The studio is crowded, even more so now. Leaving rehearsal, Tere, I sense BLEED as a requiem for the three previous dances or perhaps for a limited idea of dance beholden to representation that you have no interest in delivering on. Instead, you conjure other worlds baroquely melancholic, dark, vertiginous and electric. I wonder watching BLEED if I am not too haunted by memories of gesture, of phrase, of image traced in Secret Mary, poem and my imagined sense of Sister. What to do with these many ghosts unleashed through physicality and voice? How do these recollections sit against the gorgeous vivisection happening in front of me now?

BLEED is deeply tied to disappearance and memory as the individual dancers almost disappear into the crowd coming into view only in flashes as devynn and Mary roll into the waiting laps of other dancers becoming airborne swimmers or later in their oblique duet—a dance of throat as much as body. So many fleeting small intimacies as devynn touches the back of Michael’s head, their hand entwined in brown hair, or as Cynthia brushes Ryan’s hip in passing, ask how it is that we become visible to ourselves and to each other and how we engage in these transitory passages. Importantly the work plays with the edges of visibility not as recognition but as something closer to witnessing a series of vanishing points or corporeal apparitions. Deeply promiscuous, the relations within the piece constantly shift as the dancers exchange partners, hand and gaze touch and shift away, touch and shift, as the encounters continue.

At last viewing, Heather begins with a solo, her arms a tenuous architecture now round now abruptly bent now round again taking over body. Her movement crescendos tossed and shaken by winds simultaneously psychic and climatic until she catches herself. Hooking a finger in her mouth she pulls herself backward and away. Lips frozen in taut circles or hooked by her finger, these gestures render the mouth as a strangely metonymic figure that is never mute even when silent. Heather joins Cynthia and Natalie and the three now circle their arms as Ryan, Oisin, Silas, Michael enter in line along the back of the space in slow balanced arabesque.

BLEED tears against dance as representation, imagining dance as consciousness, as so many constellating architectures inscribed in lines and pools of sweat across emotional and aesthetic terrain. At moments these lines are physically danced, virtuosic technique reiterated and decomposed entangles in spiraling repetitions not only of movement but also of gaze. So when the dancers attach in a serpentine frieze across the floor moaning in agony or pleasure, in their momentary stillness they take on qualities of sculpture as a temporal apparatus. History flashes in time’s dilation.

I imagine these accumulations—spatial, temporal, rhythmic, textural, emotional—as the deeply affective work of BLEED’s perceptual vivisection. Perhaps this is what Giorgio Agamben had in mind when he wrote of dance as phantasmata, arrested as if we had just seen Medusa’s head. In their gorgeous congealed stillness, the dancers hold the shimmering cacophony of earlier moments—David and Cynthia swaying to bend and stand as if gathering energy along the perimeters as Ryan, devynn, Tess, Mary slowly curl into themselves collapse and rise as Silas, Oisin, Michael, Heather, Natalie splay arms out sternum exposed then all join in thrashing leaps around the room.

Maybe it is not stillness at all, but restraint. The truncated tempo and spacing of the leaps, the way that David holds Michael’s wrists as he attempts to escape backward turning away. Oisin’s glance around the space before he lies down again. How Michael lifts and carries Heather in a rigid line or he and Silas propel Heather in a circle around the room pulling her knee to step, hands supporting her lower back, pushing gently or as they lift her up after she collapses repeatedly a less violent flash of Pina’s Café Muller.

Ohhhhhhh, they sing or murmur voices echoing against the textures of the score. Held in the static crash of waves, industrial and oceanic, sound diffuses narrative and historicity, working instead to suspend disparate elements in sweet paradoxical proximity. Sound acts as another choreographic texture a submarine erotics trembling just under the surface of the dance that also evokes qualities of requiem submerged within BLEED.

As I write, I am admittedly deeply saddened by the recent passing of my beloved teacher José Esteban Muñoz who not only taught me of the shimmering value of what is beautifully illegible, but also the urgency of choreographing these spaces of intimacy and sensation and consciousness for now and for the future. As José reminds:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.

