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Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting ...These Things That Divide The World In Two... by Saun Santipreecha. This interdisciplinary, multi-media installation is Santipreecha’s second exhibition at the Los Angeles location, and the third presentation of his work by the gallery (following his recent solo presentation in Rome). The immersive work combines sculpture, sound, surface, video, and (live) performance, transforming the gallery into a spontaneously and relationally composed encounter that will endlessly change in response to bodies’ pathways along the space over time.

The exhibition is on view from May 25 through June 22, 2024.

Saturday, June 22, 7:30pm: Performance composed by Saun Santipreecha and Screening + Talk with Katherine Weiss at the Closing Reception for Saun Santipreecha’s current solo exhibition, “...These Things That Divide The World In Two…”  (May 25 - June 22, 2024). The Performance is set to begin at 8:00pm.

Santipreecha’s translational performance-piece “Mother […] Mother” enacts a permutation of Samuel Beckett’s play “Footfalls.” Echoing the complications of physical and psychical interiors/exteriors that occur throughout his sculptural sound installation at the gallery, “Footfalls” revolves around a single feminine character May, who walks back-and-forth while carrying-on a conversation with the disembodied—‘outer’—voice (which begins as her mother) with what sounds like an internal dialogue.

Santipreecha has evolved the performative and linguistic dimensions of the play in relation to music and sound, and in relation to the sculptural elements of his exhibition—particularly the 4-part permutational sculpture that shares the same root name as the performance: “Mother […] Mother.” The work is carried-out through an atonal musical score and choreography composed by Santipreecha and performed live by flautist Cari Ann Souter, as well as a shifting architecture played-out by Santipreecha (and engineered by Luc Trahand). Mother will be embodying the role of May.

Katherine Weiss, co-editor of “Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art” (ibidem Press: 2017) will be Screening a clip of a rare, original performance of Samuel Beckett’s “Footfalls” (1988; directed by Walter D. Asmus) with Billie Whitelaw as May. Afterwards, Weiss will be discussing “Footfalls” and extending the context of this performance up through Santipreecha’s present translation of this piece.

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Beginning at its title, the work draws inspiration from the writings of Samuel Beckett, with a particular investment in the works of The Trilogy (1951-3); namely, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. With this connection in mind, the timing of the exhibition accounts for the event of the 2024 Beckett Conference, Beckett and Justice, which is taking place June 6 – 8 at California State University, Los Angeles. Santipreecha is set to present at the Conference, and will be speaking about the engagement of his artistic practice with the works of Beckett. Referencing his text on the ethical, sound-derived concept of “relational modularity,” Santipreecha will discuss his work in response to the metamorphic structures of language, materiality, sensation, and embodiment in Beckett’s works.

The relational structure of the installation begins with any visitor’s (a subject’s) entry into the exhibition where they will immediately find themselves populating, (dis)ordering, and distorting the shifting system of sounds sculpting the room of the gallery along the contours of a moving body. And while responding to the wandering movements of a visitor’s body, the underlying architecture of the works will also be incorporating various spatial and temporal dimensions of the gallery that are usually ‘left-out’ or regarded as collateral. The outside of the gallery will be (sonically) brought to the inside, and the ‘outer’ subject (a visitor) is brought to the inner-most core of the gallery: its hole, a void (making-room for an other…). The gallery’s physical architecture is deconstructed and rebuilt through sound. However, in this context, ‘the gallery’ and ‘the exhibition’ only occurs or takes place in the event of an encounter with a visitor: there is no gallery, no installation, without somebody being present.

It is in this sense of something being assembled in the same moment as being said where Santipreecha initially finds a sincere and intimate connection to the works of Beckett. This connection is especially evident when considered in relation to The Unnamable, where the reader and the text’s rambling narrator share in the process of constantly displacing and re-shaping the metamorphic body of the narrator with slips of the tongue and misrecognized glimpses of themselves in others. One moment the narrator is some malformed man jammed-into a jar working as a signpost for a local spot, and in the next he is a nearly featureless egg shaped something like an urn or a curled-up, limbless fetus that fills it. What the narrator says, what the reader writes, the body—of the narrator and the text itself—become. In other words, The Unnamable effaces any distance between what is being said and what is being shaped: what form a figure takes as a body. It is precisely at this place between language, sound, body, and ideology where the exhibition begins to find alternative pathways between subjects and systems, selves and others, through atonal structures of sound.[1]

Santipreecha articulates this knotted place, this tangled sonic interval between bodies, as a “relational modularity,” or the unstoppable slippage of a body between mythological systems and their (dis)array—between a body and other bodies. For Santipreecha, the slippages and distortions of a body as a relational context coming between regulatory structures and drifting morphologies, multitudes and monads, provides an opportunity to reconfigure the ethical possibilities of what it means for someone to relate to someone else (or somewhere else).

