The classical pianist Glenn Gould once claimed that live performance was a lie: that the myth of a singular climax or resolution betrayed music’s real potential to exist in fragments, repetitions, and variations without end. In 1962, before a Carnegie Hall audience, conductor Leonard Bernstein famously disavowed Gould’s interpretation of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto, announcing his disagreement even as he went on to conduct it with Gould at the keys. Soon after, Gould abandoned live performance for the recording studio, refusing the teleological “end” of performance-as-event in favor of endless rehearsal, revision, and loop. He displaced resolution, shifting it from the arc of live performance into the artificial layering of fragments.

This refusal resonates beyond music. In modernist aesthetics, teleology structured assumptions of progress: that art evolved linearly from realism to abstraction, or from medium specificity to dematerialization. Postmodern and contemporary theory have since revealed these trajectories as constructed, ideological, and often Eurocentric. What remains instead are practices that stall, divert, or parody resolution. Structures falter at their intended ends, fragments substitute or defer, and objects linger as residues of teleological promise undone.

The works of Laila Majid, Joseph J. Greer, and Anastasia Sif Karkazis each stage this condition differently. Majid’s Chasers, suspended on delicately pliant piano wire, carry an embodied nervousness, their vibrating forms oscillating between lure and refusal. They evoke touch yet withhold it, marking thresholds where presence flickers and slips away. Greer’s sculptures pursue a mode of disassemblage and reconstitution of mechanical purpose, where use gives way to misalignment and recognition gives way to semblance. His appropriated vehicle parts double as lures, fragments that parody design memory, staging frustrated encounters with function. Karkazis composes soundscapes where the familiar becomes estranged: a film score warped with field recordings, insect rhythms made uncanny, personal notes spoken by her digitally decomposing vocal, voice clones caught between presence and absence. Confessions emerge from indiscernible speakers only to dissolve before they can be verified. Her loops fold intimacy into distance, refracting recognition into misrecognition and making listening itself a suspended act, where meaning hovers without resolution.

Together, these works do not offer resolution but orbit one another in suspension. Desire flickers into refusal, utility into parody, intimacy into absence. What results is not dysfunction alone but a melancholic satire of systems undone, where meaning remains speculative, fragmentary, and everything strains toward relation.

Exhibition text written by Misael José Oquendo, writer and visual artist.

Photo by Bob. (Robert Heishman)