A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench
2013–2014

A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench consists of a suite of 11,460 cyanotypes produced over the course of a year. The work was commissioned and initially installed from floor to ceiling in the Curve Gallery of the Barbican Centre in London.

The Cyanotype Process:
The cyanotype is one of the earliest photographic processes, discovered by John Herschel in 1842 and used primarily to reproduce technical diagrams, an application that continued into the mid-twentieth century. Cyanotype chemistry is a UV reactive solution comprised of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate, and will bond to any cellulose material, such as paper, cardboard, wood, plant-based fabrics and textiles. The process requires very little infrastructure and no chemistry other than the sensitizing liquid itself. The object being imaged is placed on the cyanotype-sensitized material, and then exposed to direct sunlight; the material is then “processed” by simply running it under regular tap water, producing a reversed silhouette of the object that was placed on its surface.

Material Conditions and Production:
The byproducts of the production of the studio, from failed darkroom prints to texts, discarded mail, frame remnants, invoices, prescriptions, bank statements, and various other detritus (including the working drafts of the proposal for the exhibition) were used as a substrate for the cyanotypes. The objects (those used and exhausted either directly or indirectly in the daily productive life of the studio or that of the artist) were then imaged upon the sensitized material (the materials covered in the cyanotype liquid). The result is an expansive archive of all the materials and objects that flowed through the studio over the course of one year leading up to the first presentation of the work at the Barbican Centre in London.

The cyanotypes were made each day the studio was operational, and the number made per day depended on how much waste the studio produced in a given day. The works are installed in chronological order, and on the backs of each individual object the date is marked. For the Barbican Centre installation, a viewing platform emphasized the panoramic qualities of the space, as well as the 19th century origins of the museum, the photographic process, and the panorama itself. The cyanotypes were photographed, front and back, and printed in large bound volumes at 1:2 scale, to allow closer examination by visitors, and as a document of each object in the installation.

The production moved between two sites, first in the artist’s studio in Los Angeles, and culminated on-site at the Barbican Centre where the last group of cyanotypes was made with materials scavenged from the museum operations in the run-up to the exhibition. The cyanotypes also include topical ephemeral objects, such as newspapers and periodicals that the artist and his staff were reading while producing the work. The work can literally be read in relationship to its time, and to its making, creating an imprint of the world around it, as it images its own production.

Transparency and the Studio:
The work was an attempt to make a wholly transparent picture, one which accounted for all the productive forces involved in constructing a work. The studio itself is a node in a network of relations that support and disseminate artistic practice, and can be understood as a large picture making machine, an apparatus which creates an integrated arrangement of people, raw material, and machinery with the purpose of producing aesthetic objects, and further involves both concrete and immaterial (i.e. social) forms of labor. Neither the studio nor the artist are the subject of the work, rather they are a lens or mechanism designed to reflect the world in some way. All depictions are the result of the tools used to make them, and thus all depictions are provisional, distorted by the means of their making, no matter how totalizing or objective they might present themselves to be.

The Archival Impulse:
The photograph, the museum and the encyclopaedia each arise from an impulse to capture and order the world in microcosmic form. The logic of the archival impulse always reaches an inflection point between rationality and mania, its logic can extend to the point where it becomes irrational in its desire for completeness. Archives tend to reveal more about the desire to archive, the anxiety of loss, than about the objects within them, just as the act of possession divulges more about the drive to possess something than about the object of its focus; each are insatiable desires, they are never fully consummated, they simply move on to other objects once the current one is exhausted. This work reflects the museological drive toward completeness and accessibility: the desire to document, as well as the impulse to splay time out along a linear axis, to lay it bare and stroll along it like a promenade, to gaze at it as a horizon, and the fantasy, the suspension of disbelief required to think that it is even possible to capture and hold static the world around us for our leisurely inspection.

Exhibition:
The complete work A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench is comprised of 10,076 objects, occupying 14,451 square feet of wall space. Should the exhibitor of the work not have enough wall space to display the entire work, the resulting exhibition should be amended with the prefix “Abstract of:”. For any display of the work in less than its complete form, the work should be displayed proportionally by date (i.e. if the display space has 60% of the wall space needed, each day of the work should include 60% of the objects produced on that day).

