- Venue
- LiveArt 08, Wellington Terrace studios
- Location
- South West England
the Sorbonne, 1968: an exposition given by Jacques Derrida on the notion of différance (re: writing and the Saussurian/structuralist theory of language) provokes the remark that, "in your work, the expression is so important that the attention of the listener is constantly divided and directed, on the one hand, to your way of talking, and on the other, to what you want to say." Derrida responds, "I try to place myself at a certain point at which…the thing signified is no longer easily separable from the signifier."1
annexe car park (Wellington Terrace, Falmouth), 2008: 'what do you think? Helvetica?' half-laughing rhetoric, demands this quietly centre-stage European (Swiss), in his appropriated standard yellow Hewden-hire container. The typeface for any signage needs to reflect the quasi-industrial/clerical set and Galeazzi's methodology for the performance. Three white outsize boards entitled respectively side-effects, side-affecting and diverted procedures, line the sides of the container recording the elicited responses of invited and impromptu audience alike – the Town Mayor obliges with a full hour given over to interview. Then perhaps a journalist, doctor, writer, a glut of art students, psychologist, waitress. Collateral/corroborative occupations? Twin angle-headed worklamps glare at the ceiling, blur time.
A singular séance: two women thickly shrouded in woollen blankets – pink and cream – each sit nursing a fragrant glass of tea, a silver-plate tea service on a silver-plate tray. 'Cultural displacement' is marked up as a diverted procedure. Galeazzi conducts his seminar patiently, easily, the blankets slip to their elbows.
donkey – don Quixote ('my flag animal for my engagement with dissemination' (Galeazzi)) …'because identities are constructed and not essential they are inevitably fragile, but no less important for all that' 2. Galeazzi confesses an interest in the topographical margins of cities, where the functionality of a population – industry and infrastructure – collides with its domestic territory and a very particular and separate social identity is forged. Suburbs: sub- (prefix) 1. situated under or beneath 2. secondary in rank 3. falling short of, less than, imperfectly; urbs a city, citizenship, state. What happens at the fringe? For Derrida, the imperfect state, by its complexity and impurity, capitulates/contradicts the model (in western thought) pertaining to the logic of identity: Galeazzi employs the same rhetoric, the graphic and poetic strategies, to alert the respondent, his audience, to the disintegrating distinction between disciplines and between subject matter.
Galeazzi plays with the container – what begins as a box, becomes an office, a surgery, a closed cell, a snug, a theatre, a locker, before it breaks its bounds as any particularly defined contained space at all and a couple of braziers stake their ground out front, strewn about with 'critical waste', Hewden-yellow paper tight-screwed, scrawled over, spewed out reactions to the two days' shows.
The premise for this work derives from 'dissemination' (being a self-reflective exercise in the context of contemporary arts practice and dissemination?): more precisely, Derrida's Dissemination (1981, University Press of Chicago): a proposition that writing is an incomplete action, dependant on what has gone before, so that writing becomes a consequence – the result of what has gone before – creating a self-generating process with exponentially consequent responses. Ripples begun and dissipated and doubled by the traffic of a working harbour. In the sense that critical writing is a fringe activity, responding and evaluating, Galeazzi looks at the responses the art festival generates, how he himself responds through his fringe performance, and what that causes by return: i.e. what it generates and affects. 'To generate effects' reflects a primary concern throughout the work of Jacques Derrida, in that it offers a way 'to open up the philosophical terrain so that it might continue to be the site of creativity and invention.' 3
Notes
1. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and 'Différance' Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988, p.88
2. John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers – from structuralism to postmodernity London, Routledge, 1994, p.108
3. ibid., p.107
