Warping the Grid
By Rowan Melling
Grids have been used in pictorial art from at least the 15th century, and in mapping and urban planning since ancient times. Something changes, though, in the modern grid. While older grids were imaging technologies for situating objects or mapping terrain, modern grids draw living people into their logic. As Bernhard Siegert shows in his essay “(Not) in Place,” the mapping of humans in grid systems solves an ancient problem of classification. While objects can be classified and put in place for easy retrieval, humans tend to be harder to locate, pin-down, or recapture. Once out of place, they can easily disappear.
As Siegert relates, modern grids find their first use in the Spanish colonization of South America. Here, the gridded mapping of colonial towns assigns each settler a proper place – an address – where they must stay, and therefore can always be found. Henceforth, Europeans cannot simply evade state power by disappearing into the jungle across the sea; and indigenous people can be omitted from grids of belonging, effectively mapping them out of colonial territory. The subjugation of humans to grid systems sets up the controlling logic of modern institutions.
Assigning humans a proper place within a grid requires rubrics of classification: what kinds of people belong where? If the grid is a Spanish colonial town, it must classify dwellers as poor/rich, belonging in this or that area. If it consists of prison cells, subjects must be marked according to the binary criminal/non-criminal. A grid of psych-ward units produces the necessary classification sane/insane. Three dimensional architectural grids function by mapping identities into two dimensional, classificatory grids. The question “where do you belong?” melds with the question of “who are you?”
As Michel Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality and elsewhere, this mapping requires expert discourses of classification – criminologists to decide who goes to jail, doctors to decide who enters the hospital, and so on. As an “expert” knowledge, these classification systems remain opaque to those who are classified. Decisions are made behind closed doors, contained in locked files, stored in another grid system which determines access to its information. Why an institution has chosen me as belonging in this or that section of the grid remains a secret.
Yet, this secrecy generates counter-secrets. It is precisely the opaque violence of classification systems that makes them blind to the bodies, desires, and practices of their subjects. Not only are secrets kept from the grid, but the grid overlooks certain identities through its rigidity. It cannot see the acts that fall outside of its rubrics, its own limitation on knowledge. People might “pass” for one identity or another; meanwhile their bodily experiences speak to a different kind of being, hidden from the grid.
The works in Plans for the Waiting Room reverse, or torque, this relationship of secrecy between grids and their subjects. Cryptic language exposes hints of secret pleasures that grid systems cannot capture. Grid-cuts in fabric reveal the open secret of the desiring body beneath the hospital gown. Patterned marking on the surface of the grid replaces a logic of rationalization with an aesthetic of shifting glare and directionality. These techniques of counter-mapping and counter-secrecy reveal the fragility of the grid’s own categories of belonging. They glimpse identities that escape its logics; they hint at secrets that the grid cannot know or process.
Importantly, these works are careful not to proclaim a new identity that could be easily captured. This is not an insistence on representation within the grid, easily co-opted by institutions. Nor do the works pretend to overthrow the grid towards a revolutionary, post-classificatory utopia. Instead, they offer a gentle persistence of desire that extends outside the grid, that slips through its knowledge system, reaching out for the pleasures and sufferings beyond classificatory power.
Over the grid, Gisèle imposes the pattern. Patterns are fundamentally different from grids. Grids are techniques of differentiation, whereas patterns are techniques of repetition. Where grids are imposed over space, patterns are pulled out of space, recognized rather than operationalized. Repetitive marking turns the grid of graph paper into a patterned surface, something recognizable, knowable, mappable, no longer opaque to its subjects. Gisèle’s work shows that a recognizable pattern is a potential that can be drawn over any grid, a counter-mapping that robs it of its institutional secrecy function.
Alongside the pattern is the trace. In sewing, patterns are traced and followed; they are guides rather than moulds. The pattern for a hospital gown can be traced, followed, but changed. Tracing and cutting the gridded floor plan of a hospital into the gown reveals traces of a body that the institution produces as abject through its concealment. Traces of a body appear, too, in the creases left by the process of embroidery, the hands tightening the hoop, gently crumpling the paper, stitching the fibres in repetitive turns. These hidden histories are traces assembled into patterns.
Traces are secrets with a corner turned up, glimpses of what might have been intentionally concealed or forcibly obscured. They suggest an identity, while evading capture. They are lines that hint at what was there before, lines that map out what was overlaid, or cut into. If grids use a line-work to impose a new reality over the old, then traces are counter-grids.
