Monkey’s Fist
By throwing the monkey’s fist it creates a liminal space through drawing and movement established with spatial ideas concerning sculpture, installation and performance and ultimately deals with low key aspects of contemporary art which end up as curtailed wisps on the edge.
Peg Rawes would refer to these as Acts of construction espousing the relationship between aesthetic judgement, space and geometry and link the transcendental intuition of space with the constructive powers of geometry. It is this relationship that I am encircled by and one intrinsic to understanding the properties that the fist represents. Particularly as the fist itself is made up of the Borrmean Rings underlying both folk, knot lore and intrinsically linked to hyperbolic geometry. Ellipses rather than geometric perfect circles, the rings are not linked but only linked as an entirety. Therefore the spatial construct is both within the fist and surrounded in the momentum that could be provided by an act of construction which moves us from the transcendental to a thinking, embodied and sensing subject .
So basically I can catch a fist, throw it, entwine it and use it singly or in multiples. I prefer the latter, a mass of lines, volume and shifting at once. This is my response to Adam Cluely insitgator of this challenge – that is my choreographic/ installation proposal.
I have been drawn to the short narratives of Primo Levi’s character Faussone who works on a rig in ‘the Monkey’s Wrench’ a solid tool epitomizing the modern world of construction and straight lines. Whilst the fist may bend and make arcs in a throw, equally it draws tight once connected with it’s conjoining component. The balance between suspension to tension offers the flight before the fixing. The high rises of the 20’s recall suspended girders and workers working without harnesses at crazy heights and buldings are now erected from fused pieces to fit like a jigsaw. New developments with Hadid’s architecture bring in waves and curves along boulevards. Meanwhile the geometric rig echoes within stage sets and outdoor theatre. It has been drawn again in Ellen Gallagher’s climbing frame at Tate Modern and Sol Lewitt’s open structures recall the modernist approach to construction.
A suspended thrown and performed rig, whilst an imaginative act at the most, at this point twists round the knots of the modern built environments fixings and solidity, writhes against the blank faces of glass buildings, recalls the performance of space of labourers and artists and in its fall into some place – embodies the weight of our own bodies bound to the ground despite Icarus dreams. The final tension can offer the tension between our moving and bodily existence caught within the restrictions and freedoms our built environment offers us.
All at once there might exist, briefly, a rig in the air. But this seems unsatisfactory and merely decorative of the rope itself. The thing is the knot the thud, the wrap, the tension, the pull and the lever all of which need to be present. If this is done amongst a giving surface, the thud of the knot as it lands will leave a trace of this bridging and map of the temporary rig. The cracks and splits the drying, rendering and violence caused by each attempt to bridge a gap.
In many cultures pieces of paper, cloth are knotted to ropes. I have often wavered over the use of these and ultimately rejected them but they offer a symbolism to tentativeness which mark borders where there is conflict, borders of division and so since the Monkey’s Fist is the most basic of bridges, the most tentative similalry I see the ropes of the fist covered on fluttering cloth markers acting as buoys for this moving apparition.
In commenting on borders and edges the act of occupying one of these does not amount to a specific site but a specific type of site. I do not want the stage but a geometric space of a space constructed through this act to make a space clearly divided on the an edge.
Lobbing the Fist back to you Adam..
