backjump: notation, disnotation

In his final work recalling 2 years spent as brother to Palestine’s fedayeen, Jean Genet recalls the postulate of a Sudanese revolutionary with whom he is mutually enamoured:

“When you were strong enough to land in our country you were still only the equivalent of a linguistic game of patience… But to conquer us you needed a common language.”

It is the memory of a conversation captured, perhaps unfaithfully, that is clarifying in its prescience: in order to unsettle a people with genocide, a language had to be settled into common use. Such games of political manipulation are no less familiar to us in their design: empty systems of discourse by the new archons of world-making, the West’s political and media class, are easily recognisable in their illegibility: a common parlance emptied of relation to the world, to accountability, authenticity, to justice and its attendant peace.

If Genet’s friend’s theorem has survived as the l’esprit d’escalier of a 40-year history of public language made hyper-visible and grotesque, Madden’s Backjump turns attention to its fugitive counterpart; an alternate language hidden in plain sight.

Madden’s work as amanuensis and translator of the illegal and covert is extended in this solo exhibition that reads graffiti as notation. In her new works exhibited in the window gallery, the surface becomes text. Graffiti on brick and concrete are remade into a synthetic orthography that recognises surface as author, as interlocutor in mimetic exchange. Far from a notation that denies relation to its spatial and temporal context, these forms cannot (and do not want to) escape accountability to their environments. To what is visible in plain sight.

In Misreading Misreading, text and form authored in the spirit of the moment is remade into a permanent language that invites a kind of first contact with the already-known. The incidental and aleatoric become beseeching in their permanence, demanding to be read with the legitimacy of ‘real language’.

In conversation with Tia, I’m enamoured of her attention to the brief and almost-accidental, the time it takes paint to hit a wall. In her poetic insistence on reading form as occasioning translation, she becomes an artist of a language which both denies and demands interpretation. Here, the esprit d’escalier, the spirit of a moment, entreats you–unsettles, disrupts–briefly immortalised. Then, disappears.