The Fox-Situation

PART 1: THE KNIFE IN THE MIRROR

Let us begin with Terry Fox’s knife. It is an unremarkable, wooden-handled hunting knife placed on a small mirror lying face-up on the bare earthen floor of a Soho cellar. The mirror is roughly one and half square feet without a frame. A man sleeps beside it, enlisted by Fox for the purpose, his weathered face relaxed, mouth agape. His clothes are askew, and we can see (by accident?) a portion of an old and faded tattoo splayed across his exposed brown belly. We are meant to take these two assemblages, knife and sleeper, as sculptures suspended in conjunction with other elements, including the artist himself, all in black as he makes his way from this situation to that, from this stray patch of light to that: spitting soapy water through the panes of a broken window frame, “bumming” a cigarette from the audience, smoking it idly, simply letting the smoke roll out his mouth. Little sounds of running water are subtly amplified via a microphone hanging down into a ragged sewer coupling emerging from the floor. A flashlight illuminates the hole as if to say this is where the sound is coming from; there is no trickery here. Everything is exactly as it appears to be. 

In recounting the event later that year (it is July of 1970), Fox will identify these two sculptures within the tableau that is Cellar as carrying unique and overarching significations: The man is the time element, a physical embodiment of the element of an undifferentiated time that is both unconscious but also a sort of clock without hands, a duration. The knife, on the other hand, “was an abstraction of the kind of thing which is in front of you all the time.” It isan unusually archaic use of the word “abstraction” for 1970 that suggests a deeper meaning than merely differentiating the thing in itself from the reflection of the thing or re-presenting the fragments that comprise a perspectival image in a novel assemblage (the infinitive to abstract). It is more likely the operative condition of the ‘thing’ in this instance was not the knife at all but rather to cut, or more precisely, a claim that to differentiate is to cut just as to sleep was not to differentiate, wherein the analogous reflection of the knife blocks the free passage of the infinitive to cut in the creation of a differentiation that is the extension of ‘to cut’ as an abstract figure in the situation, and so on; to cut, to paint or mark, to break, to sleep, to smoke: a circuit is created from one action to the next in a syntactical expression of a duration that is simultaneously the production of a hyperaethesis that orients our perceptions to the actual; The actual knife, the actual cellar, the actual window, the actual man that is the sleeper (a surrogate for a second Fox, as we shall see) are revealed in a series of discrete tableaus that either are or not connected. However, and this is of crucial importance, the deterritorialization that arises from one infinitive to the next is not how Fox frames the artwork (which seems to be the strategy of Cellar as well as Isolation Unit) or the effects of his actions as he breaks the panes of a window frame leaning against the wall, or bums and smokes a cigarette, or paints and washes his face, but what Deleuze and Guattari term the transversals between each that serve to alienate the everydayness of the others in a deterritorialization (the virtual to cut) that creates the situation. 

In Cellar, every object used as materialundertakes at least one transformation of its everyday utility to draw attention to its inclusion in the work of Art. The knife is used to break a window, then it is placed on a mirror…and Fox spits soapy water through the now empty window frame to activate it, to cross its threshold with yet another abstract action, the parity with placing the knife on the mirror. It is also likely that this was also the point of breaking the windowpanes with the knife’s handle, and when this was not enough, Fox decided to spit the soapy water through the window to emphasize his point further. The spitting of the water was a “futile” gesture, he called it, one already outside of his schema. Nevertheless, soap and water will appear regularly in Fox’s early work, like flour and smoke. The window, too, will reappear. We see the breaking of the window again in Isolation Unit performed with Joseph Beuys that November, only this time, a burning candle is placed behind the window before it is broken, and afterward, Fox reaches through the frame, takes the candle, and lights a flaming cross in the shape of the window-grilles amidst the broken glass. He activates both sides of the surface of the disembodied window. The spitting of the soapy water is the proto-configuration of this later signification, just as the unconscious body in Cellar will recur in Pisces, then labeled the “passive” element juxtaposed to the critical/apathetic one that is the soap which Fox used to wash his hands after applying white paint to his face to “distinguish himself from the audience⁠1”. 

The point is this: it was not enough for the window to sit there, disembodied as it were, without a vista by which to be a window: the panes must be broken in order for the disembodiment to be actualized, for the window without a bay to achieve signification. This same movement of actualization occurs along the lines of the knife as it was placed in the mirror or as the sleeper (the time element) becomes an agent of an unbidden, undifferentiated time by virtue of its consistency throughout the piece. It was there before; it will remain after. However, as Fox learned during the performance, to break was not enough. It remained to close the literal everyday reality of window-ness as did the knife in the mirror. It was not enough to present dualisms of metaphors to evoke the affective character found in the work of Art or to shine a light on the incumbent virtualities that are caught up in the production of the real and its territories. A transversal was required. However, what is already present in Fox’s early work is that passivity, in the form of the sleeper, was not a basis for inscription or even of the production of meaning or interpretation as born of equivalences and symmetrical relations. The sleeper was the de-facto element of durational time. 

