Showing posts with label rosi braidotti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rosi braidotti. Show all posts

29 Jul 2025

Reflections on Megan Rooney's Spin Down Sky II

Temitope Ajose and Leah Marojević performing Megan Rooney's  Spin Down Sky II  
on the opening night of her exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 
Photo: Camilla Greenwell (12 June 2025) 
 
 
I.
 
On Sunday, I went to see a performance of Megan Rooney's Spin Down Sky II (2025), created in close collaboration with Temitope Ajose [1], Leah Marojević [2], and Tyrone Isaac Stuart [3], which, as well as being an interesting work in itself, also served as the finissage to her solo exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) [4]
 
The piece is the latest chapter in Rooney's developing tale of the fatal love between a male moth and a female bolas spider. But, before discussing this, I'd like first to make a few remarks on the title and, in particular, the word spin ...
 
 
II. 
 
Spin - an Old English verb of Germanic origin meaning to draw out and twist fibres of material (including thin air) into thread. 
 
It is, I think, one of those words that Heidegger would think of as elemental, i.e., one of those etymologically complex terms that reveal something fundamental about human being and existence; words that speak us rather than simply communicate information and ideas. 
 
These days, the concept of spinning has entered into many areas of life and the word has taken on multiple meanings depending on context. But I like to think that when Rooney speaks of spinning down sky she refers us to the possibility of making artworks out of the blueness of the Greater Day, or perhaps stretching the very stuff of the heavens so as to send yellow stars spinning like Van Gogh.
 
Of course, if writers spin words into narratives and painters spin colours into artworks, then spiders do something equally amazing by spinning silk into webs. And, as mentioned, at the centre of Rooney's tale is an unusual member of the Araneidae family ...
 
 
III. 
 
For those readers lacking a background in arachnology, a female bolas spider [5] is an orb-weaver that, instead of spinning a typical orb web, hunts at night by using one or more capture blobs consisting of a mass of spun fibre embedded in a sticky liquid on the end of a silk line, known as a bolas.  
 
By swinging the bolas at passing male moths, she hopes to snag her prey rather like a fisherman snagging a fish on a hook (thus it is that they are sometimes also referred to as angling spiders). If, after half an hour, she has been unsuccessful, she will consume the bolas and start again. 
 
On a bad night, she may only catch one or two moths; on a good night, six or seven. The female bolas spider, however, doesn't just leave everything to chance; she lures her favoured prey closer via the production of a scent that mimics the sex pheremones emitted by the female moth, driving the males mad with desire.
 
Having given a little bit of natural history by way of background, I'd like now to say something of the actual performance ...
 
 
IV.   

Spin Down Sky II is a new dance piece developed especially for the exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac. It premiered last month on the opening night of Yellow Yellow Blue. [6] 
 
I was disappointed to have missed it then, but I'm very glad to have seen it now and to have been further ensnared into Rooney's imaginative world, which, it seems, is shaped as much by movement as colour; i.e., a combination of choreography and chromatic chaos (which is why it makes perfect sense to both open and close the exhibition of paintings with a contemporary dance performance).  
 
The sequence of movements and rhythmic articulations unfolding in a unique time and space, both natural and mythical, seemed to me to be cleverly thought out and excellently performed (with, I'm assuming, some degree of improvisation) by the dancers although, I have to confess, I wasn't quite sure who was the moth and who was the spider. 
 
Arguably, however, as their bodies became increasingly entangled in a strangely erotic danse macabre, perhaps that's no longer an issue and binary distinctions around species, sex, life and death begin to curdle. 
 
And speaking of blurred lines ... 
 
The clothing worn by the two dancers had been hand-painted by Rooney, thus inviting us to think about the relationship not only between prey and predator but fine art and fashion; interconnected disciplines which often come together despite the efforts of some who would preserve the purity and status of the former and view the latter as lacking in high aesthetic value and cultural significance [7]
 
And then there was the excellent (if slightly too jazzy for my tastes) soundtrack provided by Stuart, with live sax improvisations on the night, obliging us to also consider the three-way relationship between colour, movement, and music. 
 
 
V.
 
Ultimately, Spin Down Sky II matters because, even though a short piece, it allows us to "think through and move across established categories and levels of experience" [8], transporting us to a place where the most profound ideas and feelings live and rise up. 
 
Via creative storytelling - i.e., an act of fabulation - Rooney allows us to step outside the gate and to understand something of the complex and shifting world of relationships - not just between a flying insect and an eight-legged spider, but between us and the natural world, us and art, us and one another - that is central to reality as a web of being and becoming.     
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Temitope Ajose is a London-based dance-artist with an interest in myth, psychology and magic. Her creative process unfolds in the playful space that exists between the sacred and absurd. Whilst Rooney conceived and directed Spin Down Sky II, Ajose is credited as the choreographer.   
 
[2] Leah Marojević is a Serbian/Montenegrin/Italian/British queer female independent artist, based in Berlin, whose practice spans dramaturgy, choreography, performance, rehearsal directing, writing, teaching, curation and mentorship. 
 
[3] Tyrone Isaac Stuart is an interdisciplinary artist with over 12 years of professional experience in dance and music. He blends krump, contemporary dance, visual art, and jazz music in his work.
 