Choreography as witnessed in BLEED becomes another “structuring and educated mode of desiring” that imagines new and gorgeous worlds in vertiginous dissolution. We have not yet arrived, and so we must continue to dance…

I stole this epigraph from Rosmarie Waldrop who opens her meditations on Lyn Hejinian’s writing with a turn to Gertrude Stein. Already the room is crowded. Waldrop continues… she parses the disruptive syntax of Hejinian’s poetics to call attention to a more porous refusal of singular meaning, metaphor or analogy. All of these rhetorical tropes fall static against acoustic rhythm and repetition. Do you sense this?

Here I translate my thought

into jump-language, to double fate

But fate imposes its very interesting exercise: select

—Hejinian quoted in Waldrop

Reading these passages on the train, in transit, returns me to the studio and rehearsal where “jump-language” is quite literally something else and multiple things all at once. The condensation of techniques, states, flights—arabesque and fingers as gnarled tree; architecture rendered in three distinct spatial orientations; his relevé and her hip-shaking velocity; horizontal trajectories interrupted by oblique leaps and broken angles; her long arms extended with fingers writing in air and their hyper-articulate walk—reveals the power of choreography to do composition (and meaning) differently. Following Hejinian and Waldrop and Stein, composition proposes not only an obscure tautology but rather enacts an intrinsically relational, citational and temporal relay that resists closure even as it works within limits.

The compositions within poem and Secret Mary refuse any singular viewpoint, conjuring instead a series of vanishing points and unstable horizons, enabling momentary dependencies and fierce individuation. The works trace a series of erotic edges through disorienting encounter, shifts in urgency and withdrawal, the impossibility of ever seeing everything happening in front of us.

This is incredibly difficult work, intellectually, aesthetically, physically. It demands everything from the dancers. Silas and Michael stand on opposing edges of the space with arms extended, shaking their hands even as their heads turn away, then they run toward each other. Michael lifts Silas. Silas slides down to lift Michael. A slow refrain: they touch, exchange weight, carry, lift, drop, shift roles. Always slowly, always changing the orientation with each encounter: one climbs to stand on the other’s shoulders and the other is held upside down.

And so, Tere, you may ask why again I have defaulted to literary allusions to write about my encounter with your work. Of course, it is always difficult to unhinge one’s habits and obsessions. Yet more than that I want to try on the reverse view. What if I not only rely on the choreographic impulse within these writings—the ways that Stein takes us to an edge and runs us back to the beginning, or Hejinian evokes jumping, editing, a translation of mobile experience through paratactic virtuosity—but how the generatively illegible labor of dance materially and physically interrogates these ideas.

As witnesses to poem and Secret Mary we risk capture, affectively and emotionally. It is never only about reading, but learning how to read and understanding that everything is not the same. —Jenn Joy

Tere speaks of this as an oceanic surround or consciousness of the work; choreography as a condition of memory—ours as witnesses, the dancers as performers, as one of the structures of the piece. As a labor that cultivates attention against distraction (to shift Walter Benjamin’s prognosis), choreography creates enclosures for encounter. Not to say that as a witness I never lose focus, but rather that poem is intrinsically porous and generous enough to leave room for openings or exits within its internal dynamics. This is part of the pedagogical work of the piece; it teaches me how to read if I closely attend to its intimate variations.

Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.  —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

poem, written with no capital letter, illuminates a subtle resistance to syntax even as the piece flirts with grammar as a structuring force. Intensely iterative and citational, the phrases repeat and return. At moments it feels baroque as wrists become gnarled, limp, elegant, age, turn, write, writhe. And then flashes of balletic force interrupt angular geometries and splayed limbs conjure ghostly traces of Merce Cunningham.

Watching an excerpt of Cunningham’s Septet (1964), I am reminded of the balance within poem. Cunningham acts as a spine or architecture for the three women held, extended, suspended around him, sometimes touching, more often leaning into and away; fragile intimacies maintained at a precisely articulated distance. The moments when the dancers hold each other by the wrist turned away rather then facing each other, their figures cut elegant intrusions into the negative space. Is this perhaps what Tere mines of Merce’s “abstraction beyond obfuscation”?

During this rehearsal the dancers begin at the mirror and run toward the wall, backlight by daylight streaming through the glass. Distinct textures of running, backwards, turned almost sideways, they each swoop and swoon with a slightly different interior focus.