There are other time elements in Cellar that suggest Fox was thinking about time as one plastic element among many. Fox bummed a cigarette and smoked it idly, letting the smoke loll out of his mouth without inhaling. To smoke…the slow-burning of the cigarette a little continuous unfolding. The sleeper sleeps; the knife rests on the mirror, a tiny, active cutting machine folded in on itself. The amplified sound of the sewer main fills the space with the gentle sounds of running water. Fox’s earlier singular action’s key significations are produced via dialectical, dualistic, or symmetrical pairings of materiality and immateriality. Fox had experimented with this strategy in his early, hermetic actions. 

Symmetries abound in varying proximities to their everyday temporalizations: white paint is removed from the wall, white paint is applied to Fox’s face, and the window is broken. Each object is used to create multiple meanings and uses that pertain, in turn, to the assignation of thematic roles for both artist/performer and material/object alike. As an early work, the first in which Fox attempts to present elements working in relation to one another, several vital considerations have yet to be resolved. It is as if the phrasing is not entirely correct; the syntax required to liberate his materials is not quite aligned. It is unclear if this is intended to be a correspondence between one tableau and the next or if, at some point, the actions will spill over into a recognizable whole, into a situation. This is because, (and Fox would correct this logic in later works), the significations found in this approach were asymmetrical. The incumbent relations that revealed the forces at work did not move in two directions at once. They followed asymmetrical, albeit unicursal path. (From wind to sheet, or body to wall), or else were continuous but finite (the sleeper, the running water, the smoke). Only the Knife in the Mirror was a carried of presumably infinite extension. This put him somewhat at odds with metaphor as a potential carrier of his syntactical expressions available in producing effective chains comprised of materials.

In terms of performance art that seemingly has no place in history, in which only the remembrance of the event has a historical claim, the de facto subject of the work of art becomes the presentation of the specific praedicamenta involved in preserving the work of sculpture confined to a present-that-is-past, a state of perpetual re-enactment that Fox would characterize in his works with text as a “reproduction of experience .” As such, Fox creates a new kind of image; a schema of reflection and actuality that invokes a Bergsonian logic wherein a bifurcation occurs in the production of time that, on the one hand, remains symmetrical but is also always an asymmetrical contraction of an immanent and infinite past encountered as actual. This Crystal image is immanent to refrain in all of its forms.

***

Cellar is the crucial first step in Fox recognizing the power of the syntactical chain when it is confined to the production of a live situation. In Cellar and Pisces, however, Fox first needed to contend with the problem of the symmetrical and asymmetrical. He wanted flow and movement in his work. Cellar and Pisces, as artworks, are Fox confronting the problem of the static idea or image of thought produced by the knife in the mirror. 

In a model that approaches difference as produced by signification, the symmetrical idea (seen in Fox’s work as metaphor) precedes the inference of the asymmetrical real. In other words, we cannot infer asymmetry without having an ideal symmetry to compare it to. ⁠In this schema, the asymmetrical features that comprise metaphors are achieved by various means that relegate the passive to not a productive role but an inscriptive one. The passive is that which is inscribed upon, and legibility, correlation, causation, and inference all unfold accordingly, always in deference to the preexisting, symmetrical idea. The genesis of meaning is then created by a negative-dialectical process that has profound ethical implications with which we are all familiar; we are free when nothing is impeding our flow; the experience of the (asymmetrical) passage of educational time occurs because time is forever escaping us; metaphor exists due to deviations from the preexistent ideal, with one idea replacing another in a discrete series of mental images and events, referring backward into the past in terms of causes and origins, and forwards into the future in terms of teleological finitude.

One might argue that this lack of dynamism, this supra-historicity, is why the piece is located in a cellar. It is certainly possible. Other congruences within the piece contribute to a portrait of the artist as offering a pointed, yet formally superficial, take on East Coast Avante Gardist tropes of the ’60s, and by putting them in a literal Cellar, Fox may have been saying such ideas were not worthy of the main space. From this standpoint, it is easy to see how the requisite symmetry found in interventionist and site-specific arts of the time (and in modeling and illustration generally) placed very strident limitations upon the creation of metaphor, so much so that site-specific work quickly developed into a generalized theory of inscription; in both instances what intervenes, or what is installed, has to relate to the space in which it is put. The interrelationship between this thematic concern and site amounts to asymmetrical relations that are experienced as a teleological limit⁠. the awareness of ‘place’ as instrumental to the apprehension of Art limited the availability of metaphorically derived content to elucidate it (i.e., it had to ‘fit’), and it had to be tied to the semantic and syntactical arrangements that informed it (it had to be ‘relevant’). This was as prevalent in Concrete Poetry as in early works of Intervention such as Henderson, Young, and Hawley’s OIL from 1969 or Henderson’s ATTICA from 1972: with the placement of language comes a selection of words, and not vice versa. This atomizing of metaphor, such as it was, perceived time primarily as belonging to a language of transference between Art and space, or Art and life, or Art and non-art (the everyday or Doxa). It did not tolerate the notion that time was an element in sculpture beyond the endurational present circumscribed by “clocking in” and “clocking out,” that is to say, spatialization of time. No sleeper served as a time element or a passive element. 

