Robert Ladislas Derr Day In, Day Out Gem Center for the Arts September 9 – October 21, 2019 Artist’s Talk September 9, 7pm Robert Ladislas Derr with Ralph Clare
Every Body in the Any Day: Robert Ladislas Derr’s Day In, Day Out. Ralph Clare “Life is a habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.” Samuel Beckett, Proust
“We do not know what a body can do.” Spinoza
The artist’s body often plays a significant role in performance art, and art history has produced some astonishing instances to bear this out. In Shoot (1971) Chris Burden is shot in the arm by a rifle at close range. Rhythm O (1974) starred Marina Abramović inviting the audience to do anything to her for three hours using a number of selected objects (and they do). In Seedbed (1972), a concealed Vito Acconci masturbates in a gallery while his verbal fantasies are broadcast to visitors. Cage Piece (1978-9) featured Tehching Hsieh willingly spending a year in a wooden cage without speaking or reading. Such extreme examples of early performance art are concerned with endurance, both psychologically and bodily. What Walter Benjamin called “the wreckage upon
wreckage” of history, however, has plenty of examples of what the body can be made to endure if it must: wars, genocides, natural disasters, racism, sexism, sickness, and death. Humans, individually and collectively, can bear the worst when it comes to it. Yet what about putting up with the dull sameness of the everyday, the not-sotragic? Robert Ladislas Derr’s video performance piece, Day In, Day Out, is less interested with the body enduring the singular and more with how it perseveres through the everyday, the anything but spectacular. We all have our daily routine that we think gives sensible meaning to our lives, even if we’re half bored to death by it. After all, “habit is a great deadener,” as Samuel Beckett puts it in Waiting for Godot (1952), a play in which two homeless men waste time while waiting for some God-like dude Godot who never shows up. Ironically, habit shields us from boredom and despair, gives us something to fill the void of Time-unto-Death, but it also deadens us to new possibilities. Derr, similar to Beckett, strips daily life and the body down to the absurd bareness of their bones. What exactly, Derr asks, is a day; how do we make meanings out of it; and what about the body that traverses it all? 1.Day: Seating Arrangement. Naked man in chair hops up and down road, propelled by self. It’s work that fills up our lives, if not lending them full meaning then giving us some money to buy the things that supposedly will. But if you’ve ever sat in a chair at a
desk, whether at work or school, you know very well the feeling of just going through the motions, many of which are an idiotic waste of time. In other words, you may feel like you’re just hopping pointlessly down an endless road from anyhere to anythere. Time slows down, seems to stretch endlessly out ahead of you. One tick of the clock, one jump of the chair. And isn’t that cornfield just the same backdrop going by like in an old Scooby-Doo cartoon? There’s no mystery to be solved here, however, no mask to be pulled off, only what T.S. Eliot in his poem “Prufrock” called “a face to meet the faces that you meet,” which, like in that old Twilight Zone episode, has now become your permanent face. It’s difficult to be optimistic in such situations, hard to think “creatively” when “creativity” is now a job skill (thinking outside the box is the new box, ask any mime). And it’s pretty hard to “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” when you’re just trying to get by, jumping yourself along by your own chair legs. Yet Derr’s chairman nonetheless displays a doggedness, an inventiveness, using his chair in an original way. It’s painful, a real slog, but so is work. And this is his. Because how bizarre is a naked man hopping himself along the road on a chair? How does one impossibly become a perpetual motion machine, a fucking magician able to levitate oneself against the very laws of physics? The body, Derr shows us, can adopt and adapt, and one can reinvent the chair, rethink a “seating arrangement.” This doesn’t mean designing a more comfortable ergonomic seat for profit. Derr shows how a chair-man assemblage, this balancing partnership, can be less
conforming and more about rearranging the body, the chair, and what “use” means. In: The Object is the Path. Naked man at daybreak digs hole, plants ladder, climbs up, surveys. The day begins. It’s a threshold. Because what is a day, really? The truth is we don’t know. We can’t know. To know would be to limit what a day could be, and suddenly those days ahead look the crying same as they do now. Remember, there have been other clocks on this earth, other calendars, other ways of marking and experiencing time than ours. As Marx saw long ago, ours is a capitalist clock, the time of labor, and it alienates us from what appears to be a “natural” day, the one influenced by those sun and moon rhythms that beat back and coax the tides this-a-way and that. The one Derr’s body is staring at now. So what of nature? Derr’s nude body is staged in nature, but this nature is estranged, neutral at best. The birds sing on, the bugs buzzing just because. There is no nostalgia here for the pastoral, for pure nature and harmony of time, which leads to vacation-packaged nature on the time-share. The body here has already transformed nature with the ladder (and a chair and a candle) and irrevocably altered the landscape and the body within it. Yet the body is always already in some kind of tune with the day, if not melodiously, then atonally.
