A Summer Wasting // Godfre Leung
An essay response to Aileen Bahmanipour’s Wasting Techniques
Aileen Bahmanipour’s Wasting Techniques at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, January 29 - March 13, 2021.
A perfect machine produces no waste. In the ideal scenario, all energy put into a machine would be efficiently converted into work, and an equal quantity of material that enters the machine would exit as product. This, as we know, is impossible; all machines emit waste. Machines discharge heat, exhaust, various unpleasant liquids, and excess material as a matter of course. Design theorist and craftsperson David Pye described this fourth kind of waste as a technique—“wasting technique,” he writes in The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, is the “carving away [of] a piece of material until the shape you want remains.”
In the large drawing at the centre of Aileen Bahmanipour’s Wasting Techniques, we see a lot of liquid discharge. It’s unclear, however, whether these gushes are in fact waste. There’s a clinicality to her execution of these drawings, traced onto transparent acetate from diagrams found on the internet, that seems to withhold whether these are disasters or miracles, whether we’ve struck oil or our conduits are hemorrhaging it—or indeed if this is just a routine discharge of grease or cleaner or some other kind of maintenance liquid that keeps the machine running smoothly.
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Bahmanipour began collecting technical diagrams from the internet in 2009, during the Iranian election that resulted in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection and was followed by the Green Wave, a precursor to the 2011 Arab Spring. Due to the state’s crackdown on electronic communications, a large number of the internet’s images were not visible in Iran. Diagrams, Bahmanipour found, were among the only images that could easily be found on the Iranian internet, uniquely “clean” enough to pass through the electronic sieve.
Diagrams were overrepresented on the Iranian internet due to their seeming neutrality, their transparent, utilitarian function suggesting that they haven’t been and can’t be instrumentalized by political interests. Bahmanipour’s practice begins from another sense of the diagrams’ transparency: as mostly line drawings, one can literally see through them when they are traced onto a transparent acetate substrate.
“Bahmanipour’s practice begins from another sense of the diagrams’ transparency: as mostly line drawings, one can literally see through them when they are traced onto a transparent acetate substrate.”
From found diagrams, Bahmanipour composes mutant assemblages of repeated forms. The intended clarity of the diagrams gives way to undecipherable and impenetrable networks of interlocking parts. The opacity of these layered diagrams is compounded by the final forms the drawings take: sometimes the acetate sheet is rolled or folded (in some elegant instances, neatly tied together with a string), hung in various states of distress or crumpling, or collaged with printed matter or opaque objects.
In Wasting Techniques, a large single drawing on acetate hangs from the ceiling, curling as it meets the floor. Unlike previous works in this format, Bahmanipour doesn’t augment the diagrams’ unclarity by manipulating the acetate substrate. All by themselves, the diagrams confound in a knotty allover arrangement that suggests a nervous system crossed with a Rube Goldberg machine. It clearly thematizes resource extraction, but it’s hard to tell what’s being extracted, for what reason, and at what cost.
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Through the course of the exhibition, a primitive homemade contraption that Bahmanipour calls a “spitting machine” will spray a solution at the surface of the drawing at regular intervals. The exhibition as such is a presentation of the inverse of a drawing. As the drawing deforms, a pool of inky goop will accumulate and grow. Like what’s depicted in the drawing, it’s unclear whether this is productive, wasteful, or something else.
This will be presented for us to view on one of two Zoom links, or both at the same time if one wishes. The “verso” feed offers the machine’s point of view, which is also the viewer’s most natural point of view. From this frontal position, we can view the entirety of the drawing. Our vision, however, is drawn beyond the drawing’s surface, toward an iPad Mini on a tripod behind it that records and transmits the “recto” feed.
Aileen Bahmanipour’s Wasting Techniques at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, January 29 - March 13, 2021.
As we face the drawing through our digital proxy, looking at another proxy looking back at us, we see a third proxy in the frame: the end of the spitting machine’s copper spout. There is a certain art deco-like elegance to the spout, oddly reminiscent of the stylization of Francis Picabia’s mechanomorphic drawings. This elegance becomes harder to see after the machine comically labours to unattractively spit its solution at the drawing, recalling the Chaplinesque automatic drawing contraptions of postwar artists such as Kanayama Akira and Jean Tinguely.
