Gatefold Equinox

This past fall, artist Karthik Pandian presented Before the Sun at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis. In conjunction with the exhibition, he published a colored-vinyl LP of original music and spoken-word recordings accompanied by a catalogue of texts from anthropologist Michael Taussig and poet Amy Gerstler, among others. No mere document, the aural and textual matter of this publication elaborate on Pandian’s investigation into the architectural and archaeological milieu of the Cahokia Mounds, a pre-Columbian civilization whose earthen ruins lie just outside East St. Louis. Later this month, Pandian will present Elements of Style, a solo exhibition at White Flag Projects in St. Louis. His work is also on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through March 27. Here Pandian discusses his publication with Triple Canopy editorial and program director Peter J. Russo.

Peter J. Russo: Something I appreciate about your work—which also had me excited about the form of this publication, a vinyl record with text—is its resistance to traditional visual documentation: When viewing your installation images, it’s somewhat difficult to perceive what’s being depicted, beyond the presence or absence of light, whether projected or ambient. The photos included in Before the Sun actually embody some of the concepts you’re working with. 

Karthik Pandian: There is no great tradition of visual documentation. Today we take it as a given that art must be photographed, but the history of photographic reproduction of art is quite young. And how did people disseminate information about works of art before the photograph? Perhaps by word of mouth; perhaps an engraving was produced based on a drawing executed in situ. But oftentimes even the drawing was based on collective memory and hearsay, as in the fantastical images of the pyramids produced by Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century. In any case, these forms of distribution foreground rather than repress the interpretive and narrative arts of documentation. I try to take up this older tradition of documentation: one that is more preoccupied with affect than precision; one that promises the possibility of an event when one encounters the work, rather than diminishing it. To that end, my resistance to clear photographic documentation is entirely intentional.

My work also resists photo-documentation because of the way it occupies space. The only clear “view” of my work would be from above, from the point of view of the master architect, from the point of view of the sun. That is true clarity. But this is an impossible perspective. Even with this view, the spectator would lose access to the projections and the element of time. The videos I sometimes make to document my work deal more with this temporal dimension and how the work unfolds in time. That, along with the ground plan of the show, usually adds up to about as much information as I want to give in order for someone to begin to perceive, perhaps inversely, what the exhibition was like.

PJR: Then both materially and conceptually, Before the Sun is less a translation of the constructed environment of your Midway show than a kind of audio sculpture?

KP: The publication is part of the show. The record, like the Sun Gives Birth to the Grid table pieces, is a disc that calls forth my ideas regarding “the solar unconscious.” The photographic treatment of the sunrise and sunset on the inside and outside of the gatefold cover mirrors the relationship between the films and the corners of the exhibition space. But of course, because it is a multiple, because you can hold it in your hands and even take it away from the show, it provides a different angle on the material. If a monument is a concentrated, fixed historical articulation in time and space that people gravitate toward, then the publication disperses its influence out towards them.

PJR: Because the publication is both catalogue and record, it requires more of the reader than just sitting and reading. With vinyl, listeners perform a kind of ritual—the process of opening the gatefold, removing its contents, and reading while immersed in sound—often at a dedicated site in one’s home. 

KP: I’m no vinyl fetishist. In fact, I don’t even have a record player at home. I like that others could get off on this, though, perhaps in the same way that an arrowhead collector deals with his finds.

PJR: Though I imagine this ritualistic element and its associations with the exhibition affected your choice of a record—an object with two inscribed, equal halves—as the publication’s central medium?

KP: The disc-ness of the record was very important to me. I was looking quite a bit at the collections of discoidal stones found around the Cahokia Mounds. While some of these surely served ceremonial purposes, others were used in ritual games. The stone’s roundness was practical in this matter, but it was also cosmological. It was, perhaps, itself a sun. When you pull the sleeve out of the gatefold, the record must be lifted vertically, like the rising sun. There is also the resonance of the double-sided disc with the vernal equinox, which was when I shot all the material for the films in Before the Sun.

PJR: The reading of an excerpt from Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques on the “What Came First?” side of the record seems to enact the concept of prosopopoeia, the imagined or absent person or thing represented as speaking. Why was it important for these specific works to be heard being read aloud, versus simply printed alongside the others? 

KP: For this piece I worked with a storyteller from the Griffith Observatory named Joe Sanfelippo. In the many times I’ve heard him narrate the planetarium show there, I’ve sensed a Disney-like grain to his voice. Combined with Lévi-Strauss's almost hallucinatory narration of a sunset, I felt it struck an interesting chord between knowledge and nonknowledge, light and dark, sight and sound, etc. What is an anthropology of the sun? And doesn’t all this sound a bit silly when read aloud?

But sound hits us more directly than other senses. It can more readily disarm our critical capacities. I wanted there to be an undercurrent of menace in the narration, an exercise of power, a submission of agency. At the end of the day, one of the things I like best about this passage is that the time it takes to read it aloud is longer than the event being described. The stretching of time is essential to the character of this piece.

PJR: So there’s a relationship between this recorded expanse of time and, say, oral traditions and storytelling?

KP: This is the type of story you tell when you're high.

PJR: The techno beats on the flip side of the LP (“Sunrise or Sunset?”) for me resonate with the idea of the sunset as a beginning. Where did these recordings originate?

KP: This is my second collaboration with Eric D. Clark of Whirlpool Productions fame; the first was on the soundtrack to Darkroom. While “What Came First?” is layered with a field recording of the sunset from the apex of Cahokia's largest mound, “Sunrise or Sunset?” is woven with the sound of sunrise from the same site. Good techno is deeply dialectical. Only through the most fascist constraint and repetition is the kind of transcendence I’m looking for made possible. Perhaps there is a point where we could do away with these never-ending transitions from day to night and back again. Techno helps us summon the possibility for night and day to strobe and, in that ever-diminishing interval, to imagine freedom.

PJR: Who is F. W. Molussca, the name credited in the byline following “A Note on the Record”?

KP: “F. W. Mollusca is a member of the Phylum Mollusca which live in freshwater habitats, both those that are lotic (flowing water) such as rivers, streams, canals, springs and underground cave streams (stygobite species) and those that are lentic (still water) such as lakes, ponds (including temporary or vernal ponds), and ditches.”