Derr also presents the body “naturally,” the nudity emphasizing the body’s vulnerability. After all, the body is a human thing among other things, a fairly soft, porous mass, punctured with holes, and taking in and emitting fluids and solids. It’s gendered too, and we should note that Derr’s is a white, male, able body. It is not a universal body, to be sure, for certain bodies cannot access this world’s ladders so easily (hierarchical and phallic as they are) and reach a place of mastery. But here an object, a ladder, becomes a path to nowhere, to everywhere. Derr’s body suggests, by becoming-shovel and becoming-odd-creature, the potential of what a body, not the body, can be and what new vistas it may open up. 3.Night: Safe Space. Naked man in forest, heels-overhead, candle in ass, lights it. Nothing could be more irrational and, well, funny, than a candle sticking out of an upside-down guy’s ass in the middle of a forest. But what’s so rational about our world, with its nonstop humdrum feed of kitten memes, Twitter news, reality TV show presidents, and routine mass shootings? What kind of safe space for enlightenment is that? Why not look to other kinds of enlightenment instead, by embracing the night, curling cautiously inward, cultivating the irrational, the good kind of chaos that comes from recognizing the inherent flux and instability of what we call our selves and the universe— both of which can potentially be otherwise. So Derr’s is not a Freudian night: a dream-symbolic affair ruled by the unconscious where our repressed desires
rise to the surface while we’re clocked out. We see a monster in a dark forest, but it’s really just a twisted version of our other self that we’d rather not face, like Luke Skywalker staring himself down at Yoda’s Spa. Nor is it a psychic-religious comeuppance as in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which sinful souls are contorted into stranger things, one with a flute protruding from his rear end. Derr’s night is not these nights because, in the former, the body can only be enwombed and triangulated, yearning for a mother’s love, despising the father’s Oedipal prohibition. And in the latter it’s penalized and punished, begging a god’s forgiveness too late. These bodies come straight from suburban civilization and all its daily discontents. We want a body without organizing structures instead. We want what Deleuze and Guattari call a “body without organs.” The BwO is not a mindless zombie, an empty husk stuck in the mindless work and shopping routine, but a body Derr has been gesturing toward: one that scrambles our perceptions of the “normal” body, perseveres by adapting and adopting on the fly, by blurring the distinction between bodies (human and nonhuman), and by challenging what a day can actually be and what a body can be in it. The body is always becoming, perpetually changing, in each phase of Day In, Day Out. It is not acting like a body we know, it is acting “out” and becoming something else. In Derr’s night, the candle, long a symbol of enlightenment, doesn’t come to chase the shadows out, to crush darkness with logic, but to allow this morphing
body to shape itself and the day differently and with a strange beauty. Witness this body and the day merge together “unnaturally” in a novel and weird fashion. Gestation here is permanent revolution. As the day is altered so is the body, each extending and flickering in ways that might challenge the capitalist 9 to 5. This body truly, as Derr’s image suggests, burns the candle at both ends. Out: If the sections of this essay have blurred into one another, then good. This essay’s “organization” is like the seemingly discrete “parts” of the day, like Derr’s overlapping videos that suggest the day’s randomness, its potential to be otherwise. There are many thresholds here, many twilights, where ends and beginnings merge, revealing not the shadowy otherworld of our reality but how the present is vestigial, a virtual residual effect of the past that is really happening now. Time’s not a-wasting, it’s right in front of you. So how can we make the day ours again? Try this: Don’t seize the day, don’t just do it, don’t follow slogans. Get up after noon, don’t do anything, follow and intensify feeling. Don’t be “useful” to a dangerous system, be useless, embrace the kind of uselessness that reveals a “use” not tied to profit. Don’t find “your”self, lose the self. Find a chair, grab a ladder, light a candle for no particular reason. Do like Derr: make your “self’ into a ladder, a candleholder, a chair-person not of the board or the bored but like some kind of half-mad wooden centaur
hopping down the road, a contemporary Trojan Horse. Go ahead, look that old wooden Horse in the mouth because maybe art’s all a big joke, or maybe it’s just dangerous as fuck.
