Demming's contribution to the recent exhibition All Work No Play in Dresden, for which she constructed a homeless person's shanty outside the institution and inhabited it, is an extreme demonstration of this sentiment.(1) It is also an indication of her debt in this respect to Joseph Beuys, who, in 1974 at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, spent three weeks (during gallery hours and photo ops) in a cage with a coyote. I remember the first day of the show. Beuys looked quite comfortable; the coyote was distraught. Eventually it calmed down, life learning to put up with art. If this suggests that it takes a maximum of twenty-one days to turn the wildest animal into one more gallery hound -- and that any attempt to activate art by way of what lies beyond it is bound to end up extending the scope of art itself -- Beuys and Demming would respond that that's the point, that art needs constantly to reach out to the rest of existence because it is art itself that is changed by that reaching out. The coyote returned whence it had come, presumably refreshed in its conviction that humans are mysterious, but still a coyote, whereas the idea of what a work of art might be had undergone a change, one having something to do with how it might relate to what lies outside it. Demming's show at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson gallery at Art Center divides into two, a visual part on the outside and an auditory one inside. The phrases written on the outside walls, collectively entitled The Erotic Language of Tao, name eighteen sexual positions. Inside the gallery speakers broadcast, sequentially and at random, thirty-two voices saying the names that the individuals recorded, whose ages vary widely, used (or still use) when addressing their parents. From one kind of conjugation to another, as Barthes might have said, and certainly from one kind of intimacy to another. Demming is interested in the thought that the one experience that parents and children never discuss is what happened on the occasion when the child was conceived, a discussion that, it seems to me, would have to be predicated either on rather infrequent intercourse or the acknowledgment of a fundamental uncertainty.

Given that that's what Demming's thinking about, one is struck by her use of the Taoist phrases, all of which refer to animals, in one part of the exhibition, in contrast to the exclusive use of voices in the other part. One might say that the body, which can act -- by engaging in sexual conjugation, for example -- is on the outside, while the voice, which conjugates only words and those only within itself -- and which, as they say, comes from within -- is on the inside. Literate people are fond of animals because, believing themselves to be alienated from their bodies by language and, in particular, by writing (so that Nietzsche's "body that thinks the world" might speak but would refuse to write, suggesting that utterance is more authentic an instinct than inscription), they suppose that animals are more privileged in this respect. Preliterate people are prone to worship animals for various reasons, which may in some cases be similar to those of the literate, but which also come down to the notion that animals possess a special wisdom. Like the ancient Britons, who seem to have sought to capture the spirits of (tribally specific) wild animals for motives that were probably warlike, the Taoist phrases seem to propose a kind of Deleuzian "becoming-animal" -- which adopts, approaches, or acquires the being of an animal -- in order to escape into a purely corporeal erotics.(2) One seeks to adopt the form of that which doesn't use words so as to escape language. (Not that anyone actually thinks that animals don't have language in some sense, although we continue to imagine them free of the future perfect; they don't know that they're going to die, unless they're elephants.)

Whatever the body's capacity for immediacy and sensation, how it signifies is by no means clear. This is why literate people envy animals: animals can read the body. Once one has writing, the naked body tells one much less than one that's wearing something, that has something written on it, which tells one that it belongs to a persona that would wear that thing. Similarly the mute body is incommunicative by definition, whereas the one that speaks gives away all there is to know. This is what leads me to say that aspiring to the animal is a flight not from language, but from writing (even though there's never been any question that animals don't communicate through traces, i.e., have sign systems). Speech contains an area of uncontrollability different from that which makes the written sign ultimately uncontrollable, in that a voice is ultimately as irreducibly what it is as is a body. Anything it does, any sign it employs, leads back to it as surely as any piece of clothing is framed or supported by the body it adorns.

