Laurence Noga: 'Poetics of Obsolescence'

Poetics of Obsolescence

Slivers of forms trimmed to leave arcs and floating discs. Fat blocks and terse diagonals. A triangle, red

or black, juts out from the construction, breaking a frame. Papered segments, painted segments. An

unpainted wooden rod.

Embedded amongst the profusion of shapes are reminders of abandoned utility – a steel handle, a metal

disc, a used ticket, part of a rusty tool, a faceless LP, an old washer. Nameless, obsolete utility. Bits of

plastic and metal that, now stripped of function and context, lace the landscapes of geometry with

rootless nostalgia.

These found signs without provenance function as humble, anachronic portals to other times. Collected

from the artist’s father’s garage, they are fragmented mementos revealing the constructions as

stratigraphic layerings of time. Vestiges of things that may once have moved but are now arrested, of

anonymous processes and operative systems no longer in use, they reveal the obsolete as registration of

the cessation of time’s continuity. Assemblage is activated as the debris of outdated signs, and the

stratification of material layerings that embed time in the hybrid object.

The complex action of strips and discs play a further crucial role in this. Amongst the rich lexicon of

shapes employed by Noga, they assume a special function – to interrupt the passage of lines and colour.

Discs and strips force discontinuity into the otherwise incessant rhythms and modulations. Introducing a

stop-start effect, they intensify the temporal dynamics introduced by the symbolic dimension of the

rootless signs. Indeed, it is because of this interweaving of the symbolic and the formal, the way the real

objects are simultaneously invested as conduits of the compositional currents, that we are never permitted

to cross the threshold into the referential.

In Deep Red filtered pink, the large red disc, a painted cd, dimly evokes an experience (sonic) now over. A

visual stoppage, it also acts a bullseye that pulls our gaze to its centre, momentarily halting the eye’s

passage across the polychromatic surfaces. The disc is echoed by a cluster of smaller circles and orbs of

metal screws, countering the dominant, directional presence of the black triangle. A broad pink strip

halts the chromatic motions. Double yellow filtered black consists of a nuanced interplay of discs and

strips: the uppermost row of holes, the embedded redundant disc-objects in the central band, and the

cluster of cadmium red spots half-concealed within an imposing matte border of black strips. In the wide

‘band’ paintings, segments of rings edge their way into the lateral sequence of shapes; monochromatic

strips are more forceful breakages of this continuity from left to right.

Experiencing this collection of constructions as a play of discontinuous eruptions reminds me of Gaston

Bachelard’s meditations on time in his 1932 Intuition of the Instant. Bachelard theorised the instant as a

discontinuity in the temporal continuum, a creative rupture that renders time poetic. An expression of

‘vertical time’ that cuts the horizontality of clock time, the instant is a burst of consciousness, both

sudden and surprising, that calls for an acute act of attention. In its contrast to theories of the instant

that associate it with the instantaneous and simultaneous temporality of technologically-mediated

experience, Bachelard’s viewpoint offers an intriguing framework for further reflecting on the sense of

Noga’s constructions. We are invited to consider the power of anachronic symbols and gestures as

creative events, disturbing the routine experience of the present with the intensification of perceptions.

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