Pauline Stella Sanchez, “Pop…5”, 1997, 22 x 28 inches, cartoon color and acrylic on canvas
March 28-April 21, 2022
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The surface of the sun
(Now comes a job which will require patience, skill, and acumen.1)
Written on the back of Pauline Stella Sanchez’ painting “Pop…5” are the words, “This is a surrogate sun...made of cartoon colour. Photo in place of display. It will brighten your day while you are on stage.” “Pop…5” is a surrogate sun – the sun in the sky is a fiery gas ball continually combusting. Sanchez’ surrogate sun is made of something less combustive and less radioactive, but as high-chroma as possible for maximum effect – yellow – the lightness level at which maximum chroma occurs is highest for yellow – “yellows so intense that with the right equipment they would probably prove to have sonic frequencies.”2 At a viewing distance of 20 feet, “Pop…5” is emanant. At 20 feet, the ploy of its sun surrogacy is acutely experienced as optical radiance similar to the distortion caused by heat when light is refracted through air of differing densities. Moving closer to the painting belies its effect, moving further away intensifies it, to a point.
Sanchez’ surrogate sun is meticulous and absorptive and radiative and irreducible. The visual effect of “Pop…5” is not additive, not an accumulation, but rather an all-at-once, an ecstatic bubbling up like a blister, the color superheated and alive. Like existence itself, “Pop…5” does not resemble a neatly defined itinerary from one practical sign to another3, but a sticky incandescence, a durable organism, “an exhortation for visual art to reach beyond masks of social identity toward a state of ‘pure feeling.’”4
The front of the painting is an untouchable surface made up of hundreds of tiny peaks made of accumulated dots of yellow cartoon color. The paint on the surface of the painting mimics pure pigment and looks as though it has accumulated (dabbled, dribbled, dolloped, dripped), or that the spaces around the peaked accumulations have dissipated as though through a fluvial process, a conspicuous denudation. Imagine cutting a small circle of sunny material, then cutting a smaller circle of sunny material and gluing it on top of the first and so on and so forth, then repeating this process again and again until hundreds of little distinctive topographic peaks have formed. Now imagine doing this with drips of paint, allowing each to dry before dolloping the next on top of one prior, a field of arrested eruptions.
Happy light
(“People! Those who are born but have not yet died. Hurry up into contemplation!”5)
There is a happy light that is kept on the kitchen counter. It is approximately eight inches tall and six inches wide and two inches thick. It stands upright, plugs into the wall, and on the back, there is a little rounded toggle switch to turn it on and off. The happy light uses 120v electricity and yields a bright 26 watts of light. Sometimes it is turned on in the mornings before the sun comes up to give the sensation of sunlight coming through the window as you unload the dishwasher and make coffee. You point the light away from yourself toward the wall and the light bounces off the wall and alights the entire kitchen in a mellow and ambient way. The happy light is particularly effective in staving off seasonal sadness, a kind of situational melancholia that settles in heavily mid-February. The positive effect of the happy light may be psychosomatic or purely language-effect.
Sun, you gave birth to passions
And burned with an inflamed ray.
We will throw a dustsheet over you.
And confine you in a boarded-up concrete house!6
A fake sun is being developed in Germany7. It uses as much electricity in four hours as a home uses in one year. The light emitted from this invention is so intense that it can melt all sorts of metal and when switched on, no one is allowed into the chamber that houses the fake sun because the radiation is dangerously high. The fake sun produces 10,000 times the intensity of natural sunlight on Earth and can reach temperatures of around 6332 degrees Fahrenheit. To leave the fake sun switched on continually for one year would require 10,950,000 kilowatt hours of electricity at a cost of approximately $3,504,000. No one, not even those who invented the fake sun, can describe its value.
(Life on earth can be disrupted by small groups of people engaged in expenditure without reserve.)
Productive activity
(The sun provides an excess of energy. The extra energy can be used productively, or it can be lavishly expended.)
If you live off the grid – I stop typing to assure myself that this isn’t really possible – but if you live off the grid and you need hot water, then you should locate a relatively large clearing somewhere uphill between your homestead site and a nearby creek – you established your homestead near a source of fresh water, right? – clear the site and construct a large repositionable panel made of plywood and 2x4s – not upright like a wall, but horizontal – think of this as a stage for the sun. On the surface of this panel beginning in the center, coil two-inch diameter black pvc pipe in a continuous spiral until it covers the entire surface. Allow water to feed downhill from the stream to fill and flow through the coil and then continue downhill to the location where you desire warm water. I want to emphasize the important role of the sun here – this is how the water will be warmed. As the accumulated water sits in and moves through the coil, position the panel to face the sun – the effect of the sun shining on the black pvc pipe will warm the water. This thermal phenomenon is a gift from the sun that cannot be repaid. This project is a productive activity. I pause to consider taking a shower.
