Rene Barge: The Making of a Porous Body

The Making of A Porous Body consists of documentation of research combining aesthetic and scientific insight. The title alludes to the sea sponge, a multi-celled organism with no center that regenerates itself. It propagates while avoiding toxic areas and inhibitive zones in its environment. Moreover, it is responsive, viral and rhizomatic in the way Deleuze and Guattari eloquently described in the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. The prints and video in the exhibition cover a body of work that began during collaborations in 2006 with his colleague, the sound artist Gustavo Matamoros.

During their collaboration, Two Chambers Divided by an Opening, Matamoros had one space and Barge had another. In each space sixteen speaker chambers were divided by the opening of the space they occupied. The space sonically divided and sub-divided ad infinitum as the speakers propagated resonant frequencies, tuning into and out of the space. Ideas of sensory-motor coupling, both real and imagined, later coalesced in March 2009 during SOUND at the Bass Museum, Miami Beach and through further collaboration with Matamoros and another sound artist and scientist, David Dunn.

And so, the prints and video in The Making of A Porous Body are glimpses into patterns that Barge perceives, bearing evidence of multiple filters and distortions via alternately human, natural and artificial agents. His works here are prisms of his interactions with specific environments in that they show multiple aspects of change at once, analogous to a post-studio, post-technological cubism.

Barge writes, “It is through a network of interacting processes, transformation and destruction, and continuous regeneration, that the visual organization within this body of work is produced during sensory events. There is no clearly predetermined form; there is no hierarchy in the processes, and no artist studio. If and when a form does emerge it has little power over other forms, the most it can do is lead into other possible forms. These images come from an open approach where decisions are made all over the place and what emerges from these interactions is what you have before you. Sometimes the elements get along and sometimes they don’t and that is alright too.”