A Journey Without End - thoughts towards the work of Inigo Rose

Some things are best left unsaid, like asking an artist, ‘What does this mean?’ At a time like this, meaning is merely a short cut, a sell out or compromise. If you seek the answer, you are settling for less. For here is not an accumulation of parts where words restore units to order and establish a categorical regime. And who wants it, really, this unity of elements where contents are levered into definitive statements? In the words of Deleuze and Guattari:

‘We will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities.’

The work of Inigo Rose functions like an abstract machine; a collection of parts, which perpetually draws on, and refers to, other assemblages of enunciation. The intentional references are many and diverse, shifting in and out of our awareness: alchemy, contemporary Fine Art, physiology and digital open source. As the alchemist cranks up the machine, the work is transformed from stasis into movement, and its silent parts are no longer trapped in the timeless poses of aesthetic contemplation. There is life here, a multiplicity of elements (comprising objects, people, events and contexts), which ceaselessly make connections within and between themselves.

‘a throng of dialects, patois, slangs and specialized languages.’

I am tempted to ask, ‘Is this sculpture, animation or performance?’ but this is simply a bad habit of mine. I am aware that work such as La Petite Mort (2009) moves in and out of such orders of signification. It resists the power take-over of words (of critical language and the contemporary Fine Art market). In that sense, it resists my training. I am not prepared for it. It moves across the borders of academic ‘speak’ and critical language, moving in and out of intelligibility. In the process, the work of Inigo Rose highlights the slippery nature of intellectual life in the current scene, where ideas shift like sand and rapidly move into unchartered territory. The work sets out on a course and expresses a wandering. And when it moves, it carries its stories and affiliations with it. I could resist the journey and impose my own sense of narrative coherence on it, but what’s the point? Better to draw lines of flight and imagine temporary place-holdings. Allow the pattern, rhythm and connections of the work to take hold, for assembled within its codes are the almost-drownings, trance-induced hallucinations and happenstance conversations of Rose’s own autobiography.

As the static forms – of eggs, unicorn horns and victory signs - move into life, this assemblage of parts increases in dimension, expanding connections and moving towards infinite causality: Shamenism, Conrad Shawcross and Carsten Holler, Altermodernism and Relational Aesthetics, The Matrix and Bullet Time, Marcus Coates, Louis Greaud and Situationist subversions; the list goes on. When people are gathered and the work whirrs into action (under the disorientating effects of a strobe), the determinations, magnitudes and dimensions of the work proliferate/accelerate. The event of bringing the artwork to life generates a time-sensitive space whereby temporary affiliations can be established between objects and people – peripatetic connections.

There is ritual here, but it is not the common-sense ritual of the contemporary museum or gallery. A piece such as Diplomatic Device for Affirming Unity (2009) is more inspired by the vast expanse and social inclusion of the American festival – The Union and The Burning Man – than a conventional Fine Art mausoleum. Inigo Rose invokes the multiplicity of the meeting place, with its cacophony of people, voices and objects, many of which are traced here, if only as particles in flight. Like meeting someone in a crowded coffee house, you might see things and you might hear them, but you won’t engage with the totality of the assembly. The totality is but an elusive ideal, subsumed within the multiplicity of ambient sounds, colours and movements. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, being caught in the middle is where the pleasure begins:

‘The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary

it is where things pick up speed …'

Click here for a link to Inigo's work