JAY HORSBURGH, MELISSA MARRINS

Sub/Merge: SoNic CaLcuLAS(so)O

March 26, 1994

 

The next FLAT project, Sub/Merge: SoNic CaLcuLAS(so)O, was staged by Horsburgh and Marrins. The two had been working together for some time on collaborative works and texts at the commune where Marrins lived and they decided to organize a performance at the FLAT. The room remained blue and this provided a setting for what was to become a work that was both installation and performance. In the course of the event, the two artists built a complex environment, interacted with it, and then finally destroyed it.
As the audience entered, they encountered a 2 by 2 meter square of loose beach sand in the center of the room. Half buried were various objects including a plastic medical skeleton, a working lamp, a dead bird, animal organs and severed chicken legs - some bound in pairs. Written in the sand were words, such as “Submerge”. Beyond this ‘beachscape’, in one corner of the room was placed a mute television and video machine. A small table was set up near the site and latex sheets, like flayed skins, covered the windows.
The performance began when the artists each took a ball of sisal, and proceeded to string lengths across the entire room. Stringing it from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, they anchored the lines with plaster weights; criss-crossing, until a kind of ‘web’ was formed. The audience at this stage was held back by this ‘barrier’ and so viewed the construction/performance from the periphery.
As the stringing action continued, the pattern of lines in the space became dense. Horsburgh and Marrins then began to hang clear plastic bags from the string with clothes pegs. Inside the bags, that numbered somewhere around fifty, were items that ranged from chicken body parts and fluids to photographs and cut out images from various sources. While hanging these, they also scattered onto the floor squares of paper that appeared to be cut fragments of text and images from a notebook - perhaps from their collaborative writing exercises. Resting on a table were two jugs filled with animal blood, and Marrins at some point poured small pools from these jugs into the sand. After the pouring, the jugs were placed precariously on the table, and were supported by the web of string.

When the ‘construction’ was complete, the ‘destruction’ of the webbing proceeded. A burning oil lamp was placed beneath the string that had been attached to one of the jugs and as it burned through, the jug spilled its contents onto the sandy floor. Horsburgh and Marrins, then each took burners and proceeded to sever all the string connections to the wall. The entire ‘structure’ slowly collapsed. Some items were then set afire, and the two joined the audience as we all sat in silence looking at the remains. The destruction of the installation brought the event to an end.
In some sense the installation at the ‘height’ of its construction, before the burning brought its collapse, formally resembled Duchamp’s work in the First Papers of Surrealism[1] exhibition in New York in 1942. Here he strung twine throughout the gallery, creating an installation that he called Spider web as an example of the ‘natural’ isolation of a carcass (pseudo-geometric) of infrathin. Duchamp’s “fantastic network of white cord” according to William Rubin, was, an installation which consisted of a maze of string, an Ariadne’s thread beyond which the pictures hung like secrets at the heart of the labyrinth.[2]

Duchamp had employed simple twine to create a drawing in space, and an environment that mapped and even interfered with the art works in the exhibition. Horsburgh and Marrins too built a network, a nerve-like circuit where flat works and objects could adhere like constellations.The building and destruction of the work, all in one evening, seemed to address the fugitive nature of connections and constructs, both physical and metaphoric.

Indeed, what was perhaps, most interesting about the collaborative efforts of Marrins and Horsburgh was the manner in which this event brought together what had been important features in each of their individual approaches. Though, it would be impossible, and unnecessary to identify each artist’s contribution, the lines between their individual practices are too blurred, it is interesting to note linkages to works each had done outside the collaboration.
The notion of the cut-ups, fragments brought together in an almost random fashion, was closely connected to Horsburgh’s literary strategies. Marrins, had long been interested in the referencing of the body and the use of a kind of ‘grotesque’ symbol. On one level, the installation / performance was formed out of methodical actions, fragments from written text and mechanically reproduced images. But it also contained within its rich vocabulary of images, animal parts and blood - visceral references to the body.
In discussion with MacKenny, Buster and Moe, we talked about some of the personal history that informed the work and its relation to Marrins’ later work.