Nor was Fox alone in this durational sensibility. Several of his Bay Area contemporaries, most notably Tom Marioni and Paul Kos, saw duration as a sculptural opportunity and not, as did many, a reversion to theatricality. The emphasis on context (in both site and timeliness) was an opportunity to advance two problems at once: early works by Fox and Paul Kos endeavored to liberate sculpture from these dialectical strictures, Fox, by the creation of Elements, and Kos by referring to natural processes as that did not benefit from dialectical exposition. We might look at Fox and Kos as synthetic and an organic durationists, with Fox undertaking to synthesize the conditions of experience (or at the very least draw attention to them) and Kos referring to such conditions as already extant outside the conditions of a synthesis, that is as a naturally occurring fact. This is important to us as it clarifies what Fox would discover later, that his work was of a profoundly interior nature that stood juxtaposed and even in defiance of psychological readings. Archly materialist, Fox’s and Kos’ work were equally invested in an immateriality dependent on transformation and change.⁠

This suggests that from the outset, it was not the causation linked to the event that interested Fox but rather the host of machinic effects that serve to cut the designation of activity (and of Art as an activity) and, in so doing, create a situation out of it. The “abstraction of what was in front of you all the time,” while abstract enough, was also available as a generalization in terms of how it was recognized either as an everyday object (that is, as either a sensory-motor recognition, which Fox intended or a habitual recognition, which Fox intended to circumvent by using the knife to break the glass). Despite seeking out the window’s dead spot with the knife, this was insufficient to Form a territorializing, affective circuit out of a syntactical chain. This was likely the intended purpose of the twin cellars, that is to say, the location of the performance and the title of the artwork, which also can be seen as agents in the creation of a situation. In other words, both the cellar and the knife (the thing that cuts and the site that circumscribes it) were not isolated from their incumbent virtualities and so remained signs or representations of themselves, were not sufficiently abstract to serve as transversals (and did not, as would every element in Pisces, transverse) to serve as a “specialized vector or deterritorialization .” This is to say, they remained metaphors: to cut is to differentiate, the cellar (of the gallery) is beneath or underground the gallery, and so on. The coordinates in question remained established from the outside. The artwork did not create its territory, which it assuredly must do in order to fulfill Fox’s aims. Despite the literal presence of the knife as representative of the cut, there remained an urgent question as to what would hold the work together and what would keep all the disparate actions and tableaus in Cellar from dissolving into chaos. It was simply that the knife in the mirror was not a sufficient analogy for what was actually taking place at the virtual level, that is to say, on the level in which the work was remembered. Of Art as an activity as a revealing of territorial assemblages that opens it up to other assemblages, and in this case, the knife in the mirror, for reasons that were not to become clear to Fox until his encounter with the labyrinth, simply was not sharp enough to serve as “the cutting edge of deterritorialization.” 

This is not to say Cellar is not an important work. As an experiment, it clarified a great deal. It made clear the absolute necessity for a ‘scientific’ specificity of material and affect to create a plane of consistency. It affirmed to Fox the possibility of networking his elements as a basis for establishing situations he would do with Pisces six months later. He would also perform elements of the piece with Joseph Beuys later that year. It is also likely that despite the body of work that had amassed over the previous eighteen months, most notably Cellar, Pisces, and Rake’s Progress, Fox did not fully grasp the significance of the knife in the mirror until the encounter with the labyrinth, and that he took the labyrinth as a replacement for the assignation of elements. This replacement constituted a reversal, albeit an asymmetrical one, that amounted to preserving his earlier work, including Cellar. 

In the work of Terry Fox, prior to Cellar, variation in signals (metaphorical or actual) stands in the place of images as a means of producing (or, as he would have it reproducing) an actual experience. In the Fox-situation, in unwitting sympathy with Deleuze, we are bound up in finding a solution to the problem of how the legibility of the symbolic field of a sculptural situation (appearing in 1970 as the image of thought) stands in relation to signs: signs that appear in Fox’s work to be of an exceedingly abstract variety primarily because they are unfamiliar in their network of asymmetrical relations in that they rely on their movement to exploit the passage from one order of generality (an element) to another.⁠10 Fox was not ultimately interested in the production of meaning. He was interested in the production of Art as a collective experience that would serve to reveal (and to reveal is to create) the asymmetrical cognitive production of predicates within a situation. The mere presentation of ideas was not going to cut it. He wanted the real thing, and he understood, either due to the extremes of his personal experience, by ecstatic or pharmacological vision, or by the wanton study of Artaud and others, that the real was produced and the passive was required in the production. If this proved not entirely successful, it was because such equivalences remain, for all of their careful considerations, representative of ideas which, as Deleuze would describe it, have already unseated a pure movement in time with representations or models of how time is represented⁠. The immateriality of ideas did not prove overly valuable for Fox as it was to many artists of his generation.⁠ This process, a mixing of impure elements of perception and language, are the matter from which the sensible is derived and then extended in spatializations, the virtual component of which Fox would later consider in terms of the surface but which in structuralism is taken as the very genesis by which meaning is created. The real was not out there waiting to be encountered by any passing brain in a jar or caught in the symmetrical nets of classical philosophy; it was not an image. The real itself was a conflagration of elements in motion. It was a product of durations, a swarming of molecular impressions, sensations, memories, desires, and matter that could not be represented. It comprised movements of thought, assemblages that resonated and clashed, uneasy allies forced to coexist for a while in fabricating an experience. What is more, Fox had to teach himself to do this work, work that was an experiment with a totalizing goal of dissecting the situation into the requisite parts of Narrative and Active Durations, Passive and Critical Durations, of Conditioning elements, all of which could be considered Time Elements operating within a situation. This is why Richardson can say Fox never “tampered with elapsed time .” Time was not material so much as a vehicle in which material, artist, and the audience were all along for the ride, and it was the artist’s role to make it felt.

