Holes & Wholes

This talk will delve into the 4th issue of the artist-run journal Effects, centered on holes (issue editors: Clementine Kieth-Roach, Christopher Page, Lakshmi Luthra). It is famously, comically, impossible to represent nothing tout court, to picture only the hole. The hole needs something to be in or on; it perforates a cohesive pattern, structure or figure. The contributions to this issue of Effects orbit the perimeters of different kinds of holes and gaps. Lost histories, legacies of violence, the fissures in erotic experience—all provide openings to engage with the stories and images, the ideas and political projects, that emerge when we try to discern the vanishing points of the familiar world. Rather than seeking to fill in a void, or render the invisible visible, this issue is interested in animating an absence. What appears as a rupture in the known may yet be the outline of another form. Many of the contributions to this issue draw from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who, in the 1960’s, turned to topology to model the structural paradoxes and logical impasses of desire as it moves between self and other. Lacan used the Möbius strip—a loop twisted around an empty center—to model our psychic entanglements. At any one point on this crooked, curling hole the inside and outside appear distinct, but once fully traversed the two sides are understood as continuous. Self and other are external to one another, and yet intimately related. As Lacan said, the other is “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.” Instead of conceiving of the subject as a self-enclosed, self-identical whole, the Möbius strip invites a tender tracing of the void that links one to another.

Lakshmi Luthra is an artist and teacher based in Central New York. Her art practice incorporates photography, writing, the moving image and sound. She is a member of the research collective Seeld Library, devoted to the topic of “second nature” broadly defined as socially constructed phenomena surfacing as if they were inevitable — as mere extensions of an automated evolutionary process. Luthra also serves as co-editor at Effects, a journal of art, poetry and essays, devoted to contemporary aesthetic effects and their social and philosophical histories. Recent exhibitions include Noli me tangere at Soldes, Los Angeles; The Crack-up at Take Care, Los Angeles; Transmission at Colab Projects, Austin Texas; Opacity and Radiance at Ben Hunter Gallery, London; Poly at Sushi Bar Gallery, Brooklyn; and Full Haus: The Seeld Library at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art storefront exhibition space. Luthra joined the Colgate University faculty in 2014. She is Associate Professor of Photography, jointly appointed to the Department of Art and to the Film & Media Studies Program. Luthra is a member of the Central New York Experimental Media Consortium and serves on the Central New York Humanities Corridor Advisory Board.