MacKenny:    For me what happened here at this performance was largely intuitive. I think it was very much to do with her (Marrins’) relationship with Jay. Maybe you need to find her and ask her about that. I think it was like these two people trying to do this task which seemed very specific but at the same time rather random. There is a funny combination of the two languages – having a structure and then within the structure having a randomness occur. And so there was this kind of sense of two people being on the same endeavor but missing each other. For me Melissa’s concentration was so complete and so utter that she seemed to get into some kind of space that pushed her into another kind of head space… So she seemed far more emotionally involved in it and what I find interesting looking at these photographs now, is that I think that this piece is in fact the genesis of her later work. But the other later pieces seem to refer far more to an external world.

Allen:               What do you mean by that?
MacKenny:    I mean the language or the approbation of an external world. Melissa often used the feminist vocabulary. Like ‘body’! ‘Body’ is an issue, ‘body’ is constrained in a patriarchal society and so on. I mean she set the Mount Edgecombe work in an operating theatre. The whole notion of ‘body’ under stress, ‘body’ under duress and so on. She used a lot of external symbols or external contexts which a lot of feminists have used. And sometimes I think that students use that because it is an available vocabulary. But looking at this I think that those pieces came out of very personalized feelings which she then concretized more in the Mount Edgecombe piece which was very much about damaged ‘body’, but it was also a lot about healing. I mean she had cabinets of, I think, Ayuvedic medicines…[1]

Allen:               I remember it was almost vulgar.
MacKenny:    Ja, there was a funny combination of healing and damage. And one wasn’t sure which vocabulary was winning out. Some of the foodstuff that is meant to be healing, nourishing and nurturing, was rotting. The combination between inside and outside, operating theatre, healing whereas one was far more conscious of the incision and the blood… So there was a kind of unease between the two. Looking at this photo, and seeing words like “Submerge” in the sand, and this is a word you very often associate with water but its in sand here. The chicken-legs and the little packets; they would come up again in the Mount Edgecombe work later.

Allen:               He (Horsburgh), if I may… is an actor. He is always about performance.
Buster:             He’s performing and she’s experiencing - the performative versus the experiential. See I think that is very interesting because with performance you can almost look at two categories, in a way. When I’m talking to my students, they are never really quite sure if they are doing the performance as spectacle; performance as effect; as something that is observed. Or maybe it is not so interesting to observe it; maybe its not a whole lot to look at, but the performance has to do with a kind of experience. And I am fascinated that you have these partners, these two people participating in a performance doing the exact same thing physically. And yet what you guys are suggesting which I think is not so far off; is that it’s possible that you might have two performers operating simultaneously, but on two very different levels of consciousness. Which could even be part of the content of a work.
MacKenny:    I think it was, that was my reading of it.
Buster:             I also liked what you said about the way the string functioned - that the string didn’t fall with a big bang. It wasn’t about spectacle so much as it just reached this point where it just ‘sagged’.
Moe:                 Like if there was anything going on between them it collapsed. It just poofed out.
MacKenny:    It was almost like a non-event.
Buster:             Let me ask you this. In terms of theatrical strategies, in terms of a beginning, middle and end…what is interesting with Adrian Hermanides, is the same thing, it is duration, there is no beginning no crescendo, no climax. In a sense the climax of this was an anti-climax.
MacKenny:    Ja, definitely.
Allen:               What is quite interesting is I was trying to find some sources or similar work historically and I found this thing that Duchamp had done at some Surrealist exhibition in 1942…with string.
MacKenny:    Well the one thing that string did do, is eventually, it kept people out of the space.
Buster:             That was my other question, whether it was a sense of a web or a barrier?
MacKenny:    I think, eventually, it became their personal web, with all these things in it. Look at all the photographs there are no members of the audience standing inside. In the end everyone was kinda peering from the doorway and so on. But when the string had been burnt, of course, you were allowed back in.[1]

On a lighter note, Dan Cook, an Art History lecturer at the Technikon and art critic for The Sunday Tribune; had come to the performance, only to find an empty room. Upon seeing a pair of dirty underpants on the floor, he stormed off complaining that the gallery was “totally unprofessional.” Indeed, Marrins had given him an invitation, but he had failed to read it properly, and subsequently had arrived two hours too early.

Two examples of the cut-up cards distributed by Horsburgh and Marrins during the performance, 1994.

JAY HORSBRUGH MELISSA MARRINS 'Sub/Merge: SoNic CaLcuLAS(so)' installation & performance, 1994.