In bringing attention to the names daughters and sons call their parents, Demming raises a profound question about how we hear. The words spoken are the first words the speakers said, now recalled by them for Demming and us. At the very least they raise the question of when it is that one begins to calculate the tone of voice in which one addresses one's parents. This is where the ungovernability of the voice comes in ad does so in a way comparable to that of writing, in that in both the ungovernable is a matter of the source of the statement. In both the source is ultimately irretrievable. The voice can't get back to where is once was; writing can never fully relocate its sources in the long chain of writings which produced it. Heidegger talks about the necessity of being able to hear the original Greek words (an impossibility) as they were first spoken in order to understand the concepts they represent.(3) Clearly the reconvening of the names for their parents that children first spoke opens up the gap that it implicitly seeks to close. In this the experience proposed by the Taoist phrases parallels the attempts to return to the words one hears in the inner gallery, which are the words of a speech that knew immediacy because it did not yet know anything else. There is another sense, too, in which there's a strong parallel. Demming herself talks about such words as being the way to thinking about the intuitive connections to the parent proposed by inflection and tone, in short, by the physical orientation of the voice to its object, an orientation obviously at its most purely intuitive (and in that both involuntary and instinctive) in an infant's speech.

It is, I'm sure, quite true that few, if any, parents talk about having sex with the other parent to their children -- although there are probably many who now do so publicly on talk shows -- and by the same token, just as language lacks the capacity to consider its own coming into being, it is unlikely that any family spends much time considering the recognition provided by shared vocal properties. One could approach the meaning -- what Demming would call the "intuitive truth" -- of what is communicated between voices that are similar, indeed related, only with great difficulty and with very little to go on.

A last parallel with the Taoist phrases: every body makes its own sound, but is it its own sound that it seeks to make when it reaches out to another body or voice? The child hears the parent's voice long before speaking, reception before production, as it were, which means that the child's voice has recognition inscribed in it. The voice of the mother is written in the voice of the child.

Heidegger also says that "when we intend nearness, remoteness comes to the fore. Both stand in contrast to each other, as different magnitudes of our distance from objects."(4)

There are objects in the world, and there are objects of speech, objects with subjects. Demming's show underscores the significance of the fact that one never hears one's own voice as others do but is stuck instead with the voice that no one else ever hears. One hears one's own voice as others do only when it's recorded, just as one never sees oneself from behind, except in a photograph or a mirror. One knows one's own voice or body only as an image, reflected or projected, rendered by some other mechanism, electronic or photographic, and thus as an entity outside oneself. The immediacy of one's own voice is manifested differently, and uncontrollably and involuntarily so, to the person to whom one speaks than to oneself. The voice of one's own which one never hears and has never heard is all that the object of one's speech ever hears, which suggests that one never gets to be very intimate with one's external self and that one's relationship to it is by default essentially intuitive.

Perhaps, then, one might propose a triad of parallelisms: The child's relationship to the parent is founded in a intuition grounded in recognizing a voice already heard. Taoism proposes the animal as a body that can think without writing, a body that need not defer to signs of desire when signaling desire, one that the human can recognize, as it does the parental voice, as a body with which it once had a relationship at once uncertain and secure and to which it might, through ecstasy, return. Art, or whatever practice one has when an impatience with the aesthetic takes over art's job, proposes itself as the place where one may revisit the intuitive recognition that links the art event to that from which it is derived and in which it finds its form but which it cannot be because it is locked into its own -- institutional, historical, ontologically circumscribed -- voice: the world at large. Which is itself visible only in works of art or not-art, the only places where the world can get outside itself.

2  Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 123-25. For Deleuze it's a question of forces, and he draws his own example, perhaps significantly, from Freud's story of little Hans (see also Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, "Vision's Resistance to Language," in Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-93 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995}, 43). back to text

3  Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harpers, 1984), 57. It's worth noting that Heidegger makes this observation in the general context of the ranting against technology that formed the core of his later work (for my own comments on the passage, see my forthcoming Das Schone und das Erhabene in der Gegenwart, trans. D. Demming and A. Carstens (Berlin: Merve Verlag). back to text

4  Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper, 1982), 102. back to text