Stephanie Stein “Substitute II”

Cabinet of Kaput No. 27
Stephanie Stein
“Substitute II”
2016

Geometries of Indeterminacy

1. Understanding an artist’s work means understanding its logic.
2. It is never about taste or preference.
3. Art implies a perforation of the aesthetics of taste.
4. Art generates a grammar for dedication,facing the unascertained fractions of reality.
5. Like any thinking, art is about specifying one’s passions.
6. I believe that Stephanie Stein’s work has such specications.
7. Undoubtedly, Stein’s work attempts to open up a space of indeterminacy and to give this opening a form, which makes the incommensurable commensurable or de nes the unde ned.
8. Stein’s work moves along a ne break line between determinacy and indeterminacy.
9. It indexes the inconsistent character of reality.
10. Reality is a promise of consistency that is reneged.
11. I call everything that we assume as being at least partially consistent reality.
12. A certain consistency means a certain permanence.
13. Reality is a synonym for the space of facts that Lacan calls symbolic order.
14. That is the space of language, logos and signi cation, which is permeated by the imaginary.
15. I designate the universe of discursive facts and established consistencies as denitively existing space of facts.
16. The space of facts is the space of existing things.
17. These things can be objects like a chair or a computer but they can also be ideas, opinions, hopes and assumptions.
18. Nonmaterial things are facts as well.They can be met existing in the space of facts where they circulate as memories, certainties, dreams or fantasies and therefore are constitutive of our reality.
19. Reality is the space of facts populated by the most dissimilar things, which are subject to factual codi cation. Although these codi cations may be contingent, they only exist in the mode of ontological ef ciency.
20. A moment of headlessness or blindness belongs to art as much as to writing: ‘One doesn’t write with the head’ says Heiner Müller.
21. It is more about following the dynamic motion of writing than developing an argument.
22. Art is the risk to commit oneself to a motion that opens the subject to the Nicht-Sinn (non-signi cation).
23. Rather than ‘reacting and describing’, it is more about ‘conceptualizing different realities’, Müller writes.
24. Realities that can neither be proved nor veri ed.
25. Writing means emancipating oneself from reality by destroying its image.
26. Art does nothing else.
27. It is about approaching the indeterminate with artistic determination.
28. Stephanie Stein’s work balks at simple concepts of harmony and complementarity by integrating a third or fourth element, a corner too many, an excess that upsets its geometry.
29. I think it is about geometries of indeterminacy.
30. They point at the a-logical aspect of our reality.
31. They do it with great precision.