just passing through: A response by laaura goldstein
Image captured by Meenakshi Marchione
just passing through: the disequilibrated map
Carole McCurdy
Roman Susan Art Gallery
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
June 18, 2022 - June 25, 2022
Performances Saturday, June 18 at 7:30 PM + Sunday, June 19 at 2:30 PM
Projections June 20 to June 25 after dark
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it is something worth tracking, going to performances again, pulling up the mask when inside with people you haven’t seen in years as we come together again. here, i recognized audience members from butoh classes, both teachers and students, from exhibitions of art pieces, from photographs of art events where people danced and curved their bodies into shimmering, thick arcs. i think it’s accurate to say we all hadn’t seen each other in an age.
the small triangle of the roman susan art gallery is situated behind the loyola red line stop, right at the alley that goes along the tracks. their front door opens to a small shelf for your shoes and then a few stairs down to the space. people were already there when i arrived, having distributed themselves along the walls and sitting on the edges of the overlapping maps. one could say it was disorienting:
you couldn’t really choose where to sit because the maps, gathered from several sources, created multiple flat planes that we all tried to fit inside. a voice from speakers indicated that someone was trying to get here, directions articulated by a calculating guidance system, leading what was presumably a car in concentric circles around the gallery.
i found a spot. then i noticed that the maps abruptly ran up one wall, concealing a body, and the two lower ends of the body were wrapped in soot. she was waiting for us to get settled. then the directions stopped. carole started to cut her way out while simultaneously drawing circles around what could have been her eyes, but were instead cities or gulf streams that she couldn’t see. she was reaching up and around all the paper, tracing her own shape.
once she was free she was shaky, the body brought chaos to the fallen order, crawling, drawing circles with a marker, cutting out territories at random, distributing them to the passive figures at the edge of the performance. this is why i, as a poet, love performance art. my favorite performances understand the body as the ultimate actor, an empty subject, channeling elements in a confined space. i sat in the shuffled microcosm as she destroyed the representations of the world in that room.
“i am a colony that has no past”, she prompted someone to read. “i am a colony that has no future”, someone else said, reading. in the space between our orientation to the room and to the world, we lost our footing and just floated, both nothing and the realest things we know. trust nothing but the body in space and the stories that we break down into parts.