Milne, Louise

English

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“Dukatenscheißer”Solo Exhibition Douglas Henderson9/4--10/17/2009Songs Upon the Air-Loom -Douglas Henderson’s Dukatenscheißer and Other WorksLouise MilneThe Dukatenscheißer – excretor of ducats – is a figure from folk-lore. Candy mannikens in this form are sold in sweet shops across the region of wider Germanic culture, from the Netherlands to Bohemia. In folktales, the Dukatenscheißer is a cousin of the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs and the Gold-excreting Donkey; unlike these two, it is a proverbial figura, rather than a character in a story. 2 It was Pieter Bruegel the Elder who took the germ of this micro-myth and turned it into a fantastic hybrid monster, in the tradition of Hieronymous Bosch. In his great Dulle Griet,3 Bruegel’s creature sits on a burning roof, the Ship of the World on its back, spooning silver ducats from its egg-shell rear. It functions as a grotesque satire on the excesses of the money-market, then, as now, in a state of collapse. Following the banking crisis of 2008/9, Douglas Henderson’s new Dukatenscheißer presents us with a brilliantly re-invented version of this hybrid being. And Henderson’s work here and elsewhere in this show does more than update the Bruegelian device. Under the sign of the Dukatenscheißer, these pieces singly and together examine questions of hybridity, metamorphosis, bodily desire and desire disembodied; they playfully deconstruct the form and meaning of latecapitalist dreams.This Dukatenscheißer  is an articulated tower of sewer pipes, coated in gold leaf, and punctuated with trumpet-like  speakers.  From  these,  apparently  emanating  from  the  hollow  interior,  pours  a  symphony  of orchestrated noises, all connected to money and liquidity. To appreciate the wit and beauty of this piece, we have to understand the sense in which it transforms its source metaphor: the idea of the creature which shits gold. The work is part of a syntagmatic chain:5 successive generations of this  figura  express the history of humanity’s increasingly tortured and torturous psychological relationship with money. Freud was not the first to recognise the strong  association  between  excrement  and  treasure  in  the  western  imagination,  but  he  was  the  first  to understand how this pairing is knitted into certain typical expressions of adult sexuality. He found that gold and shit are connected in folk-jokes couched as dream-anecdotes, wherein a peasant is encouraged by the devil to mark  the  site  of  buried  treasure by excreting  on  it;  he  wakes to  find  he  has  relieved  himself  in  bed.  This dénoument  in  fact  interweaves  several  levels  of  relief  from  tension:  physiological  (the  act  of  excretion), psychological (the punch-line of the joke), and narratological (the second frame appears around the story,revealing it to be a dream).In the West, people seem to have begun to consider the equation between gold and excrement as uncanny instead of  comic, and to envisage the transformation of  one into the other as something occurring internally, around the time of the first commercial revolution (950-1350). So the hermit Peter Damian (c 1007-72), dreamed his head swarmed with dizziness, and his intestines seemed to undulate with a swarm of vermin, when he accepted a gift of silver.This uneasiness seems to have its roots in the capacity of money to split any exchange into mutually indifferent acts, separated in time, and so enabling its consummation to be deferred indefinitely. The basic desire (or lack) motivating  the  transaction  (and  latent  in  it),  is  thus  delayed,  suspended,  thwarted.  As  the  money-economy spread, this expectation of delay became a Europe-wide habit of mind, eventually reified in the institutions of paper-money  and  credit.  Meanwhile,  the  gold-bodycontents  equation  morphed  accordingly.  Bruegel’s Dukatenscheißer is an emblem of the madness of the 16C Bourse and its crazy betting on futures. His creature does not merely excrete coins, it has to shovel them out of its broken back end with a long spoon, of the kind usually needed “to sup with the devil.” Down below, maddened miniature housewives gather the falling coins and rifle  its  purse.  Regarded as  a  topological  riff  on  the  situation  of  money in  men’s  minds,  this  represents  a considerable neurotic elaboration of Peter’s dizziness and queasiness.In  Leonardo’s  art,  Freud  intuited,  a  similar  predilection  for  fantastic  formations  stemmed  from  a deflection of pre-conscious wishes in infancy. One might say that, as money lost weight and sensory resence –metamorphosing from treasure to coins, paper to plastic to binary data– so the status of the desires wrapped up in delayed consummation became, as it were, constipated: bottled up and knotted into ever more bizarre forms. The  general  movement  towards  mass-neurosis  in  these  matters  was  further  complicated  (understandably enough) by paranoia and hysteria, necessary condiments of the boom-bust cycles which have characterised life under capitalism ever since the time of the Bourse. Over the longue durée, the perpetually moving playing-fields of  finance further displaced and twisted the metaphor of  body-contents. New variants appear across a wide range of contexts in modernity –from the anal nightmares of brokers and bankers, to the schizophrenic delusions of the Body-Without- Organs and the Influencing Machine– and, of course, they appear in art.Henderson’s lean and “empty” Dukatenscheißer responds to these complex stratifications and stresses in the cultural capital the  figura  has amassed to date. The “bachelors” in the lower zone of Duchamp’s  Large Glass, for instance, are uniforms without heads, hands or feet. Suspended in glass, they hang from a rotary-mechanism linked to a chocolate grinder – an obvious metaphor for excretion. In the top zone, the “bride” is a mechanised  praying  mantis,  balanced  by  a  cloud,  divided  from  the  bachelor-machine.  