NYAB Event - “A Scratching Not a Biting” Exhibition

“A Scratching Not a Biting” Exhibition

Bureau

This event has ended.

I dreamed that I turned out my stomach and watched it roll across the floor. It quickly collided with a table leg, or rather, I thought it did—but then it curled around the thing as if trying to grab it, and I saw that a distinction between collision and perception is a luxury of the eyes. I also thought I’d float up to the ceiling and think about theology, but the noise of the belly’s experience only got louder as it rolled further away. My tongue spouted jargon and my eyes darted uselessly, as we rolled down the front steps and into what felt like a gritty parking lot, but the truth is we all found it very soothing to meet the world through texture. The concrete was so scratchy and interesting, the overhanging tires so bouncy and admirable. And with no visual edges to gleam between objects, time itself lost its linearity and became a rippling constant, in which each new sensation served only to deepen the one before it.

Then a shudder of nausea rippled through me, a premonition of some unimaginable catastrophe, and for the first time I became uneasily aware of a presence outside myself. Something moist and delicate seemed to touch me, but the feeling slipped away before I could grasp it. For an instant I was suffused with doubt, and in that doubt might have been the germ of a visceral consciousness. But then I was poked—a glowing prick of pain on one side, not the other—and poked again, and suddenly I was in an empty nightmare of dynamic violence. My eyes snapped back into separate focus and I watched myself getting bitten and mauled by a squirrel. The strange thing is that I still felt every contact as a fragment with no other side. There was a squeezing, not a biting; a scratching, not claws. My picture had no closer purchase on what was really happening than philosophy or physics.

The color dropped out of my vision, my skull dropped away from my eyes, and the world burst apart like a pomegranate into a series of static windows. Two muddy hands pulled a naked woman down a slope into a geometric abyss. A titanic bronze bear carried two more women across the globe. Ten penises that were also vaginas pointed at a thick black line scribbling itself across the wall. I don’t know whether it was the threat of consciousness that caused my anxiety or the anxiety that woke me up, but even as I scanned through these images I could feel my feet padding across the room and out the door, the jolt in my knees as I jumped down the steps, my straining breath as I ran to reclaim my guts. Terrified that my reintegrating body would leave it out, my mind tried to heal the fracture itself by reading the whole world as a metaphor for the body and the body as a metaphor for itself.

Text: Will Heinrich, A Scratching Not a Biting, 2016

Media

• Installation

ADVERTISE ON NYAB