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Nomenclature
VECTOR
Issue 2, 2009
Editor, Peter Gregorio
Video Image for Nomenclature

Cell (Winter Mimicry 1.0), 2008, 26 Hydrographically printed Renshape hexagons and metal, 59.5” x 52.5” x 1”

4/20/08 11:37 AM 58˚ while at my father’s house

I am with people heading in the direction of holy family church along liberty road, going east. It is necessary to take an alternate path. We come to a gully that must be traversed. I am wearing blue desert boots I bought while traveling with my brother. I realize if I slide on the soles of the shoes, I can get ahead of the others. Indeed, I slide down one side and gain enough momentum to get to the top of the opposite side. I am thrilled by my agility, amazed that given the rough terrain I am able to travel or coast as far as I do. But now I am stalled, stuck at the crest of the incline. I can see the road just over the top, and at the place where just a while ago the other path digressed. I could fall from where I struggle to hold my place. To my right, I see two cords that perhaps I can grab on to. Unfortunately, the cords are loose. I pull them, and surface dirt, caked mud, comes off to reveal a series of tiles that run the length of the ridge. I try to grab on to one only to find they too are loose. Now, two young men, apparently experienced in scaling this terrain, methodically analyze the situation, weighing their chances of surmounting the crest.

My brother and I this morning to my brother I voiced the dream and like the men in it who know better (only the dream itself knows more) I grasped it, but gradually. Not for nothing did I share it with my brother for I got the desert boots while traveling with my brother. A memory was stirred by seeing yesterday at Salvation Army a western-style shirt with an “Ely” collar label, the NV town where I bought the shoe-boots.

I slide on the shoes, the soles of the shoes, sure not to dig in my heels. Slipping, nothing is attached, fixed, firm, or named. Like, is it a shoe or a boot? Eschew what: gully, place, name? I coast on my soul, charm, like the black singer did last night, working the room at the restaurant where we celebrated my father’s eighty-eighth birthday. A conversation yesterday my brother and I had about the definition of the word “nomenclature”, its distinction from “vernacular” was heard by the dream. We sat with my father while I looked it up the words. My father misheard words and misapplied definitions, like “fulsome” for “wholesome”, meaning for him “buxom woman”. The dictionary was open and language was reflected (all it ever is). Nomenclature (a set or system of names or terms) resounds as name-in-clay-(na)ture. Echoing “Idi Amin Dada” dream three weeks ago, the fragment ciphers ciphe in-the place of the father of my name for the father as a failure to properly name. Sliding to hold my place, nomination slips. Clay-mud baked-dry, is it is the the crust at the top of the crest. My waking enjoyment came w/ t at uncovering, like one of the tiles, the pun: my name in clay nature has been en-crested. This leads to the two cords signal a cord, a discordant accord. Will not come through accordance only chance, hazard, discord, provide a cord, escape. The two men “know-how”; their know ledge offers a viable way. Act-know-ledge. Discord uncovers the tile-cells benet encrusted along the ledge. My brother related them rightly to tiles that line the edge of a pool, and behold: the name of our neighborhood community pool we were me was Randall rigg Ridge. The dream refers to the escarpment I struggle to surmount discordingly as nomination itself (crest, ridge, edge, ledge). Pooling here too is the memory of my brother and I as kids eschewing the streets leading to the Randall Ridge for a break away path through the middle of the block between houses. My father mentioned this path yesterday, now overgrown and obstructed, apparently. Our clear-cut shortcut, once passable, now, according to my father, is thwarted. The dream cuts another way, a know better ledge, encrusted, discordant, unconscious.

What are these tiles unearthed beneath the crust on the crest, at the edge of a deserted empty ridge pool, gully, dry-bed, draw, memory, if not the interlocking hexagon cells of the cluster sculptures for my upcoming show? Another dream cord: two days ago before leaving NYC for my father’s an Artforum advertisement was due and CR I informed the gallery haphazardly, in an awkward manor manner, of my nomination to Buck. This act the dream designates as until now unknowable, un-nameable, a truer name at the top o buried under the crust of the crest, name-in-clay-nature. Two anecdotes knot crest to crust: yesterday at the Salvation Army, an artifact, a framed gold-plated eagle, clutching in its talons arrows and branches and over its chest an escutcheon, shield, emblem, crest, but blank, un-engraved, not-yet-written. (Naming as epitaph.) I tapped it as inspiration for an artwork. My brother brought the second one: my father yesterday confessed to him, in an exchange I overheard, that he had used the wrong crust for a pie he baked. The dream knows my brother does, for who else endured like I the paternal blunders, mistakes, misfor misfortunes, misjudgments? (We share this dreams vernacular: the shortcut, the pool, an aunt’s house on Crest Street, PA.) A father who mis-names, is thus known, named, misnomer, amiss. Lable (My brother is is lately concerned with properly naming things, so our looking up words like mis “nomenclature”. Return “misnomer” emerged while decoding the dream, so we looked it up, to be sure, later at my dads.)