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Preliminary notes:

A surveillant sun scatters the shadows of shorn urn, waking my walking between sleepy nods of a tired light.

Stone tongues grind their salivations against the shouted whispers of my step, my breath, my sputters. An intrusion. An Expulsion. 

And also a sun.

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Artist’s Installation Statement by Saun Santipreecha

The seed for this exhibition was planted many years ago when I first encountered the works of Samuel Beckett, which, like many, was a viewing of Waiting for Godot, in my case, on YouTube very late (or early) one day. This was followed very soon afterwards by reading his first ‘three-in one’—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—the final novel of which forms the base strata of this installation. It took many years, and many more Beckett plays and prose, up to the writing of my essay “…perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, relational modularity and nationalism” from a prompt by the upcoming annual Samuel Beckett Society’s 2024 Beckett conference, Beckett and Justice (in which I’m incredibly honored to be taking part), to give me the courage to embark on this exhibition project.

Central to much of my recent work and inquiry, is the tension and inevitable inextricability between subject and system, which I also see as intrinsic to Beckett’s work, in particular this first trilogy. This was the starting point for this work: viewing the gallery itself as both system and subject, and the spectators themselves as subjects—players—in the piece, composing and re composing fragments into the legible and non-legible. Hence the installation’s opening instruction: <Play out the system> and its four permutations which eventually arrive at what now reads <Out! Play the system>. Who, or what are we expelling? Which system are we playing out? Or outplaying? Us, or another? Where is the border between the self and the systems we are entwined in? Is it even possible to expel these embedded systems which predicates what is legible? How are we legible to ourselves and others? “Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of” (Samuel Beckett. The Unnamable (Germany: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 454).

The installation’s opening instructions above instruct us to perform ‘excavations’ of ourselves as both subject and system, and embody how it is impossible for us to play out—or, outplay—our  systems (and selves). This process was an important component for the wind recordings you hear through the four subjects (sculptures). To put this into action, I gave both myself and wind player Rory Mazzella the ‘system’ of the twelve-tone matrix I created for this work (which is the same  matrix used to compose the performance piece “Mother […] Mother” based on Beckett’s play Footfalls to be performed at the exhibition’s closing on June 22) and instructed both to pick each their own series of rows and play, sans rhythmic, intonation or expressive dictation. Inevitably, the ‘system’ of instruction and the systemic code we have learnt musically will always impede/intrude/supersede our attempts to ‘play the system out’ as it is inextricably intertwined with our ‘selves’ as musicians: there is no uncovering or un-entwining that. And yet, the overarching image of musicians (and artists for that matter) is ‘self-expression’. Where is this ‘self’ located in which we ‘express’? As the protagonist of The Unnamable says: “It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed” (Ibid, 370). We are all branded. 

The Thai letters themselves, brand the set of permutational sculptures Mother […] Mother, Pm 1:4 (and its three other permutations), both arresting and mapping their permutations, inflicting the violence of systemic branding upon the subject mummified within trauma. And yet they change, rotate, permute. Within the Thai letters—the first six of the alphabet—2the last is not one that exists but is a hybridized or dissolution of two into one—ko-rakang and cho-ching—both of which are names of musical instruments (the first, typically medium to large temple bells, the second, small bells used to keep time in a traditional ensemble), both of which are instruments of keeping time on two different scales. This acts, in a way, as a key to the installation: this hinge between language and music, between symbol and meaning.

The two anchor points of choreography—staging—in the work are the microphone mounted  on the outside wall of the gallery—Ear—which ‘listens’ to the outside system in which we are situated and situates us within, and the camera webcam—Eye—which surveils the spectators within and drags the sound along the walls following us: the desperate vocabulary of rock gestures. In the meantime, Ear listens, and the external system triggers ‘invasions’ of the subject, the rocks piercing  through into the subjects—suspended sculptures—interrupting and pushing out their murmurings of  yet another system (that of the twelve-tone matrix) before being expelled, and returned to the systemic murmurs which continue, babbling on. Ear not only translates, but like the complex role of translation, also transmutes symbols, hidden cultural meanings, disintegrations and reformations in order to assimilate the text (or body) into the external (now internalized) system.

Eye is mounted in the ceiling of the gallery which surveils the other I’s, following our movements as we move around and within bodies of another, permutating us, the gallery itself and the works within, as subject, object and voice. Vocally—aurally—the exhibition negotiates between three tensions: language (in this case English and Thai), music, and the <failed> attempt at stripping  back the two: the rock gestures, neither language nor music, yet attempts to be both and neither, which themselves were created on two ‘art objects’ in the exhibit: the painting “perhaps that’s what I am” inside, and the sculpture “subject-object-voice” outside, giving them dual function as object and instrument.

