Colleen Asper ‘Nobody/Monobody’

Monobody: It seems as though the paintings here are presenting a minimal performance of painting and its attendant business of showing. A body producing rectangles and showing them to an audience. They have a lean, stripped-down quality, like something from Beckett’s theatre. Let’s take a look at the stage directions.

Nobody [enters left]: We have here nothingness and pure difference. Clearly nobody is the monochrome in this particular schema. [Nobody turns to the audience.] The monochrome appears as a universal form because it addresses no one. In presenting nothing, it can represent us all.

Monobody: I cannot abide by the idea of the “monochrome” creating an empty space in the pile of trash the rest of us are producing. No. The universal condition of modernity is the opposite—it is an infinite accumulation of garbage. Trash piling up. The monochrome has long been a component of this pile. The baroque is, and remains, the condition of modern universality.

Nobody: The infinity of which you speak is merely more and more of the same, but it has a limit and a beyond. While the universal may be invaginated, this invagination will always appear as a cut, never an accumulation. You remind us, however, that empty space is the condition of all desire.

Monobody: The silkiness of the gloves. The anonymity provided by the panel. The uniformity of the changing colors as though the entire scene is taking place under shifting colored lights. And what about the implied presentation to come? The opening? When the author hidden behind the panel is revealed? What will happen then? There is a dark seduction in this infinite regress of presentation and representation.

Nobody: To be the object of the gaze is to be de facto represented—an actress and a double. No wonder representation is cast as a degradation of an original and theater associated with the feminine. The monochrome can appear as neuter no longer! The feminized monochrome is represented and doubled, and in the space between the first and second {sex} is the body. [Nobody walks behind Monobody.] But do not assume the author has appeared, or that she has anything to reveal. Now that the artist has presented the rectangle, she can use it to represent bodies that are not her own.

Monobody: So the artist is a woman. I won’t say I told you so, but…

Nobody: Structured like a stage set apart by curtains or a vagina framed by labia, representation is always already performative. When we leave the gallery, we will still be actresses.

Monobody: That makes sense. Let me get my purse and we’ll go.

 

Nobody played by Colleen Asper. Monobody played by Justin Lieberman.

 

On Stellar Rays (press release)