Unproductive activity
We attempt and fail to balance the productive and unproductive aspects of our life. During the day, we are engaged in our official duties as workers and at night, we meet with our secret society whose members gather at the foot of a lightening-struck tree in the forest of Marly or sometimes in the ruins of the Château de la Montjoie. What we do during these meetings can be described generally as unproductive social activity, an ecstatic expenditure. There was going to be a human sacrifice, but we cancelled it.
(Plenty of people volunteered to be sacrificed, but no one volunteered to do the sacrificing.)
Our aim is purely anti-homogenous. We are not getting paid to organize or attend these meetings. We are also not LARPing. Beyond what I am, I imagine meeting a being who makes me laugh because he is headless.
(“Laughter is the Bergsonian foamy wave on which Bataille ‘surfs’”8)
If I’m going to be honest, we spend most nights sleeping.
The parabolic curve and its applications
In late winter 1934, to hasten coming of spring, Sylvia Bataille lay down in the snow in Bourg-d'Oisans with her shirt off 9. The warmth of her body melted a thin layer of the snow, which despite this, re-froze almost immediately, creating an icy-layer impression in the snow, an indentation, a mold from which her absence would then be cast once the silliness of this act enjoyed its moment. Sylvia then got up to laugh it off and continued along. More photos were taken posing with skis and poles and all that.
(You are now playing with a tiny ball of fire you can’t see.10)
Potlatch
If you look directly into the brightest part of the sun, ultraviolet will light flood your retina, like stepping out of a cave and into the sun. A bright yellow spot will stay with you for a while after you look away – a sunburn on your cornea. If you then close your eyes, the spot will turn black. Looking at the sun is a way of apprehending it, but a sacrifice must then be made. There is no physiological benefit to looking directly at the sun. I am going to stay in the cave but come back for me.
Photovoltaic effect was first observed in 1839. Patents for solar-powered engines were registered in the 1860’s, a concern of speculative mathematics and physics. The first solar cell was made of gold and was 1% efficient. The first silicon photovoltaic solar cell capable of converting enough of the sun's energy into power to run everyday electrical equipment was developed by Bell Labs in 1954. Solar panels are still to this day highly inefficient in harvesting sunlight. There is a superabundant outpouring of solar energy. Most of this energy is non-capturable, non-recuperable, and on the rare occasions when we do manage to capture this energy, we become irresistibly compelled to use it in a manner that threatens the prevailing system. There is not a way to connect “Pop…5” to an electrical circuit or system. Imagine it though, plugging this painting in, connecting it to the grid, a reverse solar panel. Imagine plugging it in, the lights dimming and flickering and all excess energy being extracted from the grid and transferred back to the sun.
Instead of drifting we must now swim
(Unusual noise–an airplane attacks–a broken wing is seen onstage.11)
The pilot steps out unharmed
What I have thought or represented, I have not thought or represented alone. I am writing in a cold little house in a village of fishermen; a dog has just barked in the night. My room is next to the kitchen where Andre Mason is happily moving around and singing; at this very moment, as I write, he has just put on the phonograph a recording of the overture to Don Giovanni; more than anything else, the overture to Don Giovanni ties my lot in life to a challenge that opens me to a rapturous escape from the self.12
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1.) George Donald Graham, Capture the Sun; The parabolic curve and its applications, Enterprises Unlimited, CA, 1975.
2.) Bruce Hainley, “The Power of Suggestion; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art," Artforum, February, 1997.
3.) Georges Bataille, and Allan Stoekl. “The Pineal Eye,“ Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Print. p.82.
4.) Chris Kraus, Pauline Stella Sanchez, Artforum, January, 2009.
5.) Aleksei Kruchenykh, Victory over the Sun, Translated from the Russian by Larissa Shmailo, 1913.
6.) Ibid.
7.) Hannah Devlin,“Let there be light: Germans switch on 'largest artificial sun', The Guardian, March 2017.
8.) Bénédicte Boisseron, “Georges Bataille’s Laughter: A Poetics of glissement,” French Cultural Studies, Volume 21 Issue 3 (August 2010), pp. 174-175.
9.) Denise Bellon, Photograph of Sylvia Bataille; From the series: Famille à la neige, 1934.
10.) George Donald Graham, Capture the Sun; The parabolic curve and its applications, Enterprises Unlimited, CA, 1975.
11.) Aleksei Kruchenykh, Victory over the Sun, Translated from the Russian by Larissa Shmailo, 1913.
12.) Georges Bataille, and Allan Stoekl. “The Sacred Conspiracy,“ Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Print. p.181.