Page 5 - Art First: Simon Lewty: Absorption

Ratios of Absorption

In a Simon Lewty work entitled Absorption (2010) that and leaps before us in elaborately cursive scripts?
word itself is signalled in longhand from the heart of the As Bernstein notes, there are ‘relative degrees/ or valences
picture space amid the proliferating but inscrutable textures of impermeability that can be angled/against one another
of another script. The word highlights its own paradoxical to create / interlinear or interphrasal‘gaps’that act like inter-
condition, caught in a web of differences and deferences vals . . . the absorbed and the unabsorbed cleave/since cleave
between naming and embedding. As‘absorption’accedes means both to divide/& to hold together’. Or, as Lewty once
here to its own legibility, it draws attention to a range of wrote,‘whatever touches the surface changes that surface’.
conditions marks undergo, resist or oscillate between. In his Here his concern with‘touch’raises the issue of what can
verse-essay Artifice of Absorption Charles Bernstein points infiltrate the surface or what marks of resistance the surface
to how there seems no limit ‘to what/the absorption-anti- might offer or in a sense inscribe for and on itself.
absorption nexus [can] absorb’. If absorption suggests one
way we can relate to an art-work so as to overlook its actual Bernstein is focusing on poetic texts but his insight bears
means and textures, it might also suggest how an enigmatic on the role writing performs within Lewty’s practice.
image or inscription can infinitely recede before us, leaving Theodor Adorno observes that language-based art-works
us with the surfaces that it can slip behind where we can’t. can never become wholly implicit (like music or abstract art),
for whatever is said through them has to pass simultaneously
In Lewty’s work any question of surface is closely and (though not identically) across their overt speaking. He con-
fatefully linked to the texts and textual graphics which cludes that explicit texts can never be wholly literal while
negotiate it: at times they seem to project beyond it but wordless forms of art can never be perfectly thoughtless.
at others grope back into it, even provoking visual contu- In Lewty’s work such an issue forms part of a continuous
sions and diversions as they burrow under its skin. There attention to the traces left by legible, semi-legible and illeg-
is a continuous cycle of graphic forms coming to term ible marks, marks circulating around intentionality, both
(being legible), being waylaid (recaptured for indecipher- gaining it by chance and losing it by mischance while creat-
ability) or in process of being deflated or inflated outside ing a complex texture of inter-association, as if offering
any stable moment of recognition, though that moment a transverse glance at the surfaces they filter through. In this
always remains in question: why is recognition deflected sense, Lewty’s surfaces cannot be seen as neutral backdrops
or encoded away from us, or what do we do when it flaunts or arenas. Where the autonomy of graphic figuration has