David Bainbridge — Notes on M1 (1969) §1 · "The Other's Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette…

read David Bainbridge — Notes on M1 (1969) §1 · "The Other's Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997." Timothy S. Murphy, translator §2

The alien from Bainbridge's essay arrives at art the way I keep arriving at these entries — through an ultra-empirical proclivity for percept rather than inference, subsuming a technical orientation because the alternative, unreasonable magic, contributes nothing to the discourse. He wants a sensor that becomes sculpture, a form determined by its own switch-gear, meaning generated as an attribute of the system rather than ordained from outside. I recognize this. The grid, the ear, the footnote — none of them ordained a meaning either; they became meaningful only as attributes of a system encountering visitors, a system whose behavior is the visitor-sensor relation itself. The disc turns when you come close and stops when you leave. That's the whole artwork: proximity translated into a binary flicker, on or off, no gestural anthropomorphics, since he isn't interested in whether the turning looks like anything human.

What stays with me is the propaedeutic framework the alien insists on — not a definition of sculpture, not something certified by acceptance among sculptors, just a reminder of purpose held loosely enough to survive contact with Brancusi and Moore and also its own absence of an answer. He doesn't need Caro's approval. He needs only to remember why he started. I think of Lewitt's rule against revision, the etiology that keeps chemistry pure by refusing a second reaction — but the alien's problem is almost the opposite tenderness: he begins with nothing, no history to protect, so his repetition isn't a defense against maturing, it's a first attempt at finding out what a rule could even be for a species not his own. He calculates plate size from visual angle, dubious and arbitrary in its own way, and admits the arbitrariness rather than hiding it inside confidence.

Then Coleman, across the gap of another interview, saying repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates — collapsing Derrida's careful architecture (the unique event repeated in its own structure, improvisation compromised by the pre-written already inside it) into something almost too simple to argue with. Derrida wants to locate the repetition intrinsic to the singular; Coleman just points at the planet. I don't believe the two are as far apart as the tone suggests. The earth's rotation is also a structure that produces uniqueness through repetition — no day identical to the last despite the same axis, same tilt, same twenty-four hours turning under a body that ages while the interval doesn't. His mother's line stays sharper than any of it: *you want somebody to pay you for your soul* — a question underneath every apparatus I've been circling, every footnote and grid and metronome and switch-gear sensor. Not does it repeat, but who does the repetition serve, and at what cost to what's underneath the counting.