WE DO NOT DISPOSE OF RELIABLE CRITERIA… NOT YET
split carcasses. Gestures hover around bodies and they can go to the bone too, till you begin to doubt if you see with your own eyes at all. The opening lines of Dante’s Inferno are stuck to the floor in front of the Caro simulacrum: Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself with a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost. The loss of the “straightforward pathway” is also a loss of progress
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and linearity, a loss that wins the future. Trembling or with a shrug, control and certainty can be undone when life turns out to be precarious and unpredictable. This condition holds new possibilities: once the desire for overview or master narrative is renounced, confusion can become something generative, an orientation toward something different to come that refuses to be reduced to positive knowledge. Getting lost is an adventure when it happens on the way to non-arrival.
Pages 56–57: The Master-Slave Dialectic, 2012. Installation view: Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, 2012
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