absence, around what has not been seen but is revealed as the ruin of descriptive possibility the landscape can no longer support. This negative space becomes the core of a practice that speaks not to some paradise lost of what was not seen or witnessed in the present tense but rather to a void around which the ideas can act on things other than themselves.

The tendency for entropy to increase in isolated systems is expressed in the second law of thermodynamics — perhaps the most pessimistic and amoral formulation in all human thought. — Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, Principia Discordia (1965)

This landscape is registered according to its capacity to retain heat, the fluctuations of small flames and nitrogen induced freezes that deny the drain and seepage of irretrievable extinction. Charred and senseless artifacts are strewn around the floor, parts perhaps of a drum-kit whose percussive meter would, in former times, have registered the march of time through a song or a space. And if the sonic register of this music has sunken into the sub-audible realm where it is felt rather than heard, where the attentive listening body is no longer the privileged recipient of higher forms of aural communication but rather immersed in its landscape leaning into its amplified resistance as if into a storm, Violette's scattered shards of structure and mangled pop references carry with them a similar de-centering of the attention they would appear to demand. The grids and cubes, soundstages and panels are, for all their invocation of the geo-generic structures of Sol LeWitt, the non-sites of Robert Smithson or vocal wailings of a generation of long-haired expressionists nothing more than the theatricalization of an attenuated absence, the description of a landscape from which those same properties have fled. What is felt rather than seen is the dissipative heat of those narrative architectures that once held content within a melody, a novel or a room.

He walked out into the grey light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate world. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. The Road

Images of romantic extinction float through these forms shrouding the cauterized terrain of the unhistoried world in much the same way that the pressure of polar slabs grind and destroy the vessel of Hope in Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting Sea of Ice. Here the mute tragedy of hope serves to heighten the durability, strength and indifference of nature while also beatifying fruitless sacrifice in the face of this deaf Ananke. Crushed within this frozen wasteland the vessel registers only the extreme indifference of an entropic landscape from which all heat and energy have been bled. Like the horizontal sound layers that grind and shear through the possibility of melody, the fractal procession of the novel that renounces debt to the narratives of sacrifice and redemption or the sculptural presence that refuses to coalesce into a coherent whole, the polar desert of Friedrich's painting is a place where descriptive geometry and symphonic ambition have given way to a tectonic of deformation and destruction.

Desert is literally emptiness – its synonyms desolation, wasteland. To travel to the desert "in order to see it," in order to experience it, is paradoxical. The desert remains an absence: the desert is this place I stand multiplied by infinite numbers – not this place particularly. So I come away each night convinced that I have been to the Holy desert (and I have been humiliated by it) and that I have not been to the desert at all. The God of the Desert, Robert Rodriguez

Test-sites for monuments bound to fail: the hot desert and frozen sea are landscapes of emptiness and unfathomable singularity. They are as resistant to the fundamentally static nature of sculpture as they are the documenting human endeavor of any kind. Positioned on the thermocline between the two (gallery) sites, sculpture and sound are never complete but articulated around those absent missing elements lost in the space between recording and transmission. Temperature differentiates the event. It both separates it from the surrounding landscape and promises its re-absorption within it. Ice eventually melts and the flames go out. Events cool and are then forgotten leaving only the scattered objects which, like markings indicating religious observance, are both lucid and illegible at the same time.

I wait in line to enter the Sepulcher, a free-standing chapel in the rotunda of the basilica. A mountain was chipped away from the burial cave, leaving the cave. Later the cave was destroyed. What remains is the interior of the cave, which is nothing. The line advances slowly until, after two thousand years it is my turn. I must lower my shoulders and bend my head: I must almost crawl to pass under the low opening. I am inside the idea of the tomb of Christ. Robert Rodriguez

The burden of narrative lays on sites such as these, sites which more often than not maintain their emptiness precisely in order to preserve their capacity as vessels of descriptive revelation. Various religions secular and otherwise carry with them the idea of absence as support to narratives that can and in some cases never should be portrayed or witnessed. Like the Islamic Kaaba, the Sepulcher is a physical space rendered featureless as idea. Whether holy or unholy, the concentrated presence of history corrodes the descriptive architecture it purports to uphold. Sites such as these stand aside from the narratives they invoke to become non-sites. Areas of virtue or otherwise they represent not the events, from which they are now removed, but the ruins of their descriptive possibility. In Columbine, a place absolutely and tragically defined by history, it was the library that was both epicenter of violence and center of the school. Faced with such a loaded site the school district elected rather than to raze or rebuild to seal it off and create an empty repository for all the fear and commemoration that attended the violence and its aftermath. Consecrated as if by virtue of inverse divinity the empty room offered an unseeable image of epiphanic destruction, of profundity organized around descriptive loss.

On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. Cormac McCarthy, The Road

In some curious sense the monolithic sound and disrupted sculptural presence may be foil to the forced gestalt that puts the reading of either one within the totality of experience. Physical and acoustic environments merge: sculpture shades sound and sound casts the form of the objects it invokes. Broken drumkits, peels of jagermeister and empty glasses of laughter play to the paradox that haunts all successful renditions of defeat. And behind it all, behind the broken glass and shards of what went before the monolithic presence of the very thing that eludes all history and all description. The thing you and I will never see and never know.





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