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A house skin can be

— Ariana Reines, The Cow[1]

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4478. Grundrisse: Gallery Structure (1). Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Gallery. September 25 - October 12, 2024.

3 or 4 (or 5) piles, 2 or 3 puddles. A wall. a drip, one tear. A weight. A wall. 3 blocks. Paws. A pool, a hole. A wall. 2 eyes, Mouths. A Wall. Some bones. Wax. Some scales. Ribbon. Two doors. A skin. A house. A wall.

Light, dark. All night.

A skin a house can be.

…Now if I could just get in there….

(Don’t worry, we’re just talking to ourselves in public (again).)

….

(Draft 3)

Following the installation of Blue Print: Gallery Structure (0) at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary location 0000 (2680 South La Cienega Boulevard, 90034) in Spring 2023, this work occurs as the second iteration in the gallery’s ongoing Gallery Structure series. This series processes the material, historical, social, economic, and conceptual constructions of the Gallery as a cultural industry or marketplace and a physical room built between bodies and passages.[2] (A store/house?) A processing of the rates, languages, limits, substances (and narcotics) of the gallery. A questioning of how to ask foundational questions.

               What is a gallery? While Blue Print focused this question on some of the intrinsic, internalized symbols and tropes of the gallery, the current installation at 4478 West Adams Boulevard, 90016 (location 0001) moves towards extrinsic, external but embedded, material economies and logical structures of the gallery. From its tragedies to its comedies, and back again. (The installation and this text is a draft that continues to be worked-on and altered, redrafted, throughout its duration.) 4478 turns to the ‘building-blocks’ of the gallery: matter, energy, transformation, information, observation, language, calculation, transmission, and condensation (or gelling).

Or, maybe, like us, the gallery is just talking to itself. (Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. In tongues, with teeth.

But how can we keep-up with our own language? Maybe like this.

In any case, the work is a demonstration of the work of the gallery (recursively: in its own language).

What does it mean to be a place that shows (and sells) works of art? (What is the value of the gallery?)

Beginning at its foundations, 4478 (Grundrisse) (or ‘4478 (Foundations[3])’) works-through the landforms and architectures of the gallery as a developmental and relational structure—and as a record, database, or archive—organized and produced through coded (coated) forms of physical and cultural labor. Starting with its address (4478), the gallery is talking to itself in its own language. (It is like one of those shows where all the museum or gallery workers ‘get’ to install their own work for a show—except we also own the means of production!) This is a way of working with the materiality of labor and time through the contexts of the gallery. By literalizing, displaying, documenting, and performing a reading and writing—a de/ciphering—of the gallery’s forces, logics, and structures, Gallery Structure (1) is a process of a gallery (beginning to) give an account of itself and its surpluses. A work with the gallery as a transformative technique of the body: sitting, standing, saying, showing…working.[4] And an orientation of a gallery as a localized but unsettled structure and self-conscious process, instead of a gallery as an anesthetized reproduction or result of established systems of wealth, accumulation, and capital.

Lately, there seems to be some sort of ‘identity crisis’ going-around the contemporary art scene in the U.S. and internationally. (Don’t worry, though: it’s a good crisis.) This is evident in the growing demand for, and increasing establishment of, different approaches to “the gallery,” ranging from renegade artist initiatives (like O’Flaherty’s in NYC) to micro-galleries and homegrown art spaces—and galleries in disused historic buildings (like SHED projects in Cleveland, Ohio). While many of efforts are just re-stylings of the norm, just dressing-up as if Daddy’s hat has fallen off, there are also plenty of efforts that are forcing galleries to ask important questions about the ways in which they function and how this relates to the artists they work with and the exhibitions they present. With this installation, we are taking this instability of the gallery as a starting-point for asking how to work with this unstable structure. How might a gallery remain with its instability without becoming catatonic?

               Initially, this installation hypothesizes the structural necessity of a gallery as an unavoidable medium or exchange between readymade planetary systems and the (extra)terrestrial evolution of techniques of a body. A necessary exchange between structure and delirium. Between organized bodies in orbit and a body set adrift….

