Essays

Notes on Genesis
The Red Corner
Review of 'The Quality of Being Nothing'

Notes on Genesis

Thinking about beginning. Thinking about thinking about beginning. Things I think about before I begin, in relation to a theme, in the order I think about them:

1. Genesis: English rock band formed in 1967.
2. Genesis: The book of. First book of the Hebrew bible, the first five of the Torah. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” [1] God says let there be various things, various things come about, and so on and so forth…

1. The longest standing member of Genesis, Phil Collins.
1. The longest standing member of the Christian faith and all its associated variants, Jesus Christ.
2. Alopecia (baldness) and all its associated variants, alcoholism and not being able to dance, nor talk, nor sing.[2]
2.2 Long dark hair, all dancing, all preaching, all miracle making son of a God!

One might take something from the above order. One might take that this is the order in which they appear when ‘Genesis’ is entered into Google (I believe Genesis were as popular as Christianity at some point in the mid 80’s which might account for this) [3]. Or, one might take this to be indicative of my agnosticism, that is to say, my sitting on the fence, on the non-committal ‘garden wall’ [4]between the backyards of belief and disbelief, faith and non-faith.

A difficult position you might say, being on the fence. A difficult place to begin, with its inherent ambivalence, its tenure of a non-ideology, its grounding being just off the ground, its stance being… well, sat down.

Bruce Nauman’s nefarious clown now comes to mind, condemned to a state of perpetual recurrence; an eternal beginning, as he repeats over and over again with growing frustration: “Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off. Who was left? Repeat.” [5] The fence here operates as a motif for an interminable condition of stasis - the clown is the one stuck on the fence. As such his mood, and hence the delivery of the unending joke, alternates between a sense of malevolence and utter emotional dissolution. The end signifies the beginning - signifies the end - signifies the beginning - signifies the horrific psychological trauma of being trapped in an unbreakable moment - a time without limitation or logical structure. Oh the pathos of destabilised temporality!

Thinking about beginning. Thinking about thinking about beginning. Thinking about the event and its beginning, based on a theme.

What’s in a beginning? The start of something, the moment just before something is started. The excitement and anxiety that builds around this anticipation of something that is soon to begin. Something that is soon to be, to come into being for the first time. Something nascent, inchoate, incipient. A flicker of light, a small spark, a chance reaction, an incidental occurrence.

And what of these moments before we begin? What needs to take place? What needs to happen to incite a proper beginning? Things must be planned. They can’t be left to chance. The main part of this is the planning, its mapping out and thinking through, mulling over, ruminating towards a sufficient resolve.

And what of the process? Lewitt states: “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.” [6] Does this apply here? Is the hope that the irrational might become rational in its conclusion - its coming to fruition? But Lewitt also said, “All ideas need not be made physical.” [7] But what about an event, does an event need to be physical? Does it need to contain palpable elements to constitute being an event?

Returning to the metaphor of sitting on the fence, perhaps this is the best vantage point for both thinking about the event and aiding its becoming? Working from the interstice, from mutual ground. Bringing about an agreement between separate elements. Bridging the gap, forming connections between conflicting parts. Isn’t this what is involved in an events orchestration?

But perhaps impartiality isn’t right here either? Maybe being on the fence implies a vague indifference to the parts on either side? Maybe it smacks of not caring either way, connotes apathy? Perhaps what is required is something more assertive, something self-assured and declarative? Decisions can’t be made from the fence.

Perhaps the problem here is stillness, and by extension, sameness [8]. These things are not conducive to a ‘coming about’ [9]. Maybe our grip to the fence should start to loosen, maybe our position should falter? We should allow ourselves to move from one side to the other, if not physically then metaphysically. As Yve Lomax puts in her own toiling with the prospective coming of an event, ‘I may be sitting still, very still, but my being is not static. On the contrary, my being is continually moving in time. Indeed, even as I rest in the stillness of the night my being is ceaselessly being made with time.’ [10]

Perhaps, then, a beginning is brought about through transition, through a movement to-and-fro? Through being transitory, vagrant, an itinerant wandering between the parts, from one side to the other, bringing about agreements, settling differences, ameliorating, ironing out, joining up, mediating. The apparent futile repetition and circularity (squarularity?) of Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square [11] now seems to make sense. Beneath the banality, at the surface of this motion lays an act of exhortation, of willing on, encouraging a ‘coming about’. It is quite literally an action in which dispraxia, both physical and ideological, becomes praxis.

This is what is needed to bring about a beginning, to bring about an event. This motion. This peripatetic ambling between places, between groups, peoples, individuals. Imploring others to get in the Su Su studio [12] and Work! Work! Work! [13] To delineate connections, to path out a possible direction, a missionary extolling an artistic cause, evoking interest by walking between the parts in an exaggerated manner. As Collins put it: “I can’t dance, I can’t talk, only thing about me is the way I walk.” [14]

1. See the Dead Sea Scrolls, J.C Press, somewhere between 150 BC and AD 70, p 1.
2. The dual correlatives between Alcohol and not being able to dance, talk or sing and Phil Collins’ problems with alcohol and him having written the song I Can’t Dance need not be explicated. See YouTube – I Can’t Dance
3. See Google - Genesis
4. Genesis was formed out of school bands Garden Wall and The Anon
5. See Bruce Nauman’s 1987 installation, Clown Torture
6. See Sol Lewitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, The MIT Press, 1999, p 106
7. Ibid., p 107
8. Nauman once said, “My definition of anxiety is the gap between the now and the later… We have no future if we fill this void, we only have sameness.”
9 Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event – Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time, I.B. Tuaris, 2005
10 Ibid., p 7
11 See Bruce Nauman’s seminal work Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square. Here Nauman records himself traipsing awkwardly foot over foot along the perimeter of a masking tape square in his studio.
12 Reference to the Phil Collins song Sussudio. See YouTube – Sussudio
13 One of Nauman’s repeated single-syllable components ostensibly played on a loop in his studio as a kind of ascetic mantra. This was also used as part of his sound installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Raw Materials
14 See 2

by Aaron Juneau