#surfaceplan

Matfield Outpost Reference

the outside of the left side of the inside

Installed at City Ice Arts, Kansas City, MO     August 2014

In preparation for this installation, in studio rehearsals and constructions I have been thinking of this work in a broad set of frameworks.

I have been thinking of stagecraft – temporary and malleable quasi architecture. In this fiction/scenario the stage is set, but the performance is on hold, its tempo is at an idle. We are acting inside of this idle pace with our own cadence, backstage, milling around, observing. I am tinkering with the idea of interludes.

 The situation is absolutely kinetic. Paul Virillio speaks of a condition of chrono-diversity – a variety of rhythms and paces that compose our reality. He argues that our philosophies and social structures have been unable to explain that “speed is not a phenomenon but the relationship between phenomena.”[1] This calls for an adjustment to the idea of composition, one that accounts for a collection of different velocities (“a musicology”[2]), one that is both meta and provisional.

 I have also been thinking of architecture. The stagecraft here references Raumplan, the practice of the architect Adolph Loos that focused on the organization of rooms as three-dimensional spaces, avoiding the floorplan as an organizing principle. I am thinking of “plane-plan” as a way, not of resolving space, but of playing with our movement through it.

Plane-plan. Surface-plan. I have been thinking about a full-scale working model built of surface.

“Plane-plan” is at once the slippage from the resolved Raumplan into the provisional, and the addition of a meta-dimension to the 2D form of the floor plan, yet somehow less than the 3rd dimension. 2.9D.  2.9D inside a 4D space/time that is on hold. Sort of.

And I have been thinking of painting – a process of finding through making. Of course, paint is involved here, but the reference for me goes beyond materials and requires us to consider all discernable elements, including references, as potentially formal, to be fine tuned into a cohabitation of the site, and of the moment however provisional it might be. I am thinking of the process of painting, not the conclusion.

I am aware of moments layering into histories along with the compression of their details. And I am aware of the material equivalent, the compression of layers into surface and the compression of surfaces into sensation.

James Woodfill,

August, 2014

[1] Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, (semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA, 2012), 26.