ENVIRONMENTAL SURFACES  (January 1971)

As Fox must have recognized sometime after the use of the mirror in Cellar and before the creation of the landscape in Environmental Surfaces, between the utility of the mirror to reflect and the attribution of the mirror as a surface exists a host of relations that have little or nothing to do with vision. Unlike many of Fox’s materials, such as flour, fish, and flame, which he would use repeatedly, the knife does not make another appearance. The mirror, too, would fade in importance, although it did make a noteworthy appearance in Yield (1973), in which he worked atop a large mirror on the floor of the Berkeley museum. Given his fidelity to his materials, their exclusion is noteworthy. 

As Fox makes clear in his breaking of a windowpane in Cellar and Isolation Unit (performed in November 1970 in Munich, also in a cellar), his sculptural situations were much more than simply a ‘points of view’ or phenomenological composites. Instead, they were interdependent with thought to actualize them as part of a continuous moment that changes not only with every step with every turn of the head but as part and parcel of the movement of thought itself. While a Fox-situation could be said to include the site of our receptivity to the work of art, indicated by the sleeper or the burning cross in the form of the intersecting muntins of the windowframe, it was not itself a representation. We are inextricably wed to our experience, Fox seems to say; there is no way of discerning where it ends and we begin. Whatever relations inferred from the knife and the mirror were of limited use in creating situations comprised of actual durations because the knife in the mirror, as an analogy, was a generality. In contrast, situations, if they were to be capable of engendering affect, must be comprised of specific relations. 

Fox enlisted Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim to perform their works alongside his for Fox’s second New York show at Palley (the first having been Cellar). It is likely Fox got this idea from Beuys, who, in inviting Fox to perform with him in Dusseldorf the previous November, basically englobed another artist (Fox) into a performance to establish what, for Beuys at least, was a work about the Vietnam War.⁠ Regardless of this, Fox’s inclusion of Acconci and Oppenheim in his show was inspired. Not only did it help to elaborate on the profundity of the field of performance as something far beyond the fashionable term “body works,” it also helped clarify his methods that contrasted with structuralist and endurationalist approaches at a time. By that time, Oppenheim had already become one of the critical darlings of the theorists led by Jack Burnham, eager to find a place for the advanced arts of the 70s within the European structuralism finding its way to American shores. Acconci, meanwhile, was actively engaged in creating a body of works that serve a veritable mapping of the body and its interdependence with regulatory and mediated expressions of time and space.⁠ Fox, on the other hand, was in 1970 more or less operating intuitively in regards to what would later become his signature themes. However, he recognized the advantage of distinguishing himself from these two other trajectories with limited potential. What is more, Fox’s schema englobed Acconci and Oppenheims’s works in a field of sound, with his piece being the nexus or apologia of the entire assemblage. If there was a proto-performance in the triptych presented, it was Fox’s, and all three performers acknowledge the use of sound and the interactivity that emerged from it as having brought the evening to life: 

The use of amplified sound is the one carryover from Cellar, with the location of the performances being the critical difference in how it is applied. In Cellar, we hear water running through an open sewer main in the floor. This all-encompassing sound creates a sign out of what would have otherwise been ubiquitous: of the significance of Fox’s decision to work in the Cellar as a metaphor for liminal or subterranean movements of the earth. In Environmental Surfaces, the amplified live sound of Fox’s breathing is paired with a similar pre-recorded track of Fox’s breath. A continuous syncopation is produced, compounded by the breathing of the other artists and the viewers. In both cases, the subject of these sonic displays is the space in which they transpire, although each has its own unique sociopolitical signification concerning that space. It is not hard to see how these arrangements are precursors to Fox’s later performances and installations with piano wire, where the room itself becomes the resonating element, as well as what is arguably one of Fox’s masterpieces, Instruments to be Played by the Movements of the Earth (19xx). It is also evident in Environmental Surfaces that Fox was not prepared to command the space alone. His own devices were still far too subtle to overcode the modernist legacy of the white cube. He was still too skeptical of the gallery as a site for his work, and he needed backup.

