Sand in the Vaseline: on twenty-first-century process art

Abstract

The machines didn’t stop – there was no bright red alarm button.1 In response, I’ve invited a group of five artists, Alisa Baremboym, Nicolas Deshayes, K. R. M. Mooney, Tania Pérez Córdova and Alison Wilding, whose work and relationship to sculpture I admire, to imagine, on their own terms, the theme of process. Last August we shot my first video, Birthing Pools. The camera-eyes were suspended over four hypnotic, bubbling tanks in a chroming factory near where I live in south-east London. I have taken metal things there to be expertly skinned and armoured in glamorous chrome for over a decade now; often forms cast from clothing, as well as plant and animal bodies. What pulls me back isn’t so much the ‘finished’ sculptures I’m ostensibly making, but rather the process itself, which is seductive and disturbing. Especially the electroplating tanks, their raging surfaces criss-crossed with metal bars from which jigs are hung, submerging parts beneath and within liquid surfaces for specific periods of time (fig. 1). During lockdown I often thought of the churning, primordial pools in the factory, and the bodies that move fluidly around them. I couldn’t imagine them stilled and my intuition was right – tanks and bodies never stopped simmering; production was continuous. We filmed the copper (blue), nickel (green), hexavalent chromium (black and orange) and rinse (clear) baths over several hours as they produced a pleated chrome skin on multiple, jigged, sand-cast and vapour-blasted aluminium parts for a sculpture, Seahorse. What can such artistic strategies achieve if the production line never stops? What does it mean to author sculpture on these compromised terms? What agency do we have as artists in relation to industrial production and the late-stage global capitalism that drives it relentlessly and lethally? I think we can be honest, making, on our own terms, these deliberately obscured processes visible in our work. This is what I mean by twenty-firstcentury process art; we can punch holes and make ruptures in smooth, hard, continent, complete and totalizing surfaces. This is what happens when, for example, naked spider and brown crab shells, their bodies ‘ill acknowledged by vertebrate production chains’,2 are loaded into a planetary system. A planetary system is a large, rotating, steel structure made to hold hundreds of identical plastic parts (for example, car headlamps) while they are being coated in a thin layer of aluminium in a vacuum metallizing chamber. Planetary System (Kolzer DGK63”) is also the title of a sculpture I made in 2019 (fig. 2). The multiple crustacean bodies infest a machine ostensibly used to Artist-edited feature