The Object is the Path 2017, single-channel video (vertical), color, sound, 00:12:48 The Object is the Path metaphorically takes Derr on a different path. During sunrise on a beach, he digs out the sand deep enough to erect and hold a ladder in the air, and climbs up and over it. As he scales the ladder, the sun’s rays emanating from behind his body creates an ethereal effect.
Seating Arrangement 2017, single-channel video, color, sound, 00:08:19 At high noon, under a cerulean sky with white puffy clouds, Seating Arrangement presents Derr hopping an institutional chair across the frame in a linear score on a loop. Following the edge of the road along a verdant cornfield, the chair’s screeching contact with the street arrests the ear as distressful signals.
Safe Space 2017, single-channel video, color, sound, 00:20:30 The idea of a safe space for the marginalized has suffered misuse by groups attempting to suppress free speech and differing views. Derr addresses safe space through an escape to lush woodland at dusk; nineteenth century conservationist John Muir suggested, “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest.� Performing the yoga Plow Pose for twenty minutes, the length corresponds with the suggested time for meditation. Marking time, a candle inserted in his anus burns for the duration as dusk slips into night.
ROBERT LADISLAS DERR Select Performances 2018 Un_Becoming, SomoS Art House, Berlin, Germany 2019 Ball Breaker, Experimental Action Festival, Houston, TX 2016 Dribble Score #1 White, #2 Black & White, and #3 White & Black, Interlude, Media Arts Project and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC 2013 Chance: Canberra, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, Australia 2007 Chance: Vancouver, LIVE Performance Art Biennale, Vancouver, BC, Canada
2012 Beneath a Petroliferous Moon, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, SK, Canada E Il Topo Magazine Launch, White Box, New York, NY 2009 The End of Oil, Exit Art, New York, NY Playing the City, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany 2006 PRC/POV: Photography Now and the Next 30 Years, Photographic Resource Center, Boston University, Boston, MA 2002 Looking In, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY
Select Solo Exhibitions 2013 Face Book: A Social Experience, Raygun Contemporary Art Projects, Toowoomba, Australia 2012 In My Shoes: Dublin, Centre for Creative Practices, Dublin, Ireland 2009 Structures and Strictures, Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn, NY 2003 Intellectual Economy, CAVE, Brooklyn, NY 2000 Eger, Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA Select Group Exhibitions 2019 FotoFocus, The Carnegie, Covington, KY Art in Country of Tokyo, VideoBardo, Shikine Island, Kouzu Island, and Tokyo, Japan
Robert Ladislas Derr is known for performances from live to intervention and multimedia installations, which have been presented around the world. His work has been in 35 solo shows/screenings, over 225 group exhibitions/screenings, and is in 21 collections. From 2004-2016, he taught in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University, and served in such administrative capacities as Undergraduate Chair. In 2016, he left OSU to chair the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Department of Art & Art History, then led the formation of the School of Art, Art History & Design as the first Director, where he is presently a Professor. His service includes roles with the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, College Art Association, and New Media Caucus. He earned his MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, attended the Photography Institute National Graduate Seminar at New York University, and BFA in Photography from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. www.robertladislasderr.com
RALPH CLARE Ralph Clare is Associate Professor of English at Boise State University, specializing in post-45 American literature. He is the author of Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2014) and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace (Cambridge UP, 2018). His latest book project, Metaffective Fiction: Structuring Feeling in Contemporary American Literature, explores the role of emotion and affect in fiction of the neoliberal era.
Imprint This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Robert Ladislas Derr Day In, Day Out Gem Center for the Arts September 9 – October 21, 2019 The Gem Center for the Arts is a hub that fosters creativity and innovation through the visual and performing arts. Gem Center for the Arts 2417 W. Bank Drive Boise, Idaho 83705 (208) 991-0984 info@gemcenterforthearts.com www.gemcenterforthearts.com Printed in the US Photos: Ó Robert Ladislas Derr Cover: The Object is the Path, 2017, Performance view by A L Foglesong The work is subject to copyright. All rights reserved, whether the whole or parts of the material is concerned, especially those of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, broadcasting, reproduction by photocopying machines or similar means, and storage in data banks.