The central wall piece—16 Permutations for Copper—engages a concept which stemmed from my reading of The Unnamable and which I first explored in my essay (mentioned above), that of relational modularity, in itself a musical (rather than linguistic) notion, whereby the sixteen copper  panels are permutational, and the de/re-construction changes the function of each in the musical  sense where a note’s function (and legibility) is determined by its positioning in relation to another. This notion is also extra-bodily which not only disembodies and re-embodies a work via its modules but is in many ways non-bodily, or a-bodily, whereby the modules no longer have fixed bodily functions but are transmorphic. This is reflected in the aural installation component, which, along with the blinking ‘sun’ on the piece the sun shone […] on the nothing new hovering in the central section of the gallery, is governed by the architectural Max system engineered by Luc Trahand. 

This suspended piece, itself an abstraction of a tree, can also be seen as a visual (and conceptual) anchor point to the work as a totality, a kind of statement on my part: the attempt at not simply illustrating the works that have been such a pivotal part of my life and work, but rather excavating, uprooting so as to inquire and work with and through these works by Samuel Beckett, whose shadow I see no parting from. And so I—like we—must go on, permutating, rotating, inverting and retrograding, as the sun continues to shine, “having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

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Curated by objet A.D (at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary).

Rory Mazzella: Wind Performer 

Cari Ann Souter: Flautist for performance piece Mother […] Mother 

Luc Trahand: Max architectural engineer, Studio assistant

Ken Goerres: Structural designer and engineer 

Savika Goerres: Additional assistance 

With special thanks to Katherine Weiss and Feargal Whelan.

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“My work is grounded in the position of questioning—or rather the questioning of position—in relation to frames and systems while acknowledging the inevitable necessity for frame and form to carry intent and meaning, to enable dialogue—ouroboros; the act of breaking myth being itself a form of myth-making.

My work as a whole is the form and process through and within which many of my inquires take, the oscillation between ideas and emotions, the investigation of our need to find meaning which leads to the theme of mythology and myth-making, itself another kind of frame and form which shapes and molds our perceptions of the world.”

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Saun Santipreecha is an interdisciplinary artist from Thailand who works in both visual and aural mediums. His artistic route in both disciplines began simultaneously, studying privately with two Thai Silpathorn Award recipients for Thai contemporary artists, visual artist Chalermchai Kositpipat and classical pianist/composer Nat Yontararak amongst other tutors and mentors. In 2008 he moved to Los Angeles where he pursued a career in music composition for film, collaborating with artists from multiple disciplines including fashion and video games while also working independently on projects culminating in the experimental album Dandelye (2022). His compositional work in film, TV, and fashion has been screened in over thirty film festivals worldwide including the Cannes Film Festival as well as at New York, Paris and LA Fashion Weeks. He has also worked in numerous capacities in the music department for a number of composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers and Abel Korzeniowski.

He had his debut solo exhibition as an artist in July, 2023 with his exhibition Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA. His first international solo exhibition, Per/formative Cities | A Nest of Triptychal Performances, engages with three novels by Italo Calvino through a multimedia sound installation (February 29 – March 15 in Rome, Italy). His second solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is titled ...These Things That Divide The World In Two... and coincides with his participation as a panel speaker at the 9th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society—Beckett and Justice—at California State University, Los Angeles (the exhibition is on view May 25 – June 22, 2024). Santipreecha’s first institutional exhibition, [O-I-RI-R], an installation in the (ADN) East German Guardhouse at the Wende Museum, is on view April 27 - September 15, 2024.

His work has been in various group exhibitions in Incheon National University, South Korea, New York, and Los Angeles, and he continues to work with artists and specialists across disciplines.

He is currently based in Los Angeles, CA.

{Biographical text courtesy of the artist.}

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[1] Underscoring the historical-aesthetic relation between (national) myth-making and normative emotional and—supposedly—subjective associations with tonal structure or tonality, the atonality of Santipreecha’s work is where he situates the possibility for imagining somewhere else beyond the readymade mythologies we inhabit through music, film, literature, and popular cultural media. (He is particularly critical of this relation between tonal structure in music or sound and nationalistic myth-making in the context of cinema and Hollywood film-making. In this context, film scores are almost always ideologically rendered through readymade tonal structures that situate a particular (bodily) subjective response to the combination of visual and aural content employed by the film. Think of the shrieking score for a horror movie versus a light-hearted soundtrack for a popular Romance-Comedy.)