Natalie and Heather stand to the side watching Oisin, Michael, and Silas in their circle dance: high kicks to center and side to slide to the floor on their backs. Self-reflectivity and metonymy played out in parallel; we see them seeing each other; the dancer’s legs animated as if on strings. The juxtaposition of these modes reveals one of many logics within poem as so many clues toward our reading.

They perform articulated balletic leaps to land to stand. Oisin and Silas pull the front legs of Heather and Michael forward drawing them into a low lunge. Partnering in this moment is not only about intrigue, pleasure, collaboration, flirtation, effort, but assistance or even enabling.

Silas and Oisin rise to stand with heads bent over. The bent head becomes a refrain in Franz Kafka’s writing, or at least if we believe Gilles Deleuze in his mediation on Kafka. The politics of such a gesture figure a turning away from desire, from connection, a turning inward that blocks sensation, memory and connection. This is truly a strange moment even within Deleuze’s world. And yet, what Deleuze proposes is a reading of Kafka’s work as syncretic machine that contains expression and content that does away with intention and narrative and representation as it relates to sense. He writes:

To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it—these are states of desire, free of all interpretation. The line of escape is part of the machine. Inside or outside, the animal is part of the burrow-machine. […] Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process.

A process: Heather and Oisin stand close to the audience. They touch hands, turn, smile, subtle, their play of fingers speaks of writing, of romance, of frustration, of anger, and then all of these again undone. A process: Natalie stands at an oblique angle to the audience and shakes her hips and arms with bent elbows, rising and falling slightly with vibrating intensity. Later Oisin takes on these movements while turned obliquely away from the audience toward the mirror in the back corner of the space. Now vibration becomes citation, momentarily, until it becomes something else. A process: Michael slowly lifts Silas, holding him upside down. Silas carries Michael. Michael bends down as Silas climbs onto his shoulders, slips down. Michael slides under Silas’ legs and is pulled, an odalisque, across the floor.

I sense a different weight in the transitions as one scene or movement or gesture transforms into something else—her hand slides over his wrist, his arm twists under his leg, their gaze absorbs the seemingly empty space of the room.

As I write an image comes to mind: a sculpture by Luisa Kazanas, Untitled (To Reach You). A taxidermied songbird dressed in a resin space suit with a glass helmet waits on the edge of a tree limb. Suspended under a glass dome, the bird and the tree and a small reflecting pool appear otherworldly. Science fiction or muted bird in a strange crystalline world or melancholic elegy turned prosthetic or another metonymic slip?

Exquisitely beautiful and incredibly sad, the silent immobile bird in her pale blue landscape calls out: to escape, to wait, to fly. I am not at all certain and quite suspicious of this shimmering image in my mind. And yet, perhaps it acts as a cipher for virtuosic restraint or a stilled velocity of movement of sound that illuminate some of the many surfaces of poem. An exit and a return participating in what Tere describes as the “braiding of choreographies” so much “powder sprayed on consciousness.”

—Jenn Joy

Standing at the ballet barre, the dancers run to the mirror turn, almost swoon and sweep arms bend over to rise and return to the barre. This is to be the opening refrain, the establishing shot as so many initial lines of flight come undone. The dancers run to leap to circle.

Tuesday is a day of trespass—Providence to New York, sculpture to dance, seminar to studio—of choreographic preoccupations. Returning to the studio, the detritus of teaching lingers in my mind. How do we sit, who sits where? How is knowledge produced? What does it mean to read critically? How do we watch closely with concern and interest? What kind of techniques and skills are required and which ones become so many limitations? Perhaps part of the work of these interrogations is to open up the spaces where discourse, talking together, critically, creatively, might happen. I hope. Can we attempt something provisional, even promiscuous in its reach?

Natalie and Heather watch Oisin, Silas, and Michael lie with raised legs on the ground. I think of Tere remembering his first viewing of Swan Lake as a child, of seeing no swans but other architectures, the trio, the triangle. A structure to add to the concern with line, duet and trio, established, danced, then dissolved, recomposed again.

Between the barre and the mirror. Of course, this space is just one of the transitional locations of Dance 2 resulting from complicated rehearsal schedules, classes, work commitments, economics, time. And yet, the effects of the studio participate in the viewing of this particular moment. The barre and mirror act as so many ciphers for the questions of training, of technique, of virtuosity called up in the dancing. To state the obvious—the dancers are all exquisite movers and performers—and yet the piece asks something more than simply the display of virtuosity; it invites a reflexive play with structure, with authorship, with meaning

They step to slide, to step, to slide.  Side step, side step… Is this a rehearsal line along the barre or a chorus line. At some moments the dancers form two lines facing each other and the empty space becomes a column, a ghostly aporia, transposed across the space in different and shifting directions.