Both  Bruegel  and Duchamp found parallels in alchemical imagery for their inventions – the idea of magical cooking is folded in to the Dukatenscheißer tradition – while transmutation itself has clear affinities with making art. Henderson’s work also resembles a kind of  athanor  – the alchemical womb-crucible – distilling out an occult quintessence from mundane ingredients.In this sense, the body of the  Dukatenscheißer  stands for Henderson himself; the artist is the occult vessel in whose bowels (so to speak), these ingredients have been “cooked.” The technology of recording sound is  itself  a  kind  of  alchemy.  Dozens  of  recordings  dealing  with  money  and  liquidity  spiral  down  the Dukatenscheißer  tower:  coins rolling,  pouring down pipes, spinning,  sifting,  jingling in pockets, dropping into water.  At  the  top,  these  sounds  are  convolved  with  noises  from  a  casino,  an  old  tickertape  machine,  a neighbourhood Turkish street market, street-noise after a football game. At the bottom, guttering candles, running water, water in pipes, and market recordings plunge downward, like eddies in a river. Coins roll through it all. This vertical  sound  axis  cross-pollinates  a  range  of  individual  “notes”  into  hybrid  “chords”  –  whose  effect  is metamorphic and mysterious, greater than the sum of the parts.Hybridisation is an important part of the aesthetic here. It is a technique central to the surreal visual style of Bosch and Bruegel, and to folk-fantasies such as the Dukatenscheißer. Using sound-imagery, Henderson re-engineers the basic metaphorical structure of the hybrid-form, changing its stresses and topology, so to speak, in mid-air. To see exactly how he does this, we must consider the semiotics of the hybrid, and how this is bound up with the representation of the imaginary, dreams and the occult, in the Western tradition.Freud  argued  that  we  should  understand  dream  imagery  in  terms  of  condensed  and  displaced memories, and the point 12 about a condensed or displaced image is that it is hybrid. Hybrids came to signify dreamexperience  after  a  long  history  of  employment  on  shrines,  tombs,  citygates,  manuscripts  and  other boundary zones. An angel (part-human, part-bird), for instance, is a marker of  visions, divine messages and graves. Wrapped around the skin and undersides of churches, we find hybrid mythological forms, including folk-motifs. Individually, they connote animal desires, "non-sense", the Rabelaisian zone-below-the-belt. Collectively, they are all adynata (impossibilities): a genre of signs that distinguish fantastic or occult thresholds. An adnyaton denotes something impossible,  in  possible  terms.  Any hybrid  image is  thus an  adynaton,  made of  parts  of mundane things; it is the fact that these parts are  fused  together (as in a winged-human) which indicates the entity’s  occult  status.  Adynata  can  also  be  regarded  as  end-products  of  Freudian  dream-processes,  of condensation and displacement.The same images we see on the cathedrals or hear in folk-tales (or at the cinema) also populate the private imagination; so the "externalised" occult defines an "internalised" or psychological occult and vice versa. With or without its supernatural scaffolding, the occult thus has an intrinsic experiential existence; it is, in the words of Alfred Gell, the place where things are when they are not happening.14 Some kind of “discourse of the occult” is generated by the limits of consciousness (sleep, death, ecstasy), and is required to mediate these limits.15 At the same time, the boundaries of the occult (internal or external) are endlessly challenged, written and rewritten, according to changing historical circumstance, and this involves the creation and deployment of new adynata.This  argument  is  elegantly  demonstrated  in  Henderson’s  Fadensonnen:  essentially  a  double-helix whose climax is orchestrated as an adynaton. Speaker-cones – each an orange sun in a translucent blue sky – spiral up and down around a thick rope hanging from the ceiling. They consitute a translation of Paul Celan’s Fadensonnen. Following the arc of the poem, we stand on a barren landscape (footsteps crunch at the foot of the “tree”),  look  up  into  the  branches  (book  pages  flutter  upwards  around  the  axis),  and  imagine  an  ineffable harmony where the soft fractal edge of the treetop touches/holds the sky. At the ceiling, a musical cloud gathers: sonic “light-tones” made of footsteps, jingling keys, and tones produced by an electronic brush, as the artist traced the lines of bare tree branches over a photograph. It is this hybrid sound which “translates” the  songs beyond  humanity  of  the  poem:  convolutions  in  the  fabrication  of  the  sound  match  the  double  sense  of impossibility in the poem. Neither eye nor ear can follow the near-infinite complexities of the place where tree, sky and light are interwoven; the mind must apprehend this as a gestalt whose significance points beyond the veil of perception, to the place where things are when they are not happening.Because  adynata  are  internally  fluid,  the  recipe  for  each  composite  type  allows  for  an  endless modification of the relationships among its parts. This fluidity is raised to the level of an organising principle in all  the work here. Thus the elements of the Dukatenscheißer. collectively manifest an endlessly diverse cylindrical sound-field  –  a  new “corpus”  –  whose  primary  aesthetic  impact  is  a  sense  ofmarvellous  exhilaration.  