Both artists in Amenities attempt to slow down infrastructure by placing the human body in-between infrastructure and its functions. Zurita’s action of kissing a miniature Empire State Building infantilizes an iconic building while caring for it. By kissing it, she establishes a desire to incorporate it within herself; similar to the hosting of life. In Iribarren Vazquez’s system of Coagulators and Cooling Units’, bodily actions like breathing become material that generates new matter. In Amenities, we find edible sculptures: a chocolate cast of a miniature Empire State Building and cast gelatin made of human breath. Both sculptures are meant to be eaten, the act of eating becomes the last gesture of incorporation.
Oh how criminal it is for flesh to be stored away in flesh, for one greedy body to grow fat with food gained from another, from one live creature to go on living through the destruction of another living thing! – Pythagoras
I have a yearn to be inside, similarly to the self-affirming wanderer 1 yearn to be outside. The self-affirming wanderer yearns to be one with the outside, usually led by a desire to “return” back to home. Oftentimes, “home” is a diversified landscape. Let’s provide examples for the wandering man, in this instance I will only recall two: Odysseus and Robert Smithson
Both of these figures were led by an intense nostalgia for unity. The nostalgia for unity comes from an averse reaction to the awareness of separation. The separation between subject and object is first experienced by a child’s realization that he is no longer one with his mother. This becomes clear to the child once the mother attempts to breastfeed him. The child responds with aggressive welps at the sight of his mother’s breast – perhaps longing for a
return to the safety of the womb.
At times I look into glass windows into luxury apartments or into peep holes on construction sites and long to be inside of them. At times I look at the buildings that tower over me without any permission to do so and long to be inside of them. This is what I call appetite. We are all familiar with appetite, an appetite for food, an appetite for knowledge, we long to put these things inside of us in order to transform, to become better versions of ourselves, fuller versions.
Both Odysseus and Robet Smithson longed to return, to no longer be a foreigner, rather to be a host. For Smithson his magnum opus, Spiral Jetty (1970) was his home where he could perpetually host visitors, no longer a guest
visiting a site. The feast of Odysseus’ return is the scene of his muder. After developing a strong interest in shamanism, Smithson began to believe he hosted a spirit; a few months later he died. In the Odyssey, Odsseuys meets Polyphemos which is said to be the “grotesque literalization” of Odysseus’s own appetite which has been inflated into a monster that is entirely all mouth and eye: a huge gaping hole eager to take everything onto itself.
Because home is unstable and changing, the strong appetite for home is most often met with disappointment because it does not fulfill one’s desire. Similarly kissing, eating and consummation end with some disappointment
because oneness, true unity is not reached.
A worker drags a bundle of debris from a water intake screen at the East River Generating Station. The water flows past him, over a natural gas turbine condenser that spins a generator routing power through the Cherry Street
substation and the underground Cooper Square network feeder to a transformer under Henry street, the 24 Rutgers service meter, and a Foreign & Domestic outlet. Connected to this outlet, an air conditioner’s internal condensing coils turn the breath of a woman in the gallery into water. It trickles into a bucket weighing down a Coagulator.
Maite collects liquid breadth from the bucket with an ice tray, which she puts into a freezer connected to the same outlet as the AC. She removes the blue silicon plug from a wall mounted Cooling Unit and siphons out some of the water inside the copper organ to make room for frozen breadth. This leads the Cooling Unit to condense the breadth of another woman in the gallery. It drips into another Coagulator. Maite pours the second woman’s breath from the Coagulator into a pot on a hot plate connected to the same outlet as the AC and the freezer. She mixes agar agar into the pot of boiling breadth and pours it into another Coagulator. Her friend adds a couple of berries to it. Another adds sugar. It sets into a gelatin that Maite takes a bite of. She takes a big breath and puts another ice tray full of liquid breath into the freezer.