Jenny Kalliokulju

Exhbition text to Moon Days

at Inman Gallery — 2016

                                                                                                                              00:00 eerie Moondogs barking Sokrates
                                                                                                                              hurrying down dark streets turning
                                                                                                                              arrow keys to decrease volume: Hello,
                                                                                                                              anon! Sweet sweep me away! White clouds,
                                                                                                                              so called swans of axons, as in pointers
                                                                                                                              to X, no beginning nor end: Just
                                                                                                                              something waiting, resting and lurking
                                                                                                                              behind the stage of the eternal black sky.

The gravity of the Moon distorts surface of the Earth and pulls the ocean’s tides. The moon affects all living organisms on the deepest level. It also rules human unconscious, the lesser-known, uncontrollable side of our being (or so some say…) just like the tides, there’s really no origin or starting point, only a sort of putting-into-orbit. Waves in motion. The key thing is how to ‘get into something’ instead of being the origin of an effort. To create, or sync with a rhythm, not merely reflect on rhythm over plot. I have a hunch that “continuous” or “eternal” belongs to the realm of the impossible, an unattainable limit where contact with the divine resides the liminal, pre-linguistic space of affect, involved in processes of becoming, and not unlike X, this collaged elements bring together mass-produced lingo (an expressive painterly landscape of gesture and mark-making) but still, and always: there’s never been anything “readable” h e r e is only the notion of change (after all this is not the Grotte de Niaux…)

//

                                                                                                                              Mud from the waist up umbra making
                                                                                                                              offers of blue Giotto-posters for sale
                                                                                                                              maybe the artist had worried about
                                                                                                                              melancholia? Parallel lines of birds or
                                                                                                                              stars moving Suddenly X wakes up
                                                                                                                              finding Xelf walking down some dark
                                                                                                                              corridor somewhere in an ally of a truly
                                                                                                                              promised-land, pleased to meet you Socrates
                                                                                                                              said; show me the shape of blue dingy
                                                                                                                              waters and then turn left at
                                                                                                                              melancholically, right above infinity. The
                                                                                                                              womb was dripping with regular
                                                                                                                              monotony leaving us wanting a language
                                                                                                                              without syntax a dampened grid with
                                                                                                                              arrows pointing in satirical deliria called
                                                                                                                              “Ariadne’s ballet” , dance in the sky like
                                                                                                                              clouds, little birdie, cause we’re not able
                                                                                                                              to fly (yet). I don’t need this, said X: I
                                                                                                                              sleep where I sit. I eat and shit where I
                                                                                                                              sit rooted to the ground, spot on No-
                                                                                                                              maps-land surrounded and slurping iron-
                                                                                                                              tasting water.  Said: while sleeping, can’t
                                                                                                                              get rid of this feeling lost, walking on air,
                                                                                                                              like white blank sheets to the rhythm of
                                                                                                                              something? These evoke most directly
                                                                                                                              the engagement with the objectification
                                                                                                                              of nothing. Looking at the clouds,
                                                                                                                              reconstructing the world, letters apart,
                                                                                                                              and lines of roots that holds the earth
                                                                                                                              together.

X found Xelf sitting, waiting for the metallic flavour to stop. Thinking about mercury. Mercury is a transitional metal. This has something to do with oxidation states and loss of electrons. Following the toxic rivers of silver, just want to fixate on the idea that transitions, by definition, to exist inside processes of change. Just like clouds in between phases, gaps in classification. I’m telling you this because it’s also of a long chain of experiments trying to make the world visible, the complex processes of consciousness, the fear of never trusting our own senses, like the taste of iron and salt of seas (that unfolds in relation to experience) and never trusting fishy language with its technologies and geographies