Taken as a single event, Environmental Surfaces is a veritable survey of the primary strategies that inform performance-based sculpture of the day, especially concerning the use of time. As were many of his pieces from this period, Acconci’s work was primarily concerned with endurance-based, metrical time; he literally walked in a circle to the tempo of the minute hand of a clock mounted on the wall for his action. This self-subjugation was a mainstay of Acconci’s practice, often used to emphasize how psychological and societal controls mediate the body. Similarly, Oppenheim’s work is more subtle in relation to metrical time and involved a wooden channel roughly six feet long and eight inches wide. One end of the channel was Oppenheim’s face, on the other a tarantula. As the tarantula made its way down the channel towards Oppenheim, the artist pulled hair from the top of his head and threw it into the channel, obstructing the tarantula’s passage. According to theorist and then champion of Oppenheim’s work Jack Burnham, Oppenheim’s use of channels and mazes (not to be confused with labyrinths) represented an inversion of tropes that revealed a complex structuralist tendency toiling deep within the modernist project. Burnham and his partial apotheosis Rosalind Krauss saw in the new sculpture a confrontation with the regulatory role of liminal space by architecture and championed artists accordingly⁠. Bruce Nauman’s corridors were also of supreme importance in the evolution of these sensibilities that would come to be considered (somewhat narrowly, that is to say ironically) as installation arts. However, this was still some years off. 

However, the real breakthrough of Environmental Surfaces was Fox’s use of flour and Borax soap flakes as a literal, material, production of consistencies to create surfaces. This effectively replaced both mirrors and windows as visual metaphors, emphasizing the body through kinesthetic, tactile associations with the audience, and gave Fox a much more abidingly unique aesthetic. The mirror is replaced by the surface composed of “virtual volumes” Fox had previously evoked by photographing himself manipulating smoke and flour in discrete, ephemeral conditions, now taking their place within Fox’s chains of signification. Now, when the empty hand from Opening My Fist as Slowly as I Can unclenches, we can see the effects of the force of Fox’s grip upon a mass of soap flakes. 

Equally, if the territoriality of the window and the mirror were ambiguous in terms of their (unavoidable) opticality, there was no mistaking it in Environmental Surfaces. Here the surface-language takes center stage. The molecular-flour, free-forming, granular, is contrasted with the Borax, which would retain some of the shape from the pressure from Fox’s fists in another pairing, but this time it is firmly rooted in the sensations of the body. This sensibility is then doubled in the pairing of Fox’s recorded breathing and his amplified actual breathing. Yes, there is an image in there, but the image is a result and not the root of the haptic situation. Within the modest territory, Fox created for himself, set in relation to Acconci and Oppenheim, Fox used these materials to form ephemeral landscapes and surface effects that actually created territorial assemblages that mirror each other in their specific affects and not, as in Cellar, in metaphorical or analogical ones. While Environmental Surfaces did include a kind of miniaturization, it was anything but a model. 

Flour would remain a primary material for Fox in Pisces, Hefe, Yield, and Pont, second in flexibility only to the body itself, and would make an appearance as bread in Hospital (1971) as a drawing element and in Halation (1974) where it would be shared with the audience as bread⁠5. Fox’s previous works with the surface had been confined to the mirror as a static form and the windowpanes in Cellar and Isolation Unit. In each case, as an affect, the surface was created as a principal strategy in forming the situation. However, from Environmental Surfaces onward, Fox appeared invested in Eliminating transgression as a necessary condition of the activation of the surfaces, as was the case in the breaking of the widows in Cellar, Isolation Unit, as well as the violent act of Defoliation. Seeking out the dead spot in the windowpanes by repeatedly tapping them within one case a metal pipe, in the other Robert Frank’s hunting knife, then once the dead spot had been determined breaking the glass created four identical little psychodramas repeated one pane after the other that was probably disconcerting, and it was not Fox’s abiding intention to unsettle his audience, or himself. The act of signification found in an action was much more the point. In Isolation Unit, there was a candle burning behind the windowpanes. Once the final pane was broken, Fox reached through the window, picked up the candle, and in the act of signification, placed it in front of the now vacant window frame. This expression was undoubtedly intended to function similarly in Cellar but with the knife instead of the candle. The knife in the mirror was used to break the panes of glass of the disembodied, unmounted window frame. There was also the matter of reflection (the mirror) or lack thereof (the window).

However, his seemed not to be as successful as Fox might have hoped, which is not surprising considering the leap made in Environmental Surfaces. After all, the surfaces in question were never a generalized idea of surfaces as one might expect in painting, but actual, everyday objects and places. The surfaces in Cellar and Isolation Unit were not derived, even when the breaking of the windowpanes created them, nor were not inferredeither by ideation or extension, nor by correlation or inference, and there was an unnecessary level of complexity in Fox’s window-machine that complicated the infinitive. Do the mirror and the window have a surface? Assuredly so. However, to reflect is not a secondary quality of what makes a mirror a mirror any more than to allow the passage of light is not a secondary quality of a window. Furthermore, if something is added in the attribution of qualities that cannot be derived from the sensible effects of the thing in itself, it is only because both subject and object are bound up in the same durations already from both sides. 

