...if you can hear me clap once

I was asked to respond to a performance installation by Michaela Murphy at SAIC's Sullivan Galleries. The following text I read, repeatedly, from my notebook while inside the open locker and speaking through a megaphone during other responses.


The applause is over but the holes remain.
Last night there were hands, arms really, disembodied and clapping, applause.
There was an armless body locked in a locker.
Days- maybe weeks ago the same arms put holes in the gallery wall.
The arms most likely found their way back to the body
But the holes remain.

Last night the applause, unlike normal applause in that it kept on going – eventually became atmosphere.
At first an interruption bleeding across the space, as sound, uninvited into other’s pieces- became something you could get used to, live with, or ignore.
The sight of the arms without operator fitting tightly into the wall was less easy to get used to.
“Disturbing” I overheard someone say.
Disturbing the wall.
Troubling the view.

“Force is not to be confused with power. Power is the domestication of force. Force in its wild state arrives from the outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls.”
-Brian Massumi, The User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Force, in its wild state breaks constraints and opens up new vistas.
If power builds walls, what of the interruptions through that power?
The holes in the wall are a confrontation.

The first treatment of holes is usually a rush to fill them.
And yes, on a first reading holes can seem like an invitation.
We have a reflex, or perhaps a habit
Of filling cavities, closing gaps and patching holes.
As if the disruption itself was a call to its own destruction.

Holes disturb the unbroken façade.
They disturb the sense of double you wholeness that is a reliable illusion.
They expose a fault.
In geology a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity.
In that case, they expose themselves.

All holes are alike in that they are made not of the substance they interrupt but of not it.

I’ve been asked to take a break. A rupture in my litany that will allow you to enjoy the intermission as well as the sound of others' work. A break that will serve to enliven everything else precisely because of its not this ness.

Maybe intermission is there to allow us to better see (or hear) and appreciate the faults and flaws of the work it pauses.

I heard a story about the silence and lift of 500 paper airplanes gliding in appreciation at the end of a show. Flooding the stage with noiseless applause.

Perhaps clapping – hitting one’s hands together with the intention of raising a din – is an attempt to fill the hole left when something is over?
Filling that silence with silence resonates with the disturbing beauty of a hole unpatched.

Consider the nose.
Two holes in the face that function to let air in.
Air crucial to the animation of the entire body.
Stop up the holes, the body dies.
To life, a vacuum is a theoretical space.
To live, material needs to breathe.