Natalie and Silas dance in distant proximity. My mind wanders as the density of movements overlap in the space. Three hold hands, barely touching each other. Often one faces away from the other during this precarious balance. Gestures collapse in distant proximity is this a portrait of intimacy?

Tere describes the dancers as witnesses inside the work, such that it is not collaborative in the same ways as Dance 1. The voice of the choreographer directs and conditions. From the periphery leaning against the piano he intones: “and”… “and”… The dancers continue. The choreographer’s voice becomes command, yet his words gesture toward a more open additive compositional quality. Stillness is immanence or latent texture. Now facing the audience, the dancers’ deep plies expose a vulnerability of throat as their heads fall back and arms sweep up. This constant accumulation of micro-gestures of fingers, of wrists, of neck, of hands, always transforms into torque and extension and movement.

Sometimes her hand is a claw and sometimes theirs is a tree and sometimes his is a tool for digging and sometimes it is pinched to judge scale relations and sometimes the hand is just a hand.

To hold. To touch. To look. To assist. I want to think about choreography as a series of infinitives that point toward and back and sideways simultaneously. Here repetition might escape some of its mimetic restraints to do more inventive reparative work. Or perhaps these many refrains generate what Jen Rosenblit describes as the “hot spots” in the space, a more phenomenological and affective rendering of the spatial and temporal through temperature and tone.

They walk on relevé. As Heather’s arms open toward an unrequited hug she makes visible a soft nebulous architecture within the space of the studio. This is not pantomime but the body taking on a shape in relation to an imagined force or form; moving to foreground the background.

—Jenn Joy

—Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

Returning to Clarice Lispector is always a strange gift; a poetics inscribed in the seemingly familiar that struggles and abrades meaning. Her words perform a sensuous and at times abusive labor, virtuosic and unnerving. I had been reading her novel Near to the Wild Heart on my way to rehearsal and her voice continued to whisper as I watched—a lacy rough yet quite precise vocal texture, seductively cool alienating syntactical advances and retreats. Lispector conjures an aporia between language and desire, not a void per se, but a densely saturated intensity of sensation, emotion, loss, desire, lust, indifference. Her writing fights against sense demanding something else of language than any singular or legible representation. She choreographs desire as it touches the uncanny tics, twitches, and shudders of the quotidian rendering a complicated poetics that approaches (for me) what Tere describes as the “de-languaging” work of dance.

Some notes from Dance 2, a rehearsal, in no particular order:

Oisin and Silas bend over with arms stretched out behind them, running fast without moving; broken seagulls fighting against the wind, no direction only futile effort.

Standing along the periphery of the studio, they slide to step, slide to step, repeat, shifting balance from one foot to the other and back to trace or smooth over the ground. Writing about the relationship of ground to dance, theorist Paul Carter claims that the ground must be flattened and colonized before any dancing can happen. Karl Marx would say that we must eat before we dance. These regimes (economic, social, cultural) work with the studio apparatus evoking something of a governing force in the work. Even without the barre or mirror, there is nothing neutral about this not really empty studio. The dancers’ clothes, leg warmers, bags, snacks, Styrofoam rollers clutter the wall by the door and we, the small audience, sit watching from the side. Life accumulated in piles along the periphery. How do these ciphers of the exterior of the dance and of experience, of living, animate each rehearsal? The residues of working, classes, rehearsals, relationships, conversations, headlines, subway rides…

The dancers stand, leap, fall; they carry each other.

Heather is lifted into the air, very very slowly. A slowness that alludes to a careful attention to weight and the impossible aspirations of verticality but also of intimacy, the kind that follows after an accident or fight when something is broken or bruised. We never witness the breaks only the prosthetic after-effects.

Standing with their heads falling back, chins upturned like the strange headless creature of Brassai’s photograph that graced Man Ray’s surrealist treaty, Anatomies, they expose the vulnerability of the neck to the knife or camera. Anatomy becomes momentarily unrecognizable and strange. The almost uncanny imagined through the exquisite physicality and technique of the dance evokes a generative illegibility that exploits choreography’s power.