The symmetrical relations at play in Cellar do not repeat in Fox’s subsequent performances but are instead replaced by new strategies and metaphors that can sustain asymmetrical affinities. Apart from the sleeper, the tableaus in Cellar functioned as models as analogies for something unknown. For Fox, this was not enough. Between July 1970 and February 1971, he seemed to labor on this point, to speculate as to possible pairings that could break out of ideal and symmetrical relations⁠6 in ways that were not functionally transgressive acts, that could operate outside of the signification of to cut. In the interim, other works pushed these considerations forward. Levitation is one such work. Isolation Unit was another. These works, while more complex than works from 1970 such as Wall Piece, Corner Piece, and Opening My Hand as Slowly as Possible, cling to didacticism as representative of the common but are not overly generous as to what we might call the mystery of the object: the materiality of the object as something that is recognized or known, that has an aura, an affect, or a singularity of expression despite its ordinary, everyday nature. Again and again, in Fox’s work, we see this elevation of everyday things not in accordance with the contextual gaming of the readymade but of something far stranger. The objects in Fox’s work seem to have lived lives, been touched, handled, and used in ways that defy their common-ness, not merely refer to it as might a readymade. This affinity extends to the viewer and his own body (which, as we shall see, Fox would distinguish from his physical body.) 

The soap is also present, illuminated between the twin beams of two flashlights, facing one another, their switches taped into the ‘on’ position so there would be no confusion about their status as durational objects. When the twin beams of the battery-powered flashlights were extinguished (two asymmetrical relations that played out only at the very end of the piece), the performance was over.

***

After Environmental Surfaces, Fox would leap symmetrical, linguistic relations to durational situations that foregrounded asymmetrical movements grounded in an intense, dramaturgical movement of breathtaking simplicity, what we might, in Fox’s terms of the time, call a mood. We also should notice in Environmental Surfaces that the proto-elements at play in Fox’s earliest pieces were of a privative nature which Fox knew, at least intuitively, was not going anywhere. One could only go so far following a sculptural logic of inference and limit: bringing to light the presence of unseen synthesis would require more than mere removals and static juxtapositions.⁠1 The narrative element needed refinement. Another order of signification was required to augment the first. More was needed to bring his conception of the materiality of his situations to the surface. Despite the rigor of his situations with their often protracted length, it was not the subjugation of the body that was the subject of his works. While his works were far from effortless was not the effort that is important here, not the endurational craze that inspired so many performers in those early days where the body of the artist was exposed to an artificial torment or jeopardy in hopes of revealing some invisible subjugation as is found in the work of Vito Acconci or Chris Burden or Marina Abramovic. It is the kinetic plasticity of these early actions that interested Fox. Of activation. Also, while site and activity coexist in a state of restless affinity in Fox’s work, it is of dubious use to call Fox’s work a form of proto-installation. The site itself is not the situation, nor is it the territorial refrain within the situation. The site is a temporalization of the refrain created by the most abstract element in the assemblage. This creates the milieu of the Fox-Situation. In the Fox Situation, everything is as it appears to be, but it is not as it is supposed to be within the contexts of the spaces in which they appear, spaces that the situation will temporalize as it presents itself. Space, in Fox’s work, is subordinated to time. If a Fox artwork is site-specific, it is because considering the logic of empirical givens, how it be otherwise? There is no room for redundancies in the chain of the Fox-Situation. Any redundancy would be catastrophic. Any tautology of figuration would upset the real and reduce the whole thing to chaos. Or worse, theatre. Nor is this mere scholasticism of Fox’s part. It is nomad-logic. Traveling light. A way of living. The Fox-Situation is a portable, procedural sculpture framed by a becoming-cosmic of the anyplace at all that remains its specificity as a point and as an activity that is the point. Sometimes it can be geographical, like the patch of earth spread out on the gallery floor in Levitation or the selection of a cellar in Cellar and Isolation Unit, or they can be ephemeral zones of circumscription like a sheet on the ground in the first part of Pisces where he lies, tied by the tongue and the penis to two live sea bass twitching and dying on the ground. A second sheet is added, suspended above Fox’s sleeping form as he dreams of the expired fish, a doubling of the territory. As for Cellar, the doubling lives in the title. The cellar-Cellar, a little didactic circuit. Sometimes light is enough to clarify these assemblages, low hanging bulbs over this action. Framing, focusing, but always gently and without trickery. In Environmental Surfaces, there is a sheet above and below Fox as he sculpts tiny, more ephemeral territories, tiny landscapes, and smoothed planes made of loose flour and jagged forms made by clenching soap flakes in his fists, the flakes holding the form of the interior of Fox’s grip. A puissance. Or in Yield, where he created a miniature of the installation space, photographed it, and hung the photographs in the gallery. In some artworks, this little territory might also be a scrim or obscuring situation, of the audience not being able to enter a space where the action takes place like Pisces and Tower Room, or the audience confined behind a transparent veil as in Pont, or behind a glass wall in Yield. In 552 Steps Between 11 Pairs of Strings, the audience was positioned in the apartment below the sound performance, listening through the ceiling. In Suono Interno, while audible from the street, the performance was visible only through a hole in the church’s door where Fox performed. This is a second-order of the simplest of territorial refrains, that of the inferred territories, not of the habitat but the habitus, or rather our habit of making habitats, little circuits the audience is required to complete and that Fox sets up in advance of what is to take place that will reterritorialize the situation, in a chain or circuit completed through actions attenuated to the frailties of durational time. This is what Fox had to figure out, what he had to discover and discover anew with every performance: the basis for the refrain, dependent on something that was not at all given but would become so in the Fox-Situation. It was not enough to confront symmetrical, dialectical relations in play in Cellar one had to englobe them in surfaces that deterritorialized and reterritorialized the dialectical and symmetrical as part and parcel of our habitual ways of looking at the real. The Fox-Situation clear had the potential to do so, given the right circumstances. The question, in 1970, was how.