The work begins literally, rigorously. We begin to work with the building of A Wall (2024-). Since a wall seems to be one of the most necessary, or at least most enduring, structural features of a gallery, this is a practical place to begin the practice of theory of the gallery. (Maybe even more so than the actual foundation, the building of the wall seems to constitute the founding act of the gallery.) A Wall is built over the course of the exhibition. This practice of slowing-down the cyclical movements of the gallery demonstrates a connection between delirium and clarity at the level structure: like the phases and physics of particles, the structure of the gallery only seems to make sense at a certain distance, and at a specific speed. (And once I am near enough I cannot tell the difference between some fuzz on the floor and the span of the cosmos.) This initial moment of (mis)recognition produces an identity crisis that most often leads to attempts at disappearing the position of the gallery beyond the vested heredity of a name (of the father): “Reisig and Taylor (Contemporary).” But this disappearing act is already doomed to fail, since a gallery must always appear at the place of a “don’t look.”

               So what would it mean to slow-down (or sometimes speed-up) enough to keep track of the invisible forces, forms, and formulas of the gallery? How does a gallery demonstrate and display its necessary structures, and not only what it wants to show (the structure of its desire)? Or, what is the socially necessary labortime of the gallery? How does a gallery work? And at what value? At what cost? How does a gallery learn to speak its own language (to itself)? In order to begin to address these questions—if only to produce more questions—the works composing this installation deal in part with measurement, calculation, logic, architecture, distance, observation sampling, time, condensation (and gelatin). These syntactic tractions among the works provide a minimal grammar of the gallery’s language, the limits required to communicate a void. (As if I were try to explain a gallery to extraterrestrials, it is a matter of how to say nothing while still saying something). Ultimately, this halting pace of deconstructing the gallery from within unlocks connections between the local processes and programs of the gallery and the deep time that populates its structures.

What are the gallery’s structures? What is the gallery made of? And what makes-up the gallery? (Is this all absurd?)

               (Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. Building itself from scratch and addressing itself in its own (alien) language, the structure of the gallery is worked-with as a medium—as a kind of (“no-Man’s”) land: place, space, light, and time. And a as a mode of address. 4478. 90016. A (failed) transition between image and information. 34.03257659309928, -118.33773906153222. A rhetoric or figure of speech. (Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. A timeframe. 0009/0028/2024 - 0008/0012/2024. A transmission. 1000101111110. A fit, a start….

               … And also a negativity. An address to the void. Or at least a certain amount of negative space (1200 square feet, in the case of the gallery). But a negativity that resists the usual connotations of an emptiness or a negation. It is not nothingness. It is a real negativity. And a logical opposition (blank walls | signed objects). A logic of negative magnitude.[5] (Maybe even a gallery’s disappearance might be made to count for something, after all.)

(Sun, soil,) concrete, plaster, wood. Gelatin.

A skin a house can be.

{The complete installation text is accessible here.}

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/Questions, Alternations/

a. How and why is time measured with space? How is information is converted into space and time? Or, what is the relationship between distance and history?

b. How are samples (aliquots) collected? Or, how is an activity or event recorded as data and how is the resulting information stored? Or, how is an energy emission—(thermodynamic) work—such as a radio wave, rendered into an image and a measurement, such as a wave, and a frequency or a wavelength? How is this recorded observation (and translation) verified?

c. How do these generalized circuits between work, exchange, record, and (re)production recur—or are only made possible through—human processes of rendering their environment into a legible, calculable, inhabitable, structure?

d. What is the relationship between work, (artistic) creation, duration, and value? (And, what is the difference between work, labor, creation, and production?)

e. What is the relationship between calculation (of structure) and delirium (of symbolics and imaginaries)?

f. What is a gallery’s bodily function as a medium between physicals (environments), work, and cultures.

g. What are the fundamental instruments and techniques of the gallery?

/Parameters/

Location/

> Address: 4478 ~ 1000101111110[6]

> Zip Code: 90016 ~ 10101111110100000

> Coordinates: 34.03257659309928, -118.33773906153222 ~ 100010.00001000010101101111, -1110110.01010110011101100001

Expenditure/

> Month: $110110101100000.00

> Year: $1000001101000000.00

Equivalence/

> Weight: 4478g = 9.872lbs

> — : 0 , | : 1  [ 4478 = 1000101111110 = |— — —|—||||||— ]

Labortime (Aliquot (Metronome))/

> 1 minute of labortime ≈ 1.11 inches of work = 1.11 inches/minute of labortime ~ 1.00011100001010001111 inches/minute of labortime[7]