Encyclopedia:
The cyanotypes were photographed front and back and printed in large bound volumes at 1:2 scale. There are 52 volumes in the encyclopedia of the work, which also includes daily newspaper clippings selected by the artist and studio from materials being read at the time. These selections were made on the day of their publication.

Inventions Without a Future:
The title of the project “A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench” is drawn verbatim from a lecture delivered by Hollis Frampton at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. In short, the title refers to a lecture within a lecture, an absent figure that contains the speculative horizon of the ideas he is speaking about, operating en abyme. Within this talk, Frampton muses about the lecture he planned to give, but decided against. Instead, he offers a title for this absent lecture, and a brief summary of its subject, the use of outmoded media. The lecture was to be a discussion of the importance of antiquated technologies and how their out-datedness allows them to be understood more clearly (i.e. denaturalizing them), and opens them up to a multitude of meanings. In Frampton’s case, this was, on its first face, an indirect defense of cinema at the time when video was becoming dominant, but his argument has much more far reaching implications than this: refuting the neutrality of any technological medium. The title of this phantom lecture alludes to the origins of the medium and its inevitable obsolescence. In addition, it also calls forward the question of the role objects play when they have ceased being contemporary and ubiquitous. Wrenched by time from their intended use, these objects run the risk of becoming nostalgic, the object becoming the focus of contemplation in both historical and poetic terms. Yet, this obsolescence points to the impeding obsolescence of all media. In this sense, this archive of objects situated around aesthetic production (i.e. the production of the work and the productive network surrounding it) are also relegated to the world of relics, of 19th century museums (the museum being part of the historical trajectory of the cyanotype itself), and the archive, which is here turned in on itself, documenting its own production, its own cultural and social life. Even as the archive of objects represents a full accounting of studio activities, it presents no single definitive narrative or explanation. As Frampton put it in that lecture, “The supreme ritual of our time… is the ritual of possession, the creation of possessible things, the conservation of the possessible, the ritual process by which the things of the world and then their reproductions or representations are validated so that they can become ownable, so that they can become possessible. I would point out in passing that we are engaged here today in a fairly complex variation on exactly that ritual in an edifice [the Whitney Museum] that that houses all manner of validated, possessible works of art, I believe they are called.”

It bears noting that Frampton’s phrase “an Invention without a Future” is a quotation of Louis Lumière, one of the earliest innovators of cinema. What does it mean to be at the beginning of cinema and speculate on its obsolescence? This proposal is for a work that duplicates, or self-narrates its own coming into being and obsolescence. The objects become open to polysemy in a way that was barred when they were inseparable from their use (as Walter Benjamin put it, the act of collecting frees its object from “the drudgery of being useful”), now comprising an archive that collects its own production, that contains itself as a specimen, splayed out as a vast panorama, a kind of vivisection of its process, and the extended context that it is a part of.

Titling conventions:

A final description of the full work shown in its entirety, for example one that would appear on a wall didactic in an exhibition space, will read:

A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench (9 October 2013–8 October 2014)
2014
Ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide on cellulose-based material, 10,076 pieces
Bound letterpress and digital offset print volumes, 52 pieces
Dimensions variable

When a percentage of the full work is shown, the title will read:

Abstract of A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench (9 October 2013–8 October 2014)
2014 [with the date of the work updated to the year of exhibition]
Ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide on cellulose-based material
Bound letterpress and digital offset print volumes
Dimensions variable

Prologue:
For five weeks leading up to the production of the work, a separate work was produced, as a test of the process and organization that would be implemented to track and document the main work. This stand-alone work is comprised of 1,384 cyanotypes and 7 corresponding encyclopedic volumes, and is exhibited with the following title:

Prologue to A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench (1 August–8 October 2013)
2014
Ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide on cellulose-based material, 1,384 pieces
Bound letterpress and digital offset print volumes, 7 pieces
Dimensions variable