They are couples or partners; sometimes they count.

The dancers form a line close to the audience staring out above my head. Their gaze aspires to non-expressivity, yet reads as the frozen blank look of the dancer concentrating on the dancing internally. When I watch this iteration I experience a confusion of expressivity, or perhaps this is part of the layering of the choreographer’s vision and direction layered over technique in relation to the differential velocities, extensions, textures, qualities of each performer.

Leaving the group, Oisin walks to the back of the space and lies face down on the floor, now behind the other dancers, alone. Disengaged, exhausted, alienated, he almost seems to give in to gravity’s pull, to resist the rise of the other complicated geometries and architectures surrounding him. In the silence between the steps, you might almost hear his breath; his back rises and falls with this subtle effort. Asleep, exhausted, distant, his elegant pale tension holds the other laboring bodies as if suspending the movements all around him. His momentary extraction from the group calls to mind Jérôme Bel’s Véronique Doisneau (2004) that features the almost retired ballerina Véronique Doisneau executing extracts of dances she has performed as a member of the corps de ballet in the Paris Opera House. Yet, in Jérôme’s piece she is now alone in the corner of the stage, her corner as it were. Jérôme distances this piece from an idea of dancing to focus specifically on how it writes a specific body in a specific space and how this encounter narrates not only the relationship between dancer and company, but individual and society. Choreography, etymologically the intertwining of writing and movement, now becomes an intricate entanglement of relations, “a frame, a structure, a language” as Jérôme describes this constellation. Against his imposition of language or riffs on the semiotics or pop cultural sentimentality of words and memories, Dance 2 demands a more subversive play with the structure of the dancing and of the language within and surrounding it. The piece attempts a constantly shifting series of orientations as the dancers exchange roles and positions, never with narrative intent but always in relationship to events—spatial, sensational, temporal.

Always following, always anticipating future trajectories.

—Jenn Joy

A question: What are the “secret detonators” lying in wait within choreography?

Guided by a photograph of a tombstone covered with flowers taken by Félix González-Torres, Dahn Vo wanders Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris searching for Gertrude Stein’s grave. His encounter reveals a second name—not only Gertrude but also Alice—that explodes his idea of González-Torres’s photograph. What he finds remains invisible in the image, not given to be seen by the artist, existing rather as a secret detonator lying in wait behind a bouquet of dying flowers and scattered petals.

Something about the photograph unsettles in its sad nostalgic beauty, in its simplicity. Subverting the ways in which the photograph plays with the mnemonic function of a name and of an image, particularly a name inscribed in stone to last into eternity and an image marked as memorial, Vo conjures a multiplicity of histories, memories, interpretations, assembling a choreographic requiem for Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Isadora Duncan, Victor Noir, and for González-Torres, as well.

Vo’s rendering of the encounter speaks of a choreographic thinking; enacting a fluidity of time and history that while critical is also incredibly intimate. It offers something of what I want to call critical intimacy as a mode or practice of watching or perhaps witnessing choreography, particularly that of O’Connor’s current in-process works. Critical, not only as Ryan Kelly so eloquently explains as a degree zero of negativity that evacuates all meaning from a work of art, but critical as a mechanism of creative thinking that attends closely to the material, political, emotional, technical, aesthetic qualities of an object, a dance, a text, an image. Critical labor: what a dance could do (must do) right now. And this relationship to contemporaneity is also something that Vo touches on quoting González-Torres: “Things happen within culture when it is needed.”

There is a subtle erotics at work in Vo’s writing alluded to in the multiple couplings happening in the photograph, in the cemetery, in the shimmering of the past in the present, in the shifting distances and proximities between Vo and Gonzales-Torres, Stein and Toklas, Noir and his adoring fans, artist and writer, curator and artist, and on and on… Inciting what O’Connor speaks of in his own process as a kind of polyamorism—a mode of multiplicity that stands against narratives of monogamy and monotheism (conceptually, spiritually, physically, relationally).

What Vo activates in his writing resonates for me with what O’Connor describes as a “letting go of knowledge” to incite instead a “new balance away from laws foisted on dance…allowance versus strangulation.” And then O’Connor speaks about his first encounter with Swan Lake. Asking why the audience only sees swans and when he experiences many other images and layered energetics. “I saw a hallucination of architecture of legs…another math.”