THE CRITICAL/APATHETIC ELEMENT

The early presence of the Time Element in Cellar and its deconstruction in Environmental Surfaces left Fox in direct confrontation with how to display a paradoxical, analogic representation upon a surface. We know Fox saw this as a problem, and not just a set of representational descriptors of phenomena that appear within the passage of time, because it is evident in his use of materials and in his stated aims of creating a new form of communication that such relations do not appear in time, but are rather constitutive both of time and our experience of it. This is the ‘why’ of Fox’s use of the body as a flexible, plastic element within the Fox-Situation and why the audience figures so prominently in the (re)enactment of his work even as there is seemingly no praxis; they are of the refrains comprised of mnemonic and diagrammatic indexes deployed in a collective production of sensible affects. 

In his seminal work The Machinic Unconscious (1979), Felix Guattari outlines the mnemotechnical diagrammatic refrain as follows:⁠ 

1. It is deterritorializing: it appears and makes matter appear as a novel expression or becoming specific in every case to its myriad durations. 

2. It is constituted by asignifying redundancies interacting with other components (it is part of an assemblage that includes both symmetrical and symmetrical (or destabilizing) movements/durations.

3. It announces (but does not necessarily actualize) the possibility of a rhizomatic opening, which is Fox’s work is the fabled “communication” by which his work can be seen as a situation in which the artist’s body is relegated to a material, in which common materials are elevated to the status of the body, and in which the observer is an intrinsic element in the work. 

Unlike representation, the refrain invites us to orient our inquiry away from intention, causation, inference, historical elaboration, or aesthetics and towards the fabrication of a sensorium from chaos, of a Fox-Cosmos, and viewing Fox’s work as navigation and ordering of existential affect. In creating elements, Fox had it in mind to create both the intrinsic movements found in the creation of the object (or of the situation) and the extensive qualities of the situation’s presentation as art. What is more, he was intent on doing so within a conception of the event as immanent to the formation of situations: that is, in the formation of planes of consistency that could “free” subjectivity from mediating processes of Bahktin’s chronotope that resulted in “unification, individuation, totalization, and isolation” in effect turning each into a productive activity as opposed to a subjectivizing feature or identity. 

The mistake…the habit…the temptation…when approaching the refrain is to defer to a generality regarding the conditioning of time. This is both instantaneous and easily reversible within the Fox-Situation, but not always so easy in real life, where we are usually perfectly comfortable thinking in terms of causation and are content, for the sake of convenience, making correlations that serve as a basis for how we consider what is possible or likely. This is what Hume tells us and what Deleuze elaborates on in his critique of representation as comprised of extension and generality as contingencies upon which representational models of the real are based. On the other hand, the refrain is not an analogy for anything; it is the thing in itself; it is perfectly real. Nor is it immaterial. It is perfectly matter. It is also not semantic, despite its reliance on an infinitive status. It comprises its own sequences, and some part happens before producing a metric that records or overcodes it in deterritorialization. Virtually, the refrain is an ur-position in the formation of the cosmos. It is a “pure” expression of immanence and a vibratory actuality that functions independently of space and within and through it. 

The general’s unavoidable folly, while illustrative of extension as it appears in the static genesis of the idea (“I am not as good as I thought I was”), is also representative of the reversed static genesis by which the archer locates himself (as in, “I am the best archer ever.”). It is the attribution of a universal character that is the problem. Alternatively, Deleuze tells us, “We are right to speak of repetition when confronted by identical elements with the same concept. However, we must distinguish between these discrete elements, these repeated objects, and the secret subject of repetition, which repeats itself through them.” The secret subject of Fox’s work, which should not seem so secret to us and he seemed to be saying it in one form or another all the time, and which he evolves further in the work Hospital, which we will discuss in chapter two, is that the work of art has a use. 

As Fox clarifies with the Passive Element/Critical Element in Pisces, nothing in the sensory-motor schema needs to carry the potential to differentiate at all, nor does it matter if the action in question endures for two seconds or two millennia. Nor is this indifference (or, as Fox would put it, apathy) due to an unfulfilled requirement for a fiction or narrative action to take place because, somewhat counterintuitively, what is created in the Fox-Situation is not a potential for an action (which does, of course, exist as a mnemonic function) but rather the preservation of a state of uncertainty or disequilibrium within the situation itself; which, as a work of art, is an asymmetrical synthesis found in the possible as a mirage of the present in the past that in Cellar attempts to ‘mirror’ the refrain⁠. To cut as a syntactical arrangement implies the presence of a representational abstract machine that includes virtualities of that which cuts and that which is cut, but this is not the kind of abstraction Fox is referring to. Instead, Fox presents an image of a diagram of a specific ontological genesis (how a concept is created) in which we need the virtual with all of its complexity and swarm of potentialities to create an actual recollection-image whereas before there was none (item II below). However, he is also moving away from ontological genesis (which, after all, would constitute media) by searching for (and not necessarily finding, at least in Cellar) a method.