This second-hand heraldic shield, to be etched, written, carved, once encrusted by paternal misnomers at the crest of a ledge I know better now, “inscribes” a name I made for myself, one that bucks the father’s name through a vowel movement, spelled-out literally by the dreams cunning wordplay cunning relay exchange crisscross of the very same letters e and u in crest and crust. of for a u that knots What’s en-crested in a name? Scaling the ridge of the dream, an act akin to it’s interpret deciphering (dreams know ledge), I ascend to the brink of a liberty road. Crest is a cockscomb too. Rooster, bird, feather, artistic name change nothing other the than a nom-de-plume. The representative miss-nomer, my enjoy-meant, nom-en-clay-nature, crest-in-crust, the dream lets slip discords to buck, my sign-nature, ensign, insignia.

Clay to mud to shit, it knotted letters in my ow alphabet: the terrain of the father, earmarked not only as name-in-clay-encrusted-crest, but clay feet, once idolized. I instead wear feet salvaged out west. My feat now coast to coast, not east, west, hanging from the ridge, grasping once encrusted crest, mis-named, I can no longer the dreams rescue, unable to get a leg up rescue coming liberty over the ledge, a name I call myself, clay if embedded in the crest. Crust, dried baked, caked clay, once mud, shit. What is the dry-bed of shit a landscape of it, a world a pool of it, world-o-shit, absent world of no of distinction, drowning; lacking world of name place-names or co-ordinates; the world I end-evered to unearth myself from. The dream ciphers this morass and backwardness mud as dry-bed, illegible, backward guideposts in the form of relics wayward. Know how ever markers, cells, signposts can be uncover are found embedded beneath the caked baked surface. This land dreamscape, baked in the wrong encrusted, ravages of a prim aftermath of a mudslide consuming, is the land of my father, and any other acknowledged, navigation is not all is lost. Too soon to foresee what follows this bucking, for the canny dream conclusion is a cliffhanger! Later: The Is the sequel apparent in the ending? By I recognize the dream rego act-know-ledges that with the displacement of e by u rega despite the hazardous precipice place I find in myself, I am “onto something”. The climax, though suspended, yet en-nom-in-c nomenclature now un-inscribed, I am not crestfallen!

4/30/08 7:58 AM 54º Midland Odessa, TX

The U replaces the E of Beck in all the dream arrived after the weekend that my co the news of this change G the gallery took unfavorably the news of my new name. So it must be the force of the self-naming that affectively carves out the dream-terrain upon which it ramifies. The letter u non assigned to the signature subject, act-knowledges impasse, and it’s rep and crossing the geography of u I grasp appropriately the dream ciphers in of my self-nomination, my my self-nom-in-nature, encrusted in clay, accordingly. In the topology of the mother, the mud mud-shit crust caked, heralding my crf my c name had been en-crumy true name crest as encrusted, the c while for as long as cake-mud-shit-crust was my crest, the pun encrested.

Dry-bed gully chasm goes by too as draw, and I traverse. Cards, gamble, solitaire, poker, win, lose, draw. Here, in deeds, we find the mother, now as then deadlocked, tragedy reiterates; this the true push to self-nomination against the father name, resigned to irresolution enacted by the traverse-sole? The u-shaped cut canyon dream geography, though traversed, remains a rift.

w I follow un what more matters than the meaning of the dream’s own vowel movement, is not the one letter for the other in the re-mark-able exchange of e in crest for u in crust under exclusively, but but the canny copy-cat quality of the swap itself. Move-over, it is not only that I did the same, sliding e from beck to slip in u for buck (this u all the while encrested awaiting excavation) but exchangi excising an e by any other name is pushing it out; I pushed it out, which the dream re-awakes as a trait, master signifier: push-e, “pushy”, the name shit then liked to retain, production, waste, it drops.

Desert boots reminded R. of the Hewlett-Packard brand, which typifies typing, typewriting, versing. Riding, sounds like writing, on my soles. Writing? Why not try-versing? Is this the means of the try-verse-soul? It to recapitula the replacement of the E with the U cannot the significance of the un-inscription of e by u can not longer be understated. The u in buck repre is representative of the greate representation representative of an other that can otherwise not be an act-know-ledge-meant of what in the self cannot can not be better unknown as resignation, traversal, with the force full finally of an insignia, as I no underst enjoy of what I enjoy to mean.

In the end, what u drives out of the father name, an act-know-ledge-meant of a mis-nomer, is an other letter, push e, no longer retained, it falls, as remainder, but not wasted; certainly the self-nomination of this being its first sign…

The artist last April leading up to an exhibition changed his name from Robert Beck to Robert Buck.

Robert Buck © 2009

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