//

                                                                                                                               Galileo Sunlover did rue on the
                                                                                                                               sun, so shiny his X-lapdance-
                                                                                                                               Lover Sticky Poesis: “Sing me
                                                                                                                               sugar, sweet Daylily-Love”. X
                                                                                                                               found Xelf with candles in a
                                                                                                                               grove, in a black corridor as like
                                                                                                                               with likeness grace our tongue
                                                                                                                               and sweet with sweets cloy
                                                                                                                               them along outsiders like X
                                                                                                                               (some people are just not like
                                                                                                                               other people) some people
                                                                                                                               touch us equal length back to
                                                                                                                               back, like Lucy (in the sky with
                                                                                                                               diamonds) X length equally
                                                                                                                               touches clouds
                                                                                                                            - Wait! Dear LillyLove; sing me
                                                                                                                               sweet the song of why Odysseus
                                                                                                                               always is in trouble with the
                                                                                                                               one-eyed snake what caused his
                                                                                                                               love for sea monsters (X’s
                                                                                                                               wimple under bright stars) His
                                                                                                                               very early anticipation of the
                                                                                                                               right strokes of the wind before
                                                                                                                               night, before bright moons’
                                                                                                                               fullness, no re-union of ocean
                                                                                                                               and desert here, no marking
                                                                                                                               where he buried X, just a song
                                                                                                                               of reflection, a brief history of
                                                                                                                               the place itself in moonlight.

Followed by a first initial, with wings on feet and wings behind ears, Socrates said that the first objection is seeing a Line, sees something that must be thick to the eye as well as long to the eye (otherwise it would not be visible, if it had not some thickness); and consequently one ought (it is argued) to acknowledge that behind the blur of nothingness, arises an imperfect form within the real world, similarly the condition of X.

//

                                                                                                                              X among limbed willows
                                                                                                                              colluding with doves (they call
                                                                                                                              rats with wings) nor tide nor
                                                                                                                              tail or feathers nor black sky
                                                                                                                              above is truth and yet, what is
                                                                                                                              truth and what is there to tell?
                                                                                                                              Sediment rustling mortified
                                                                                                                              contemplation of stones
                                                                                                                              rushing  together under the tide
                                                                                                                              X lay still in complete silence,
                                                                                                                              notes; at night the landscape
                                                                                                                              turns from black to silver.

//

Back in black tunnel, you can’t see anything but follow the axons of wicked X sweet laughing. Said: recent discoveries made by Socrates, the head of The Thinkery, includes a new unit of measurement for ascertaining the distance jumped by a flea (a flea’s foot, created from a minuscule imprint in wax), the exact cause of the buzzing noise made by a gnat (its rear end resembles a trumpet) and a new use for a large pair of compasses (as a kind of fishing-hook for stealing cloaks from pegs over the gymnasium wall). Socrates appears overhead, wafted in a basket at the end of a rope, the better to observe the Sun, the clouds and other meteorological phenomena. The highlight of which is a patron goddesses of thinkers and other layabouts. The Clouds arrive dancing majestically of the regions whence they arose and of the land they came to visit, was it on a Thursday? Was it a Friday? Feeling nothing: white moon exploding, like a hardboiled egg. Some say man is also what stars are made of – but life is just another Greek comedy, of which white, taste good, makes high-protein-salad…. (X’s giggling) and putting aside mans’ cloud-like costumes, stop messing about with the calendar, since this has put gravity out of step with the moon, making tide no longer measurable.
Just like Ovid’s love for sea monsters in glowering ripple light, or Galileo’s love for perspiring dancers, this liquid you call ocean is life is this death is you – X come under this death blazing, in its blue perfection hold your hand like a cup; slurp the pouring water-light that makes the day. The memory of X occurring in the space between tides, shining silver, like the moon on mercury. Plot on the scent of a daylily flower, look for a small mud-fly is building its nest. Its activity wrenches the open air. There will be but this one (but you won’t be able to see this either). If you don’t see one, imagen – just like the clouds, it will abandon its young never to return. You call this a form of research. Just like you in life. The mud is powdery like the foundation itself and down there roots point like arrows in the same rhythm that clouds are changing or stars are shining. Something you may refer to as nothing, or you can call X.