We can map out this philosophical terrain in the following way using the infinitive of the verb to reveal, contrasting it with the verb to produce, and then notice how its shows up in terms of its incumbent reversals (each of which can be seen as either a territorialization of a deterritorialization). 

What is essential to recognize in the particular case of Cellar is that the presence of the knife in the situation is not a representation of asymmetrical abstraction (i) that exists independent of a determinate condition (it is not a figure or diagram) but simply a presentation of the situation itself (ii). Fox puts it there, on a mirror. The knife does not cut anything. Its hilt, however, is used to break the glass in a windowpane that is either a reference to the entropic nature of systems (the soluble fish) or as a (somewhat paradoxical) reference to disembodiment. Either way, it is conspicuous in the degree to which it does not contribute to Narrativity (a set of symmetrical relations) and exists as a novel expression of time as a work of art (iii). Between this denuding of everyday, a second doublet alluded to in the parity of production and revelation. This is the image of repetition Fox would attempt to realize in Pisces. The correlation, then, is between the Active Element of the performer and the Narrative Element seen as a psychological model of sorts, of a (representational) operation of consciousness bound up in the production of the sensible. In this sense, the Narrative Element rhymes with the supermundane selection (and title) of the Cellar/Cellar itself in the same way Defoliation, as a title, simply stated what was happening: what the performance was. Nevertheless, in accordance with Fox’s desire to create situations, the Passive Element still has a select status. This status is not juxtaposed with the Active Element as it would be in a representational schema, but rather the Critical element as something null or blank in and of itself, like soap. What Fox is essentially saying (and which he will carry forth in later video and sculptural works) is that the everyday (the knife), its coordinates (the placement upon a mirror), are, via the singularity of potential use, elevated not to a level of abstraction at all. However, it instead summarily blocks the multiplicities he would later endeavor to reveal/produce, what he termed “phenomena and their worlds.”⁠

What Fox had to invent, after Cellar, and what makes Cellar less available to us in terms of Fox’s “chains” is that the knife on the mirror does not undergo a state change of a kind it would presumably need to do in order to serve as an analogy of a disjunctive synthesis (which is to say, as base materialism). 

In Pisces, we see Fox in the frailty of the moment. While a state-change is not a prerequisite, it is being taken up to produce a sensory-motor schema actualized by the Fox-Situation. While there is no correlation between the movement of thought and actual movement within a passive genesis, Cellar is not altogether successful in how it mobilized the actualities in play. This is not because the viewer is left with a choice to cut or not to cut, or to consider the difference in degrees between what is cut or not cut, or the difference in kind between the knife and its image, prepared, metaphorically speaking, to cut through the static image of thought (the idea) as a possibility of the verb to cut; the failing of Cellar is that the knife in the mirror is too complicated. It is because, to use Bergson’s words, it remains of a “duration wherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we should see ourselves, is a duration whose elements are disassociated and juxtaposed⁠.” Other actions in Cellar, notably the breaking of the window and the smoking of the cigarette, and the flowing of the water in the pipe, suggest a “duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our states melt into each other. It is within this that we should try to replace ourselves by [the movement of] thought, in the unique case when we speculate on the intimate nature of action, that is to say when we are discussing human freedom.⁠”. 

Later, in Pisces, these complications will be stripped away; the representations will be stripped away. The sleeper will remain, but its role as a Time Element will be clarified into that of an element in the production of a duration. In the passive role, Fox is tasked to dream in an act of “energy reversal” of an already completed action. Is this a representation? Yes. However, its bipartite nature is suggested by the rest of the situation. It is englobed in the energy reversal. While they appear the same, the poles can shift from the (passive) productive movement to a revealing movement or vice versa. Likewise, in many Fox performances, most notably The Children’s Tapes, which we will discuss in this chapter, every element used in the piece is already present and on view when the viewer enters the picture. Nothing further is introduced. There is no “surprise” that happens. This is not to say there are no qualities intrinsic to multiplicities that relate to inference, origin, or appearance, only that such qualities are not deterministic⁠ in relation to the constitutive movements of the multiplicities to which the qualities can be said to belong. They are not generalities. 

This is why we do not see the knife in the mirror again. I would even go so far to say that knife in the mirror is replaced, in later works, by soap or by a fish tied up via a thousand knots which it is Fox’s work as an artist to untie, to return to the continuum of duration as pure matter. The knife in the mirror, however, in this early work, is the complexity of this return. Unfortunately, this is already an abstraction of the actual problem, which in Cellar is the virtual application of to cut as an object independent of what is cut, which is to say, as a sign that creates the possibility for remembering, recognition, memory, self-consciousness, as well as valuations regarding to educational description. Or, as Hume outlines them, resemblances, proportions, quantity and number, degrees of any quality, and contrary, all of which, as we know, is how Bergson outlines what he calls difference in degree. Nevertheless, as Fox discovers in Environmental Surfaces, you do not need the abstraction of an immanent causality within art: in terms of the refrain, the Doxa is already doing it.⁠