Chris Tosic
Recurrent Loop
Signs taken as blunders. This illusion negates collusion. Blank are the wonders. A text in profusion.
Stop now, stop, go. Chance of an intermission. Regard these staged constraints. There's room, of
course. A curse of complaints. A place of death. This reception, without transmission. The page torn
out. The picture burnt black. Four words going forwards. An absence, a lack. The museum: ad nauseum.
Or to begin again. Back to black silence. Words scrambled, tortured, quoted. The scratching of pens.
The patching of screens. Nemesis of the semiotic. Witness the soft drift. Caught in a cage. Pacing in
broken prose. Wittgenstein's toolbox bolted, foiled. Hands up, tools down. I was suffering like. Moving
in slow motion. Networks kept in check. Spectres of relay only. Revenants denied their drift.
Do the words count? Everything counts, everything's considered. The monochrome culls colour. We
proceed to dither. The force is folded. The horse is halted. The text is taken. The words have bolted.
Were you suffering, like? It's probably very simple. Straighter than you think. No need for experts. Don't
call the Oulipo. Don't ring the linguists. Don't unpack your Proust. The last four words.
Once again, to begin. Look again, attend, return. Meaning in the making. Language at a limit. Folding in,
turning in. An ellipse elliptically eclipsed. Point blank, stopped shut. Copious meaning tightly restrained.
Point of potential extension. The critic never sleeps. The critic only keeps. Time, perhaps, to collect. Call collect, call again. The waste land redeveloped. Six knives thrown twice. That's the wrong number.
The work before you. Compressed, dense, active, compacted. Message in a bottle. Watkins Tottle to Aristotle. Plato, Socrates, Derrida, Freud. Not the right order. Words in a void. The final destination
foiled. Secrets spoiled, aged, erased. Clandestine loops of allusion. Sentences stacked, edgy,
overloaded. Decipherment a deep deceit. There is no choice. Revelation is destabilised, restrained.
Chris, Harry, Alfred Jarry. Don't forget those boys.
‘Text paintings' possibly, perhaps? A conceited little genre. Stencils and coloured pencils. The lexicon
without tears. No compass or presence. Lost in the post. Thick at the most. Hard on the cards. Fiches,
files, patterns, lines. Mesh of memories, removed. Alphabet soup turned sour. A tract retracted, torn.
These words are pictures. Cryptograms from crashed computers. Nothing less than process. Nothing
more than protest.
Are the words under? Are the words over? Phillips, Smith, Holzer, Johns? A perfectly potted Ph.D. Not content with style. Pynchon on another mission. We were suffering like. Silent and morose oxymoron.
Cult of the quiet. Chatter slashed to bits. Night against the day. Days dark as nights. Pictures looking for
words. Four ways to begin. Four ways to end.
This text was written by Peter Suchin on the occasion of Chris Tosic's exhibition at Sartorial Contemporary Art in August 2008.