This Dukatenscheißer is fundamentally deconstipated; turning inside out the tradition on which it is founded. Its mobile choreography “solves”  the splitting and thwarting of  desire at  the root  of  money-neurosis,  and recovers the multiple sense of “release” in the earlier peasant jokes. Henderson comments, Though the coins flow downward,  it is in no way a depressing piece. I see the financial crisis also as an internal crisis within myself, (“...purgatory can here be understood as a place or state within the self...”). For If I were you, Henderson collected 160 songs by different writers, where the first word is I. Surfing the vast set of would-be songwriters on myspace.com, he followed webpages linking to other “friends”and so on and on. The installation plays the songs in batches of sixteen, with the Is perfectly lined up. The music thus starts in a staggered way, from different points in space, accumulating into chaos as the songs pan across the room.Out of this illegibility, for an instant, they come together in one place and time: when the word I is heard clearly in chorus; then descending into static, petering out into individual songs again. The effect is  like waves on the seashore. A seashore made up of aspiring songwriters. This piece neatly lampoons certain cliches of internet culture and content (surfing the web, a flood of creativity) – the ocean of ether, composed of millions of pages and billions of mouse-clicks. At the same time, the position of the I (an island in the sea of noise – the eye of the storm) – performs an elegant transformation of hybrid aesthetic structure. At first sight, its point of fusion – the navel of the dream  – is the sliding 18 signifier of the firstperson. But this curious sign, as Lacan realised, is universally empty and variable, capable of occupation by anyone or no one, hiding identity as much as it asserts it.Here, as it is spoken (sung) by 160 voices at once, all impossibly present in one moment and one space, it is the pivot around which breaks an unreadable fusion.The  paradoxes  of  eye  and  I  drive  the  delightful  and  disturbing  Romeo  y  Julieta,  Act  II  Scene  II. Henderson and Stefan Bohnenberger have constructed here a small machine for the rearrangement of time, space and desire. Inside the cigar-box is a tiny cinema. Looking in, both space and screen seem vast and out of scale, as if seen from the back row of the theatre. Moving on this dream-screen is a tiny film – enigmatic in black& white. Cued by the title, we might think we see the columns of Juliet’s balcony – or an object (her comb?) – so enlarged as to be rendered otherworldly, as in Man Ray’s experiments with scale.In the front row, as it  were, a small  soft black sphere (Romeo?) sits between us and the film. The soundtrack is filled with sounds from a modern romance – clinking wineglasses, light footsteps – referring to theeponymous lovers in their most famous scene. Yet there is more going on than meets the eye. Gell’s concept of the distributed self  –  that  aspects  of  personal  identity  are invested in  contiguous  people and things20 – is relevant here.We might discern here a distributed self of the interior, with paths in and out through the cavities of the body and secret spaces of the mind. Just as the screen-image and the illusion of great scale open out the box to an impossible degree, the placement of ball and screen-image opens the frame of reference into deep psychoanalytic time – the space of infancy. The ball is small and soft-looking, lit by the moving image inside the frame; the giant ridges, which also evoke teeth, loom over it, yet cannot touch it. It is as if we are looking at the memory of a primal scene, filled with indecipherable desire. This box too is an athanor, a crucible where a kind of excruciation is held in check.It is clear by now that all these works spiral around the sign of infinity. In Dukatenscheißer, a multiplicity of composite micro-narratives – like Bruegelian micro-myths – are orchestrated into a fountain of liquidity. This re-choreographs (and indeed relieves) discrepancies of lack & excess – the kinks and bottlenecks – in its master-metaphor. In Fadensonnen, an analogue is presented for a suture between microcosm and macrocosm: God is in the details, whose plenitude escapes us. In If I were You, the structure of the adynaton is turned inside out. If the Dukatenscheißer reimagines the lower half of the body (the zone-below-the-belt) as a joyous absurd athanor, in Romeo y Julieta, we are taken to another country of the self, a version of Plato’s cave, where the mysteries of desire and their origin in infancy are dramatised in a dream-like tableau.Running through all these works is a modern energy, an unmistakable humour and wit;  perhaps the most essential hallmark of Henderson’s art. As the playing-fields of culture shift – as collapsing money-markets reconfigure desire and value – matters which to previous generations were objects of trauma are gentled and changed in the collective imagination. We begin to apprehend them rather as absurd and fascinating, as sourcesof wonder and humour. This is the achievement of Henderson’s brandnew adynata, his liberating songs upon the Air-Loom.

Dukatenscheisser

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