> 1.11 inches/minute x 1.11 inches/minute = 1.2321 square inches/minute ~ 1.0011101101101010111 square inches/minute of labortime

Area/

> 1200 square feet = 14400 square inches / 1.2321 square inches/minute  ≈ 11688.58 minutes of total gallery labortime ~ 10110110101000.1001010001111010111 minutes of total gallery labortime

Frequency/

> 1.11 inches/minute = 0.0185 inches/second = 0.0185 Hz = 0.0000000185 MHz labortime (where a single cycle corresponds to 1 inch of travel), 0.0185 Hz ~ 0.00000100101111000111 Hz

Dog Years/

> 1 bone ≈ 2 weeks of (intermittent) gnawing ≈ 0.1 bone/hour = 0.000005 bone/minute ~ 0.00000000000000000101 bone/minute

> 1 bone ≈ 2 weeks of (intermittent) gnawing ≈ 26 bone/year (26 dog years per 1.0 Julian year or per 1.00068 calendar years) ~ 11010 bone/year

> 1 Julian year ≈ 7 dog years ~ 111 dog years per 1 Julian year

> 26 bone/year / 7 dog years = 3.714 bone/dog year ~ 11.10110110110010001011 bone/dog year

Laikas/

> 1 year = 525600 minutes ≈  3679200 dog minutes ~ 1110000010001111100000 dog minutes

> 53.82 minutes of runtime (on Voyager 1 Golden Record) ≈ 0.000714 dog years ~ 0.00000000001011101101 dog years

> 0.000714 dog years = 1 Laika ~ 1 Laika

> 0.000714 dog years of Golden Record / 3.714 bones/dog year = 0.00019224555 bone/dog year of Golden Record ~ 0.0000000000001100101 bone/dog year of Golden Record

> 1 Laika / 3.714 bones/dog year = 0.00265 bone/Laika ~ 0.00000000101011011011 bone/Laika

> 0.00019224555 bone/dog year of Golden Record / 1.11 inches/minute of (human) labortime = 0.00017319418 ~ 0.0000000000001011011 (delirious speed of Golden Record in bone/dog years running at 1.11 inches per minute of (human) labortime)

> 0.00265 bone/Laika / 1.11 inches/minute of (human) labortime = 0.00238738738 ~ 0.00000000100111000111 (delirious speed of Golden Record in bone/Laika running at 1.11 inches per minute of (human) labortime)

….

The Grundrisse of Karl Marx and the Question of Economy

Posthumously published long after the circulation of his (other) major works, this preliminary text serves as an analytical foundation for this installation to the extent that the works share a common problem or question: how to give an account of oneself, of one’s own work, through and with one’s own language—how to put myself to work on myself? This is the gallery’s core question about itself throughout this work.

(But now a brief Public Service Announcement: anyone who has arrived at this point can definitely stop reading if they’d like or just fed-up with what’s going on here. The following is a brief—but still long—digestion of Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, which translates from German into English as ‘foundations’ but also refers to something like an outline as well as the ‘drawing-out’ of a preliminary method. The multiple meanings persevered by the German word are the main reason why this text is almost always presented with Grundrisse remaining as the title, even when translated into other languages (like the English; and, as far as I can tell there are also Spanish and French versions that also keep the original German word). Plus, the untranslatability of the word, and its resulting alienation to some, is helpful for creating an immediate entry into the installation that shows someone something of this question: how can I read something I don’t understand or know already? Anyway, I have provided this brief digestion as a kind of responsibility for positioning this text as one of the discursive and historical foundations of this installation, and thought it better to simply show how I myself passed through the reading, and to offer a writing that may be helpful, for anyone interested in delving into the relations buried between this text and 4478. I mean, gee-wiz, it’s mentioned in the title so I better damn-well do the reading for you. Consider it a favor. Or an insult. Or an ignorance. That part’s up to you, or anyone but me.)

As one of his earlier works (and often considered a preemptive project for the 1867 publication of Das Kapital), Marx’s Grundrisse (or ‘Foundations’) delivers a highly evolved analysis of capitalism and critique of political economy that extends across all the primary nodes of his economics: production, relations of production, distribution, exchange, labor, value, technology, automation and alienation. And though it came to be put aside by Marx in 1858, lurking on the wayside of his thought until its initial publication years later, Grundrisse achieves what is, somewhat ironically, Marx’s most ‘complete’ work on political economy.

