way(s) in & way(s) out
by Naomi Riddle
Publication text A way in, A way out
March 2019

‘No one can own it; no one can own its meaning.’ Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty (2011), p. 46

I write this essay the way Lucas Davidson creates in his studio: beginning with no particular idea in mind, other than, simply, to begin. For Davidson, it is more about the playing, working, waiting, returning, stumbling and discovering, than the mapping out of a particular track. Taking his lead, I want the ideas in this text to spill over and into one another, with haste. I want to them to resist steady direction, or a firm hand seeking to push them into alignment.

In her essay ‘Without End’, Hélène Cixous links the processes of writing and drawing (and, I would add, photographing) together, suggesting that they are connected because of their responsiveness to failure and chance—a ‘seek[ing] in the dark.’[1] For Cixous, such processes of creation are undertaken by those who ‘do not find, do not find, and as a result of not finding and not understanding, (draw) help the secret beneath their steps to shoot forth.’[2] It is a way of being open to the possibility of knowing in the not-knowing—not foreclosing or demarcating, but still, flying with eyes closed.

‘I am, following, the error’, writes Cixous, ‘without fear but with respect.’[3]

We perceive (falsely) that the eye of the camera is static because of its ability to freeze the image: whatever motion is being photographed is held still, for time immemorial. The digital image goes one step further, removing the natural corruptibility of a photograph (decay and colour degradation) by saving it as a collection of pixels. Even the images that we post & delete, or share & delete, or message & delete, are being stored and filed somewhere. Clearing the trash can on your desktop is only a simulation of emptying an actual trash can, and it is only sometimes an act of complete erasure.

But Davidson not only takes the digital image and makes it material again—printing it and altering it—but also makes an image that moves. There is no time-freeze in Davidson’s image, instead an original photograph is toyed with over such a length of time that it becomes impossible to decide where a single frame begins and ends. (What you are looking at in the following pages is only one book end, a final marker of the work, an image that is a result of a previous image. The chronology of each particular work exists on a continuum, with no demarcated lines.)

What is it, exactly, that happens to Davidson’s images?

The digital photograph is taken/ printed/ immersed in liquid emulsion/ dried/ ripped/ torn/ twisted or pulled/ disintegrated and remade/ (re)photographed and (re)printed.

Flatness becomes three-dimensional (once immersed for an extended period, Davidson can literally pick up the surface of an entire photograph just as we pick up a dropped cloth) and then returns to flatness. As such, the coordinates we take for granted when parsing the act of making, and the act of looking, begin to slip.

The hypervisibility of images means that we read images fast: scrolling down at the rate of seconds, we apprehend the image and its content at mere surface level, perhaps liking, perhaps not, perhaps saving to look at again later (and never doing so), but, nevertheless, hurrying down our bottomless feeds. Davidson’s images demand the opposite. They ask for slowness instead of speed; they require you to stay still in the present moment in an almost meditative state (your project is to intuit, and attend to, the feelings or markers of thought, not to decipher them clearly and rationally).

In making a daily practice of returning to look at Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648), the writer T. J. Clark finds that slow looking and slow thinking uncovers a different way of being with, and inside of, the work:

Astonishing things happen if one gives oneself over to the process of seeing again and again: aspect after aspect of the picture seems to surface, what is salient and what is incidental alter bewilderingly from day to day, the larger order of the depiction breaks up, recrystallises, fragments again, persists like an afterimage.[4]

Each of Davidson’s works are already an afterimage of an image that has been crystallised, then split, then recrystalised again. And the rapidity with which we can see them differently, over and over again, occurs in a single viewing. It is the immediate question of ‘what is it that I am looking at’ that punctuates this arrestment. And, what is it that you are looking at? Gossamer fabric/ a network of rivers/ the wash of steady rain/ pinched flesh/ bruised skin/ the life line on the inside of a palm/ an upright hair follicle/ peaks & troughs/ peaks & troughs/ curtains/ or the webby cells of plants.

There is no narrative or clear map—and the answer to our answer, from Davidson, would be that you are looking at all of these things and none of these things at the same time.

(There is something else I want to say here, though, because it sounds as if I’m saying that Davidson is solely preoccupied with an extended temporal frame, whereas really I think that he is also preoccupied with the experience of the moment-to-moment: whether it is possible to pin down all that occurs in the instant; whether it can be pried open and retaken and rethought. It is, as Cixous suggests, the instant that always escapes us, which then makes us want to return to it all the more: ‘that instant which strikes between two instants, that instant which flies into bits under its own blow, which has neither length, nor duration, only its own shattering brilliance, the shock of the passage from night to light.’[5] In removing the potential for fixed meaning, Davidson is giving us something that has no explicit length or duration, but rather multiple perspectives, experienced simultaneously.)

There is something that stays. The body (as skin, as cartilage, as clenched hand, as flesh and bone) always reasserts itself. Yet this is not a figurative impression of the body, but a moment where the body becomes so abstracted that its presence takes us by surprise—the subject (Davidson’s own body) becomes an object, a surface on which we can work. That is to say, Davidson breaks open the coherent body and leaves us with its excised form: a closeup taken so close that it becomes a landscape instead of a portrait.

There is some pain to these excisions (like the image itself, the body is similarly pinched, torn, lifted, pulled and twisted). And, in the particularities of the tearing, we can liken Davidson’s process to what Simone Weil termed ‘decreation’ (‘to undo the creature in us’): an emptying of the self, an unburdening of the self, a puncturing of the self in order to transcend this self.[6] For Weil, ‘time in its course tears appearance from being and being from appearance by violence’, and Davidson is also separating (tearing) the appearance of the body from being in the body (by violence).[7]

Weil’s process of decreation is a paradoxical bind, a set of contradictory ideas existing all-at-once: we must withdraw so as to love; we must evacuate to fill; we must decreate to create. The contents of Davidson’s work, and the process of making it, reveals a similar set of paradoxical overlaps: there is the longue durée and the instant; the positive and negative light, inverted; the legible and the opaque. If, as the poet Anne Carson writes of Weil’s paradox, ‘to catch sight of this fact brings a wrench in perception, forces the perceiver to a point where she has to disappear from herself in order to look’, then the same can be said for Davidson’s series of images.[8]

‘Look’, is really what I am saying, and then, ‘look again’. And rest easy (as Davidson does in the making, or I do in the writing) in the not knowing and the knowing.

[1] Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no, state of drawingness, no, rather: the executioner’s taking off’ (1993) in Stigmata (New York: Routledge, 2005 [1998]), p. 26 
[2] Cixous, p. 26-7 
[3] Cixous, p. 28
[4] T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 5 
[5] Cixous, p. 38
[6] Simone Weil, as quoted in Anne Carson, ‘Decreation: How women like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil tell God’, in Decreation, (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), p. 167
[7] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford; Mario von der Ruhr, (London and New York: Routledge, 2004 [1952]), p. 39
[8] Anne Carson, ‘Decreation: How women like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil tell God’, in Decreation, (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), p. 169