Cover Art
Cover Art | ABOUT 26 SQUARES
Artist Statement
aecruse@ucsc.edu
The cover of this Catalyst issue is in conversation with the Special Section on Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture. The image depicts process-pieces from ABOUT 26 SQUARES (2021-ongoing), a multimedia-dance work developed and performed by DROUGHT SPA, the project I share with artist/composer Kevin CK Lo. As this work examines the function and weaponization of metaphor in the context of tenancy and economic oppression, it also explores the creative and collaborative potential of other-than-human life forms.
Inspiration for its title came from About Two Squares, a 1922 illustrated suprematist tale by Russian avant gardist El Lissitzky, which uses a red and a black square to allegorize revolutions in content and form (El Lissitzky 1922). The ABOUT 26 SQUARES project began with 26 microscope slides (‘squares’) upon which citrus molds were cultivated, using the juice of fruit taken from my landlady’s front lawn. As artists living in the Bay Area, we are interested in how the presence of fruit trees increases the value of this private property, and how landlords enjoy the fruits of tenants’ reproductive labor as their mortgages are paid off in full – if not in excess – each month.
The shapes assumed by these mold samples were then photographed and digitally represented as an alphabet of 26 abstract glyphs. During the performance, these shapes are projected in a rapid cycle against a wall, next to which the dancer moves. When the cycle is interrupted and a glyph displayed at random, it forms part of a movement script that guides the dancer to a specific location—a type of insectile dance-language. In this way, aleatory interactions between the machine and non-/sentient life literally and symbolically structure the human’s patterns of movement.
The material substrate upon which this performance takes place – a length of black fabric – invokes ‘telling the bees,’ a nineteenth century European beekeeping tradition of telling one’s hives of events and changes in the household. Beekeepers would inform their bees of deaths by placing a piece of black cloth over the apiary. Failing to honor one’s role in this two-way interspecies communication would ensure a nonproductive hive. To this end, our project evaluates how metaphor and abstraction interpolate the labor processes of humans and other animals. The project’s textual dimension also highlights this. Writing in white ink, throughout the dance I transcribe directly onto the crepe coded fragments linked to each glyph, with topics ranging from ecological crisis to predatory finance (in which real estate plays a crucial role), to the real subsumption of aesthetics to capital.
In the darkened performance space, backgrounded by Lo’s experimental electronic composition, video feedback and other visuals produced via computer vision can be seen. These iterative and unpredictable patterns of mold growth were reproduced and collaged for the Catalyst cover, as well as the two additional examples seen here: though the forms remain functionally unrecognizable, their enclosure within boxes of red or green hint at computer vision identification training. Digital scans have also been combined with footage of the mold in situ.
Against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we return to the work of Lissitzky. Though he was initially supportive of the goals of the October Revolution, and remained heavily inspired by technologies of an emergent industrial era, towards the end of his life Lissitzky began producing socialist realist propaganda for the Soviet state. Instructive here is the idea that, as artists, we must continuously question the metaphors yoked to particular phases of technology and the larger, oppressive narratives they serve. Or, as editors T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault note in this Special Section's introduction, “metaphor has power to materialize and dematerialize.” ABOUT 26 SQUARES contends that through novel forms of collaboration and communication, metaphor's power can be wrested from the State, towards horizons of revolutionary possibility.
Figure 1. ABOUT 26 SQUARES 1. A rectangular digital collage whose foreground depicts a square containing dynamic and abstract color fields. Cobalt purple tyrian dominates most of the frame, accented by airbrushed red, turquoise, and deep royal blue. These colors, textured in places and dissolving almost to transparency, are intersected by three amorphous forms in bright yellow and orange. These viscous shapes could read as slime molds, or archipelagos viewed from above. Behind the foreground square are faint, digital artifacts in purple and teal arranged across a field of muted yellow-gray.
Figure 2. ABOUT 26 SQUARES 2. A portrait-oriented rectangular digital photo collage in somber hues of black, charcoal, and a swirling array of electric blues. Central to the image is a rectangle–what is actually a microscope slide but could be a door or metallic monolith. Its surface reveals two faint boundary lines of two semi-transparent enclosed shapes; at the center of each shape we see a darker patina of deep gray, transparent enough to reveal the blue underneath. Invading the rectangle at the bottom-left and upper-right corners grow chaotic fields of black and white, created using edge detection algorithm.
Figure 3. ABOUT 26 SQUARES 3. A portrait-oriented rectangular digital photo collage in somber hues of black, charcoal, and a swirling array of electric blues. Central to the image is a rectangle–what is actually a microscope slide but could be a door or metallic monolith. Its surface reveals two faint boundary lines of two semi-transparent enclosed shapes; at the center of each shape we see a darker patina of deep gray, transparent enough to reveal the blue underneath. Invading the rectangle at the bottom-left and upper-right corners grow chaotic fields of black and white, created using edge detection algorithm.
References
El Lissitzky. About Two Squares. Berlin: Scythians, 1922.
Author Bio
alex cruse is an Oakland-based writer, artist, and educator whose work synthesizes the disciplines of poetry, video, installation, and new media. Since 2016 cruse has worked as Gallery Curator for Artists’ Television Access. Her artist website can be found at: https://alexcruse.xyz/.