In O’Connor’s choreographic process, other modes of knowledge, of coming to knowledge, of knowing are activated through “braided velocities” and an “immersion in choreo-timing” where temporality expands and contracts and “everything turns into four things and everything is possible.” Choreography opens up to a grammar of future anterior, a process of anticipation and presence simultaneously through the constant layering of systems and spaces, of arrivals and departures. So there is no telos or endpoint or narrative climax, but instead a series of events played out against each other that sometimes repeat and sometimes happen only in singular flashes.

O’Connor’s process is plural and paratactic: assemblage, collage, bodies, sculptures, texts, movements, murmuring, bending over, lying down, leap, carrying, holding, hiding, and always watching. What Hilary Clark names the “spacious” quality of the work holds all of these aspects together through an intensity of gaze that invents the dimensionality of the work. Always aware of each other’s presence even when they are looking away, the performers constantly shift from characters to non-characters to Judson tasks to classicism always “draining meaning as it is built.” Amidst all the movement, the attention to gaze produces this relational space, a cube within which all of these episodes play out.

Asked to define choreography in terms of his own work, O’Connor speaks of its fluid nature that is
“defined by working…a complete exit from singularity of meaning…that highlights another way of being in regular life.” Choreography is a “champion of complexity and convolution and contradiction…an observational modality. Surface is not important to what is going on” but how these events sit next to each other is.

“I want to be outside the nexus of reconcilabilty, not as a rebellion” but as so many ways of working with what is inherent in the form of choreography itself. Not to create incoherence, but to work with the incoherence present in choreography as medium. And in this way, the “value system” of “unviable structures” is created where “everything co-exists and nothing is looking to be a winner.”

I imagine this attention to the construction and dissolution of legibility against meaning as participating in the work that Georges Didi-Huberman demands art history do. Or if not art history or dance history, than a counter writing to these discourses that draws out the uncertainties, the wounds, what Didi-Huberman calls the “rend” in the images, the choreographic vanishing points within the work itself. And in these moments of writing, of seeing, of being inside the work, we might touch what O’Connor calls the “fog or ghost of the work that doesn’t include the imagery anymore” but instead a more “porous projection” oscillating between viewer and work. And here, in this aporia is where he hopes a politic of the work might reside.

This kind of syncretic value system draws as much from dance as it does from cinema and in one moment, O’Connor proposes that cinema more effectively does choreographic work than most dance. Speaking about Asghar Farhadi’s 2011 film Separation and Jean-Luc Godard’s Socialisme (2010) he describes the “undermining of narrative certitude through camera movement and time.” Put another way, film and O’Connor’s work attempt a kinetics not of movement but of “degrees to which modes of presentations switch.” Playing with difference and disjunction, Godard concocts elaborate architectures and scaffoldings of history and language and image fragments such that it is not the tableau that hints at content or politics but what is “happening with the mechanism itself” that becomes the purveyor of the politic as it “hammers against standardized human behavior.”

So many ecologies, surfaces, networks… I spoke with O’Connor the day after listening to Dorian Sagan read from a paper at Artist’s Institute (sitting in front of a Rosemarie Trockel image of a truncated étant donnés with a tarantula applied over her pubis) about other life worlds and his proposal for a conception of evolution as aesthetic assemblage rather than Darwinian survival mode. What if, Sagan asks, we humans are the artworks of slime? So that assemblage rather than composition becomes the operative force.

In a quite a different way (although for me completely connected) there is something of the choreographic assemblage as O’Connor describes it in the condensations of materials in David Altmejd’s sculpture just now on view in Chelsea. Painted birds pulling on golden chains; tiny plexiglass towers and mirror geometries; cities in miniature pressed up against a rotting torso composed of paint, dirt, hair, glitter, makeup; the bones of a hand with fingers touching; crystals morphing from blond wig hair; a body in pieces splayed out on a raised white plinth accented with red flowers. Altmejd’s work speaks of critical intimacies and desire’s illegibility, cutting caverns into the dominant logics of geometry, representation, and form; and this piece too is a requiem, a conjuring operation on beauty and history and meaning through exquisite decay.

—Jenn Joy