By Rowan Melling
Grids have been used in pictorial art from at least the 15th century, and in mapping and urban planning since ancient times. Something changes, though, in the modern grid. While older grids were imaging technologies for situating objects or mapping terrain, modern grids draw living people into their logic. As Bernhard Siegert shows in his essay “(Not) in Place,” the mapping of humans in grid systems solves an ancient problem of classification. While objects can be classified and put in place for easy retrieval, humans tend to be harder to locate, pin-down, or recapture. Once out of place, they can easily disappear.
As Siegert relates, modern grids find their first use in the Spanish colonization of South America. Here, the gridded mapping of colonial towns assigns each settler a proper place – an address – where they must stay, and therefore can always be found. Henceforth, Europeans cannot simply evade state power by disappearing into the jungle across the sea; and indigenous people can be omitted from grids of belonging, effectively mapping them out of colonial territory. The subjugation of humans to grid systems sets up the controlling logic of modern institutions.
Assigning humans a proper place within a grid requires rubrics of classification: what kinds of people belong where? If the grid is a Spanish colonial town, it must classify dwellers as poor/rich, belonging in this or that area. If it consists of prison cells, subjects must be marked according to the binary criminal/non-criminal. A grid of psych-ward units produces the necessary classification sane/insane. Three dimensional architectural grids function by mapping identities into two dimensional, classificatory grids. The question “where do you belong?” melds with the question of “who are you?”
As Michel Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality and elsewhere, this mapping requires expert discourses of classification – criminologists to decide who goes to jail, doctors to decide who enters the hospital, and so on. As an “expert” knowledge, these classification systems remain opaque to those who are classified. Decisions are made behind closed doors, contained in locked files, stored in another grid system which determines access to its information. Why an institution has chosen me as belonging in this or that section of the grid remains a secret.
Yet, this secrecy generates counter-secrets. It is precisely the opaque violence of classification systems that makes them blind to the bodies, desires, and practices of their subjects. Not only are secrets kept from the grid, but the grid overlooks certain identities through its rigidity. It cannot see the acts that fall outside of its rubrics, its own limitation on knowledge. People might “pass” for one identity or another; meanwhile their bodily experiences speak to a different kind of being, hidden from the grid.
The works in Plans for the Waiting Room reverse, or torque, this relationship of secrecy between grids and their subjects. Cryptic language exposes hints of secret pleasures that grid systems cannot capture. Grid-cuts in fabric reveal the open secret of the desiring body beneath the hospital gown. Patterned marking on the surface of the grid replaces a logic of rationalization with an aesthetic of shifting glare and directionality. These techniques of counter-mapping and counter-secrecy reveal the fragility of the grid’s own categories of belonging. They glimpse identities that escape its logics; they hint at secrets that the grid cannot know or process.
Importantly, these works are careful not to proclaim a new identity that could be easily captured. This is not an insistence on representation within the grid, easily co-opted by institutions. Nor do the works pretend to overthrow the grid towards a revolutionary, post-classificatory utopia. Instead, they offer a gentle persistence of desire that extends outside the grid, that slips through its knowledge system, reaching out for the pleasures and sufferings beyond classificatory power.
Over the grid, Gisèle imposes the pattern. Patterns are fundamentally different from grids. Grids are techniques of differentiation, whereas patterns are techniques of repetition. Where grids are imposed over space, patterns are pulled out of space, recognized rather than operationalized. Repetitive marking turns the grid of graph paper into a patterned surface, something recognizable, knowable, mappable, no longer opaque to its subjects. Gisèle’s work shows that a recognizable pattern is a potential that can be drawn over any grid, a counter-mapping that robs it of its institutional secrecy function.
Alongside the pattern is the trace. In sewing, patterns are traced and followed; they are guides rather than moulds. The pattern for a hospital gown can be traced, followed, but changed. Tracing and cutting the gridded floor plan of a hospital into the gown reveals traces of a body that the institution produces as abject through its concealment. Traces of a body appear, too, in the creases left by the process of embroidery, the hands tightening the hoop, gently crumpling the paper, stitching the fibres in repetitive turns. These hidden histories are traces assembled into patterns.
Traces are secrets with a corner turned up, glimpses of what might have been intentionally concealed or forcibly obscured. They suggest an identity, while evading capture. They are lines that hint at what was there before, lines that map out what was overlaid, or cut into. If grids use a line-work to impose a new reality over the old, then traces are counter-grids.
