By Harry Dodge
trt 38 secs. LOOP
This 38-second loop features a photograph of a (slimy, phallic, sickening) roasted pork loin animated in such a way that it appears to be feverishly disco-dancing. At one point, the loin pauses and—via a crack that opens into a small speaking mouth—says, “I don’t know if you know this but—there are no holes or gaps in the machine.” This piece was originally commissioned by LACMA, and was meant to be a sort of intervention in a highbrow art museum setting in which a gyrating, muttering piece of meat clearly didn’t ”belong.”
The video is essentially comedic and visceral, but the line spoken by the pork loin (and hence, the piece’s title) also makes reference to spheres of larger meaning.
The line comes from Anthony Wilden’s 1972 essay, “Analog and Digital Communication: On Negation, Signification and Meaning,” in which Wilden describes the analog world as a wholly positivist sphere, defined by continuum, in which holes or gaps simply cannot exist. The line therefore also loosely evokes a jokey resistance to the still-queasily-present idea that women are more hole than human, and somehow most effectively identified by the “negative space” of their vaginas and uteruses rather than by the “positive space” of their human bodies. This resistance is complicated by the fact that it is spoken by a slippery little guy more than well-equipped enough to fill holes, should any suddenly appear.