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Art history has staged a succession of existential tableaux in which we see ourselves looking, from the mirror in the background of Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage to Diego Velásquez’s Las Meninas to Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergères to Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women. Mary Cassatt’s In the Loge, Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (even), and Adrian Piper’s Food for the Soul also belong in this lineage, though they each seem more to respond to this “tradition” than extend it. Art historians like to talk about these works as allegories for the ways we look at art. For instance, in his aptly titled book Infinite Regress, David Joselit describes Duchamp’s Large Glass as “a mechanism in which anthropomorphic [optical] flows circulate, are broken, and are conjoined through a variety of apparatuses.” In this context, it may be productive to ask what Wasting Techniques, as it spits corrosive liquid at the drawing we’re looking at, has to say about the interminably long summer of 2020, when all art exhibitions as we knew them were canceled and our eyeballs were marshalled to stare at endless virtual exhibitions and events on our computer screens.
“…it may be productive to ask what Wasting Techniques, as it spits corrosive liquid at the drawing we’re looking at, has to say about the interminably long summer of 2020, when all art exhibitions as we knew them were canceled and our eyeballs were marshalled to stare at endless virtual exhibitions and events on our computer screens.”
When I used to teach a survey course on the history of European and North American art from the Renaissance to the present, I had a slide lecture that began with the Arnolfini Marriage and walked from Velásquez to Cassatt and finally to Piper. In a sense, that was an illustration of art history as a machine that eats its own tail. As those sixty-odd students in that 8:00 AM lecture course in a darkened auditorium strained to see the mirrored reflection of Piper’s camera as her photographic series darkened to almost pure overexposed black, and then were asked by me to think about themselves straining to see it, their individual attention and exhaustion dissolved into one collective, senseless “flow.”
These days, art history classes occur online, just like art itself. This brings to mind a joke invented last summer: Work from home? More like live at work, which gives terrifying new meaning to a slightly older joke that has resurfaced: Another night watching the big screen while scrolling through the little screen to reward myself for staring at the medium screen all day. Insofar as post-pandemic art, with its recursive and self-conscious online supports, feels like an infinite regress, the upshot of art as we now know it might be the truth hidden in the mixing of two metaphors, the attention economy with resource extraction—a joke more economically told in the irony that the world’s most popular video game is a game about mining.
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The found diagrams Bahmanipour uses in Wasting Techniques are rendered in what is known as “exploded view,” a usually axonometric depiction of an invention’s separated parts to, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office, “show the relationship or order of assembly of various parts.” In a sense, the sparseness of these images, which don’t say enough to catch the Iranian internet’s filter, is a visual parsing out of complex machinery so that it can be easily and clearly comprehended.
This exploded view rhymes with conventional depictions of architectural space in Persian miniatures, another object of Bahmanipour’s artistic interest. Miniatures also rely on an axonometric perspective that can see “through” serial interlocking forms. Unlike space in the European post-Renaissance tradition, miniatures depict an aloof, decentralized three-dimensionality, more interested in the factual contours of their depicted objects than a humanistic representation of space.
Aileen Bahmanipour’s Wasting Techniques at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, January 29 - March 13, 2021.
In contrast to the European picture plane, in which surface dissolves into space, Islamic pictorial space is characterized by what Iffet Orbay calls “stressed surface.” The tradition of Islamic ornament, the stressed surface in extremis, is said to have emerged from an iconoclastic injunction against visually representing the divine; the sense of visual overload in ornamented surfaces, usually repeated patterns of stylized scripture and floral forms, intimates the infinitude of the divine. Is the seeming endlessness of machinery joined to machinery in Bahmanipour’s drawing also a kind of infinitude in this vein? And if so, what does it say about the wreckage upon wreckage of resource extraction it seems to depict?
And finally, can we read into this crafting of clarity into excess, this explosion of the exploded view, an iconoclastic impulse, a no more? Bahmanipour’s surface is allover ornament metamorphosed into a single, irrational serpentine form. It vomits up the image of a planetary surface covered in drill after drill, always drilling, until nothing remains to drill but drills. At the end of this exhibition, one imagines, will be a feedback loop between two iPad Minis recording each other in perpetuity on opposite sides of a greasy screen and a puddle of muck.
Godfre Leung is a critic and curator based in the territory currently known as Vancouver. His writing has appeared in magazines such as ArtAsiaPacific, Art in America, C Magazine, The Third Rail, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and has been commissioned for publications by a number of institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center. As part of his ongoing curatorial project unstately, he recently organized the exhibition Pao Houa Her: Emplotment (Or Gallery, 2020) and commissioned and edited the poetry chapbook granted to a foreign citizen by Sun Yung Shin (Artspeak, 2020).