Memory hardened into law — frozen so completely it has become a monument, and cracking under everything it will not let go.
A real-time work, computed live and never repeating. It runs continuously: the one set thing in a series of flow.
A fossilised crystal monument stands in a deep blue dark — the crystalline crown of Precipitate grown monstrous and set solid, the present frozen so hard it became a tablet of law. It does not flow. Under the pressure of everything it will not let melt, it slowly fractures; on a strict ritual clock a pale wave climbs it and re-freezes the cracks, restoring it to true even as it no longer fits. And new, living memory rises along its cold faces, each in its own colour — and each meets the law with its own fate: the honest is beaded off and turned away, pooling cool and silver at the foot; some is captured and set hard onto the face, its colour draining toward the monument's own; some only slides back down; and one kind, rare, rises straight past the top and out, untouched and free. And it casts: a hard lattice of cold blue light thrown down across the ground, raking everything beneath into its own dead geometry. The living ordered by the shape of the dead. Nothing resolves; it can neither fall nor live.
Tradition is memory crystallised so hard it stops looking like memory. Morality is, in large part, preserved memory with the contingency forgotten — we do this because it is right is very often we have always done this, and we have lost the reason. The frozen archive is protection and prison at once: the accumulated wisdom that survives a collapse, and the dead past granted the authority of the eternal, legislating for the living who never chose it. Doctrine holds both, and refuses to choose. That is why it is not the answer.
The series' open fifth, frozen — hollow parallel fifths in C, the warming third barred, in the austere register of liturgy. The only piece on a strict metronomic clock: a hollow-fifth toll struck on the ritual beat, frame-locked to the re-freeze, repeating identically — ritual as sound, the form outliving its reason. And between the tolls you hear each rising memory meet its fate: a warmth that tries to arrive and is barred at the door; a cold click as one is set hard onto the stone; a soft wash as one runs back down; and, once in a long while, a single open fifth that rings through free — the one thing the law cannot touch.
Doctrine is the fifth piece of the series — What Remains — on the fragility of memory, individual and collective. It is the dark pole of the series: pure structure, set so hard it cannot change — the exact opposite of Tideline, which is given so wholly to flow it cannot hold. The two are a pair, the two ways a record dies, each the other's warning; and between them the series keeps a third that is neither, shown only at the last. Doctrine is one fate of Precipitate's crown, the present hardened solid.
Joshua Borsman makes sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit. The pieces take real processes and signals and turn them into work that unfolds in time and refuses to repeat. joshuaborsman.com
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