               Initially, the Grundrisse lays out the necessary groundwork and methodology for performing an effective analysis of capitalism and prescient critique of political economy. Importantly, in the “General Introduction” to the Grundrisse, Marx maintains a critique of the eighteenth-century view—articulated by writers like Mill, Bastiat, Proudhon, and others—on the ‘natural man’ and his (/her) ‘natural rights’ or the ‘eternal laws’ thought to govern his/her individual existence: “It is only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society,’ that the different forms of social union confront the individual as a mere means to his private ends, as an external necessity.”[8] Ironically, Marx argues, the historical period during which this view of the isolated individual becomes prevalent “is the very one in which the interrelations of society… have reached the highest state of development.”[9] It is at this point, Marx continues, that “Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society.”[10] It is from the platform of these key and really quite obvious (though nonetheless necessary and critical) observations that Marx stems his contention that the production of the human animal as a seemingly isolated individual is not only linked to his or her sociality—i.e., his or her abstraction from the social in the first place—but also to the transformative self-abstraction of labor and production which inhere in all social processes at all stages of historical development, though always with different affects in different ways. In short, the first ‘thing’ that the human animal produces is his or herself.

               Furthermore, in critiquing dominant perspectives on the relations between production, distribution, exchange and consumption, Marx demonstrates the ways in which each of these distinct intervals interpenetrate and enact the possibilities of the other. Crucially, by unfolding the various points at which these distinct aspects of political economy become interwoven and entwined, Marx points to desire or want as not only an impulse toward production or consumption, but as a effect of material production in itself: “Production not only supplies the want with material, but supplies the material with a want.”[11] Moreover, operating in or through modes of production, the human animal—as well as commodities and things—oscillates between personhood and thingliness, subjectivity and objectivity, inasmuch as an “intermediary movement[s]” and networks of relations interminably reproduce and determine the precise mode of inhabitance and agency for productive bodies and bodies produced.

               Later on in the text, in the section, “Alienation, Social Relationships and Free Individuality,” Marx analyzes and contrasts the social relationships in the feudal and bourgeois periods of historical development so as to investigate—or extend—the question of individual freedom. Between these two periods, Marx characterizes a difference of relations: the personal governing the feudal and the material governing the bourgeois. While the prevalent sentiment of Marx’s time was that the material relations expanded and even permitted the freedom of the individual person because of the sort ‘natural law’ reified and restored in the form of the social contract, Marx urges us to question the viability of this sentiment insofar as the shift to property and the material dependence of ‘free individuality’ is “in every way confirmed, nourished and inculcated by the ruling classes.”[12]

               Marx’s implicit response to the questioning of the actual liberty of ‘free individuality’ is again echoed and reinvigorated in one of the final sections of the text, “The Labour Process and Alienation in Machinery and Science.” Prior to this section, Marx’s critique clearly diminished the freedom attached and assumed by the apparent naturalness of the isolated individual of ‘civil society.’ In fact, Marx points to alienation, rather than freedom, as the primary effect of material production and the sets of relations it produces and by which it is produced. However, in this particular section, Marx is also looking towards future modes of production – automation and machinery – as having a particularly forceful impact on “man’s alienation”: “Science thus appears, in the machine, as something alien and exterior to the worker; and living labour is subsumed under objectified labour, which acts independently.”[13] Machinery thus alienates the worker, the individual, by appropriating the means of labor (from the worker) to capital in the form of the scientifically governed automaton; importantly, his or her “own labour power [is] devalued as a result of this transposition.”[14] But, at the same time, Marx sees the introduction of machinery as bringing about the inevitable collapse of capitalism.

               While we see many echoes of the Grundrisse in Marx’s other works, especially Das Kapital, what seems to be left from its primary considerations is the question of ideology and the manner in which it is produced through “commodity fetishism.” Marx argues that the commodity fetishism is the root of ideology, insofar as the commodity ‘tricks’ us into mistaking the social relations abstracted and objectified by the commodity-form as merely a relation between things; which is to say,

[…] the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics as the products of labor themselves… It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.[15]

Thus, our ‘willingness’ to see in commodities nothing more than the mysterious ‘lives’ of things – ignoring the social relations congealed in the form of the thing – is also the fundamental ‘secret’ or mystery which is the kernel of ideology’s opacity to those subjected to its power to dissolve the networks and relations of construction. In other words, it becomes a sort of blind spot or structural unconsciousness by which the processes and networks of appearing our blocked and obscured by the proximity and ‘thereness’ of sheer appearances. It is for this reason that critiques of political economy, and developments of new political economies, are vital for understanding not only ideology and the effects of power as the emerge as psycho-social constructions, but also for understanding the agency of things within these economies (especially with regard to moments at which the agency of things seems to overtake ‘our own’; or when human agency appears as nothing more than a delusional appropriation of the agency of things).