[4] Some readers may recall a couple of posts published last month inspired by this exhibition: click here and/or here
 
[5] Immature female spiders and (the much smaller-bodied) adult males hunt without a bolas; simply positioning themselves on leaves and grabbing whatever insects they can with their hairy front legs.
 
[6] The bolas spider and night butterfly characters were first explored over two performances of Spin Down Sky at Kettle's Yard (Cambridge), as part of Megan Rooney's first major solo exhibition Echoes and Hours (2024). To watch the full (20 minute) performance on 21 June, please click here. Or for a short (43 seconds) teaser, please click here
 
[7] Historically, fashion has been regarded as a craft or applied art, distinct from the more elevated practice of fine art. This perception is rooted in the belief that fashion is frivolous, commercial, and transient, while fine art is profound, timeless, and transcendent. 
      Thankfully, such idealistic stupidity is now no longer so widespread and many people acknowledge that fashion - particularly haute couture and avant-garde designs - can be a powerful form of artistic expression and that the very best runway shows are pure theatre; one thinks, for example, of Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 1999 show and its finale featuring a model (Shalom Harlow) in a white dress, spinning round on a rotating platform, and being spray-painted by robots: click here to watch on YouTube.  
 
[8] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects (Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 4. 
 
 
This post is for Tom Hunt, who kindly invited me to the performance of Megan Rooney's Spin Down Sky II (27 July 2025).
 
 

13 Jun 2017

On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry

Scarlett Johansson as Lucy (2014)


I've been told that my post on Heide Hatry's Icons in Ash was unkind and unfair. And, further, that my refusal or inability to recognise their philosophical interest and aesthetic power either perverse or shameful:

"Do you not see how the very materials from which they are composed deconstruct the life and death binary? If only you'd drop your anti-humanistic posturing for a moment, you might learn to appreciate their uncanny, bitter-sweet beauty and significance."

Let me, then, offer a few further remarks on Hatry's ash portraits, attempting to make clear the basis for my criticisms and concerns ...


I: On Faciality

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my Deleuzean dislike of the face: click here and here, for example.

In sum: the face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics that I think we need to challenge. For whilst we might fool ourselves that each face is individual and unique, it isn’t. Rather, it’s a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are thus merely types of conformity with the dominant reality.

And so, when Heide Hatry insists on the primacy of the face and reconstructs it in all its complexity and vulgarity from ash, I have a problem. Asked if it was necessary to create facial images rather than do something else with the cremains, she replies:

"It's absolutely necessary; and it's necessary that the portrait is as realistic as possible because ... the face is where we understand communication is happening ... for capturing all the subtleties that make us human."

Hatry thus openly subscribes to the ideal moral function of the face; as that which reveals the soul and allows us to comprehend the individual: "Other ways of reading a person are incidental or filtered through this", she says - not incorrectly, but in a manner that suggests she's entirely untroubled by this. 


II: Becoming-Imperceptible

For me - again as someone who writes in the shadow of Deleuze - it's crucial to (i) rethink the subject outside of the moral-rational framework provided by classical humanism and (ii) escape the face and find a way of becoming-imperceptible. Thus, rather than drawing faces in the dust and displaying a sentimental attachment to personal identity, artists should be helping us experiment with different modes of constituting the self and new ways of inhabiting the body.   

Further, they should be helping us form an understanding of death that is entirely inhuman and faceless and which opens up a radically impersonal way of being linked to cosmic forces: a return to material actuality, as Nietzsche says; i.e. merging with a universe that is supremely indifferent to life. To think death in terms of becoming-imperceptible is ultimately to privilege ashes over the epiphenomenal phoenix that arises from them (despite the beauty of its feathers).

It doesn't mean "returning indistinguishable ashes to the particular" and vainly attempting to keep alive what was "in danger of being lost or forgotten". The idea that art exists in order to secure "the sense of a person, of her or his individuality, to lovingly preserve that quality even in death, in memory, and with it the integrity of the human lineage through generations", is anathema to me.

I think, at heart, most of us - like Sade - desire to be completely forgotten when we die, leaving no visible traces behind of our existence. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, central to posthumanist ethics lies evanescence (not transcendence) and the following paradox: "that while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the perfect stillness of not-life".

To be everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing; to vanish like Lucy or the Incredible Shrinking Man into the eternal flux of becoming  - that's better than ending up ashen-faced, is it not?       

Notes

Rosi Braidotti, 'The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible', in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133-59. To read this essay online click here.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The University of Minnesota Press, 1987); see chapters 7: 'Year Zero: Faciality' and 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...'

Mark Pachter, 'A Conversation with Heide Hatry', in Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash, ed. Gavin Keeney, (Station Hill in association with Ubu Gallery, New York, 2017), pp. 76-91. 

Re: Luc Bresson's film, Lucy (2014), of course it's shot through with crackpot science, Hollywood hokum and idealism of the worst kind - what Nietzsche would think of as Platonism for the people. But it at least hints at the form of becoming towards which all other becomings aim - the becoming-imperceptible. It's just unfortunate it ends with an idiotic text message - I am everywhere - which implies omnipresence in terms of personal consciousness, rather than impersonal materiality.    


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