Authorial Comment
Authorial Comment
We don’t say Collage, we say Samotryas
2015–2016 Green, PDF page 18
Authorial Comment
We’re raising our own miracle and giving ourselves our own massage in the Russian Samotryas. Our red-cheeked miracle is ripped into scraps and tucked into the pockets of hearts. The massage goes off to mind its own business. The mountain starts glowing from the music, roses drift through the blue sky. When the thing gets moving, when it rolls in, Fedya in his shoe covers starts to shake.
Marika and Leopard · 26 February 2016 · announcement.
Work Text
Samotryas was conceived not as a collage assembled from many elements, but as a situation in which multiplicity could emerge through the relations between them. Its basic unit was not a painting, a sound or an object, but a transition: one thing calling up another; painting extending into sound; sound into space; space into bodily movement; movement into time.
In this sense, meta-collage does not describe an accumulation of media. Conventional collage joins pre-existing parts; in Samotryas, relation itself becomes productive. The world is not posited in advance as a finished form to be represented. It appears provisionally, in the relations between things.
Work Text
From this perspective, Samotryas can be set alongside Heidegger’s account of the work of art as the disclosure of a world. What matters is not that a single thing symbolises a totality, but that it opens a field of relations through which a world can begin to appear. This is a present-day curatorial comparison, not a source or influence claimed for the work in 2016.
From the present position, this early work makes especially visible the possibility of a whole that becomes perceptible through a particular form without being contained or completed by it. A thing does not contain the world. It can become the point from which a world begins.
Related Works