(Central to this turn toward a different kind of value is Marx’s theorization of “socially necessary labor time”.[16] Here is a brief breakdown of the basic orientation of this theory and its proposed calculation:

1. Value of Commodities: According to Marx, the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time invested in its production.

2. Labor Theory of Value: Marx argues that labor is the source of value, meaning that the more labor time invested in a commodity, the higher its value, as long as the labor is socially necessary.

3. Comparison of Different Commodities: To establish value, Marx compares different commodities based on the labor time required to produce them. This comparison helps to understand their exchange value in the marketplace.

4. Use of Average Conditions: The concept of "average conditions" ensures that the calculation reflects typical production methods and technologies, rather than outliers or exceptional cases.

Is this mode of calculating the value of labortime an effective resolution of the problem? Maybe. But I also think it is important to get to the root of necessity—or, rather, the rhetoric of necessity—as an ideological apparatus versus need as a real demand on the (social) body….)

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3 piles, 2 puddles. a drip, one tear. A pool, a hole. Some bones

teething blue willow

worn

woof on bone borrowed china

wares.

Holed, howled. Walled. wear. Where Far out

A house skin can be

Amounted, squared. Cached. Where is the cow? Her cash? Their catch.

Drunk drinking a dry pool dry, lacking. her ( ) p u d d l e

or puddle, or dripping tear a rip a tear

a skin a house

Some bones. a hole, a pool. one tear, a drip. 3 puddles, 5 piles.

A skin a house can be

with borrowed china wares

(One shot, two shot, zig zag tear, Pop die pennyum tennyum tear, Harem scarem merchant tear'em, Tae tor top….)

 
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[1] Ariana Reines, The Cow (New York: Fence, 2006).

[2] A “passage” in terms of a body’s burrowing, exploratory movement trailing through space and time—a space made by a body’s path—as well as a “passage” as a sample of text: a bit of language.

[3] Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Trans. David McLellan. (London: Macmillan, 1971). This posthumously published text is a work where Marx attempts to give a critical account of his own work (and his own place within it). (David Harvey describes it as “MarxIn common with the questions of this installation, this text is an example of asking how to put myself to work on myself, to work-through my own systems and structures?

[4] Or a series of techniques of a body. See, Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body” (Original Lecture at Société de Psychologie, May 17th, 1934. Published in Journal de psychologie normal et patholigique, Paris, Année XXXII, 1935, pp. 271-93. Reprinted in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie (with introduction by Claude Levi-Strauss), 4th edition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. pp. 364-386.

[5] Immanuel Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Quantities into Philosophy” (‘Versuch, den Begriff der negativen Grössen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen’) (1763). This essay focuses on working-through differences between logical negation and arithmetic subtraction, and the two distinct types of oppositions they create. Think of the negative magnitude assigned across spacetime with the negation in front of a coordinate pair: is this a cancelled opposition or a real or logical opposition? Or is it both? (I am proposing a “both” reply).

[6] Example of conversion from binary (back) to decimal 4478: (1000101111110)₂ = (1 × 2¹²) + (0 × 2¹¹) + (0 × 2¹⁰) + (0 × 2⁹) + (1 × 2⁸) + (0 × 2⁷) + (1 × 2⁶) + (1 × 2⁵) + (1 × 2⁴) + (1 × 2³) + (1 × 2²) + (1 × 2¹) + (0 × 2⁰) = (4478)₁₀.

[7] The complete demonstration of this calculation is presented later-on in this text. This conversion is based on the work Wave 1 (2024) included in the show.

[8] Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Trans. David McLellan. (London: Macmillan, 1971). pp. 17.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid, 25.

[12] Ibid, 73.

[13] Ibid, 135.

[14] Ibid, 140.

[15] Ibid, 165.

[16] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, (London: Penguin, 1976).