Dou­ble Infinitives

“That music be heard is not essen­tial – what it sounds like may not be what it is” (Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata).

The propo­si­tion of Jacques Attali’s Noise is dif­fer­ent. He says that while noise is a dead­ly weapon, silence is death.

– David Rat­tray, How I Became One of the Invis­i­ble. Semiotext(e), 1992.

The explo­sive com­mu­nal act of riot­ing is most com­mon­ly deliv­ered to an audi­ence sus­pend­ed in the still­ness and silence of a pho­to­graph­ic image. Noise is not removed in this process, it is almost ampli­fied: the sound and action that deliv­er this sin­gu­lar­ly cap­tured moment into exis­tence are infi­nite, as all things remain while they are imag­ined, before they are anchored down by express articulation.

Pho­to­graph­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion can eas­i­ly be accused of sub­vert­ing the truth of events, not because what is seen in the image has not tran­spired, but because sta­t­ic images leave so much space around them for mul­ti­ple nar­ra­tives to be con­struct­ed. The still image is total­ly con­tin­gent on the con­scious­ness that con­fronts it. By con­trast, the near-total­i­ty of videos can give too much away…

Sourced by Fusina­to from print media pub­lished in the last few years, these images of riot­ing all con­tain an indi­vid­ual clutch­ing a rock, bathed in the refrac­to­ry glow of a near­by fire. The image has become pro­to­typ­i­cal, so much so that it lacks the sen­sa­tion of spon­tane­ity req­ui­site to pro­duce a riot. (Apro­pos to this pre­dictabil­i­ty, Fusina­to would check glob­al news­pa­pers after every forum or con­fer­ence of glob­al finan­cial author­i­ties, often find­ing the image he was look­ing for).

Dou­ble Infini­tives is a suc­cinct alle­go­ry for the reluc­tance to com­pro­mise com­fort over­pow­er­ing rad­i­cal impuls­es. Con­ver­sa­tions sug­gest this is a con­flict fre­quent­ly expe­ri­enced by artists. Deprived of a volatile polit­i­cal real­i­ty, we expe­ri­ence rad­i­cal­ism through images that act as small rup­tures, reminders that the world we live in might be more severe­ly charged than our indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences allow. Fusina­to’s works flat­ten these images of volatil­i­ty onto a smooth slate: they are sim­i­lar and radi­ate with the vexed beau­ty of same­ness. A riot is a mad and bru­tal spec­ta­cle, a the­atre that is often doc­u­ment­ed as if it were a play. Huge­ly expand­ed in scale and ren­dered in the suf­fused gloss of adver­tis­ing, the real pos­si­bil­i­ty of vio­lence that these works infer deep­ens the lay­ers of the fic­tion rather than com­pris­ing an indi­ca­tor of human con­cern. Those things with which we come into such gen­tle con­tact that their thorns bare­ly prick…

Liv Bar­rett, June 2009