It occurs to me that this project has an ambivalent attitude to communication. At one level, it has a highly private aspect and engages with dimensions of silence. At another level, it makes all kinds of efforts to communicate – via sculptural samples, photographs, drawing and writing. Yet these apparent efforts at communication draw their energy from never literally constituting or enabling a communicative circuit. For instance, while these blog entries run publicly on the web and are distributed in print form in the gallery, I refuse to be bound by the hope that they will actually be read. I refuse to make it a condition of my writing. In this sense the work resembles my programming based projects that preserve a necessarily oblique relation to any form of communication. They pass through layer after layer of obfuscation and distance, to the point that any sense of communication seems tenuous or fatally deferred at best.
Ultimately, I have the sense that my communication is intransitive. It lacks an object. It cannot adequately produce or imagine one. It is motivated not so much by the thought of reaching another person as by an intimate engagement with the escarpment field. The latter demands efforts of mediation because the field is endlessly elusive. It is never simply itself.
Unlike the 60s land artists, I do not feel that mediation is extraneous, that it is only possible to experience environmental works by traveling to see them, because even to visit the works in situ is not to discover them as such. Any actual site can only be properly approached by rendering it in other terms. For my purposes, mediation is not only oriented by the need to communicate. It takes shape within the texture of things, events and experiences.
In the case of ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE there is actually no work as such to visit. There is only a set of procedures, their ephemeral performance, an obscure set of cut out door panels, a small collection of removed pieces, some photographs, a drawing or two and this text. Each element is insufficient on its own. It is only in their integral refraction and displacement that the work takes shape.
Within this context, my final summative walk is less the perfect, most authentic point of access to the overall work than itself a point of departure. Although I suggest, while standing in the mud before the first car panel, that no image can do justice to this place, it is only by walking down there, only by cutting out a square piece, only by taking photographs, only by writing about it later that I can attentively engage with that inexplicable scene.