Trenching the Haggis

As if the faint murmur of a voice issued forth from this stain, these words having pressed themselves moist and hot on the page, bleeding out and coagulating. Not yet text, as there are no readers that are able to decipher the outstretched fingers of these pools of ink. Not yet a shape, as neither typographer nor cartographer has mapped the still expanding boundaries of the infinite shoreline of this undulating contour. A morphology seems to appear, a sequence, a type. Here are stains amongst stains, and still a murmur of an implacable voice. Let us hold off distinguishing between voice and stain for a little. The drying fluid bristles with some account of its now indiscernible movement. How to classify these different stains? A peripatetic vignette with soiled underpants, spilled paint, and perhaps a bloody fingerprint. If they are in fact some strange and disfigured speech act, what are they saying? Clearly this latter question is premature. Let us link their resemblance towards that of the vowel, insofar as they seem to be an opening into the plosives and fricatives of site. This filiation of fluid and substrate constitutes, by way of a generative grammar, a fiction-en-abyme.
Alun is not here, he is out for a walk, perhaps dusting for fingerprints. Right now there is not yet an Alun as we have not yet come to see how a proper name rises out of this now congealed trace of something. Something? What is the medium in which these stains appear? Again– vomit, blood, grease, sweat, paint–that these material descriptors are so easily pooled together already points to the uneasiness about how a name, a personage, could find itself mired in this filth. (While Mr.Williams is on his walk, I should say now that I think these paintings that we are circling around have next to nothing to do with Leonardo’s advice about staring at a stained wall or clouds in the hopes of catching a glimpse of some mythical creature or inspired composition. We will not be talking about the freedom that lies in the heart of the acculturated ‘true’ artist. A hard and cold but deeply felt structure has found its way into the working methods of Mr. Williams, this painter who steps out for walks.)
I want to move quickly, if this text is to contribute to the collection of stain-personae in this volume, it must effectively blot out these early pages of this book.

“The gift which we possess of seeing similarity is nothing but a weak rudiment of the formerly powerful compulsion to become similar and also to behave mimetically. And the forgotten faculty of becoming similar extended far beyond the narrow confines of the perceived world in which we are still capable of seeing similarities. What the stars effected millennia ago in the moment of being born into human existence wove itself into human existence on the basis of similarity.”
-“Doctrine of the Similar” Walter Benjamin

In this quote, certain questions arise as to the scope of A.W.’s practice. In attempting to offer up these images to language, are we prepared to unsettle the artist’s uncanny ability to become that which he has set about to describe, namely, a stain? Will some upright human figure come with an outstretched index finger to indicate the many points of connection where the endless contour of the stain makes contact with its now besmirched background? Here in these works, as in this text, we should attend to the troubling multiplication of non-sensuous similarity. We are thrown into a situation where reading is imposed as a form of seeing, not to mention that we are also ambulating amongst these pictures which are themselves the result of a prior ambulation, and we are waiting. Waiting for that flash of recognition that flickers up from the appearance of some proper name.
Not yet a name. Bloody show, entrail reading, divination, forensics, geology, archeology. Undecidable implications of the stain. Like the name, these stains threaten to cohere through mimesis, a chain of resemblances a la Leonardo, a dance along a signifying chain. However there is also a stain-type which points to the shortcomings of both language and resemblance in domesticating that which the stain stands in for—loss, trauma,violence. This stain is a threshold that we cannot cross.
Vocables from the sidewalks are gathered up in the hopes of being reconstituted in their displacement as homunculi now residing in a picture world. But these vocables possess no lexicon to grammatically order them. Their accidental contours call to mind the disintegrating sequence of photographic enlargements that appear in the Antonioni film, Blow-Up. The closer we try to get to examining the evidentiary traces from the murder scene in the park the more the dumb material stares back at us indifferently. The chemical substrate of the photograph, through the grain focuser, reveals itself to be only so many disorganized stains blocking out light from the enlarger, thus prompting more yellow tape surrounding a second crime scene, that of the dark room or, in this case, the painter’s studio.
It is here, where an aperture dilates, that a history opens up behind these paintings. It is not a history of names, or forms, but one of near transparent mediations that are revealed to populate the technological form we call painting. A whole cast of objects begins to imperceptibly congeal around that always receding ur-painting of a negatively indexed hand print in a cave. Rather than the inert substrate of inscription, the surface is awash in shadows, grids, and apertures. Darkrooms and caves, or lenses and grids- all surfaces imitating surfaces. This ocular prosthesis of the surface overlays itself back on to the moist retina in an endless feedback loop. Even when a stain, a figure, or shape, manages to be distinguished from a ground it very quickly finds itself recaptured in the millefeuille of the picture. However, at this point, we must make a decision whether we proceed in Williams’ work via the light-writing of the photographic, replete with claims to verity and subject to numerous administrative linguistic detours. Or, are we to traverse painting, that ancient technique of surfacing, with its frustratingly weird ontologies and quivering taut surfaces which envelope sense in aporia after aporia?
Diastole.
Here is an impasse. If history is reduced to language games and representation is locked in terminal confusion over the ordering of its terms of transmission-figure/ground/stain/trace/copy, what story then does the storyteller have to tell? Are all pictures non-sense? Does history happen outside of sense or does this impasse usher in a rappel au désordre through the authorizing force of those signatories forever being etched in the hallowed halls of painting, even while their endless enumeration threatens the structural integrity of said hall?
Systole.
A body secretes itself into a picture, this is not paranormal. The inky aftermath of Jules Verne’s giant cephalopod turns the seas black. The crime scene is too large to tape off. The work of Alun Williams reminds us of this. Every account must question its own terms of accountability, while running the risk that whatever proper name is authorizing the account could fail to enact a closure that would ratify meaning. To whom or from whom does this fluid issue forth, who is performing this mystical act of reading these remains? Is this or that trace indicative of a gentle but no less terrifying divine violence where the laws governing pictorial organization are permanently eradicated? How long do these traces persist in vision or as part of the collective experience of cohabitation and shared use?

Ceci n’est guère une tache*.

*in French in the text

Cheyney Thompson, artist, lives and work in New York