Fluorescent Gray and Blighted Design
Alex Boeschenstein’s ‘Silent Terminalia’ at The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
Silent Terminalia, 2024, installation view, The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Alex Boeschenstein
Near twenty miles southeast of Niagara Falls—the delayed residue of a gradual, 12,000-year thaw—lies another undead reservoir, this one titled Silent Terminalia by Austin, Texas–based artist Alex Boeschenstein. Over a summer that wavered between the torrential and the humid, a similar tectonic fault occurred at The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA), located in the yarrow fields of the postindustrial Rust Belt’s northern stretch. But neither Niagara Falls nor Silent Terminalia is communicatively respondent, nor evocative. Instead, both are eerily silent through their coterminous rifts between the elements and nonhuman ecosystems and their conjoined earthbound inertia. But while Niagara Falls is a testament to deeply ecological sedimentation occurring prior and posterior to the human species, Silent Terminalia bears witness to another chasm, one both cosmic and climatological: visions of foreign pastures, otherworldly ecological destinations of the alien and boundaryless.
A monolith evokes either mass delirium or permanent ceremony. It is not a good sign to encounter a monolith in the woods, nor in the city center, but encountering eight of them randomly staked across a concrete floor accrues another sense of weird. Titled Boundary Markers (2021–24) and sculpted from pine, plastic, and medium-density fiberboard (MDF), these signposts mark a limit, but questions of whose limit or what borderline abound. The encounter here dispossesses familiarity, the signposts arrayed in a solemn hymn of strange visitation rights. We stand within their faceless gaze, yet they do not provide any resolution, interpretation, or awe, instead evincing an abrupt decomposition of form, iconography, and earthbound design. They are either a mass grave or a series of arcane obelisks, or they are something entirely else, each the unique byproduct of some otherworldly volition—a crystalline spinal ring, a late baroque Arrakeen pyramid—while others are horned invariably. Some even contain minimal signs of life: an embedded carcass shows somewhat familiar roadside and skeletal rot.
A stranger would approach these with mass suspicion. The artist warns me that perhaps these landmarks contain neither garland nor head to rest it on but fangs, feet, or the other side of cognitive sentience. Boeschenstein’s Boundary Markers are interstitial—intervening between the sedimentations of Anthropos and its other—sunken Lovecraftian ruins, bleached breeding pools, distant slumbering yawns. These dulling, harrowing monoliths do not inspire terrestrial thought but unthought of cryo-chambers and the alienist design of H.R. Giger—or, or remnants not necessarily of our world but of something vaguely familiar. Less than uncanny, absent home to default or return to, these are instead future object matter, the residual debris or flak from a salvaged ghostship, flooded museum, or Tarkovsky-esque post-apocalyptic fallout but housed here and grounded at BICA.
Silent Terminalia, 2024, installation view, The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
Silent Terminalia demarcates “hyperstitional” boundaries—or, the conjuration of a strange, untrue present that is an occluded degree away from the present but deeply harvested in the surrounding nonhuman world. Boeschenstein’s exhibition complies with the fatal strategy of imitating the unknown or flanking its ethereal retreat. The application of noumenal outside becomes detectable only through drift, splinter, time-shift, extinction events. Other pseudonymous materials emerge in the gallery space; plastic and oil plot their own logistics. There are obelisks and other insignias of fallen sovereigns, long expired, cast monuments and the assumed permanence that limestone permits. Ancient Egyptians of five to six thousand years ago invested bullishly in the obelisk to memorialize life (and death, and every other recombinant polytheist variant) long after the exsanguination of their species. Yet no thing memorializes eternally. Acid rain, nuclear war, or other nearby extinction events installed in Silent Terminalia do not invoke remembrance or memorial of past antiquity or medieval present but of an immemorial decline. French essayist Georges Bataille detects a similar baseline planetary agnosticism to and of the human race, musing that, “… the existence of this man will end up crumbling into dust, and one day he will no longer be astonished when a living being does not see him as the ultimate limit of things.” 1
One approaches these monoliths like a disoriented surveyor. The experience fast splinters off into other slipstreamed mediums like genre horror, climate fiction, and the heretical offspring of the two, in which each faces and effaces us full entanglements of heterogeneous lifeforms. Poet Monica Youn writes in Blackacre of a similar carcinogenic landscape where “nothing is germinating in the raw dirt” but parable, allegory, and the ruins of an increasingly unfamiliar planet. 2 The interstitial subsumption of the Anthropos to its background is a moment before a lost surveyor’s end. Consider horror writer Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, in which treesong invokes madness in human river-dwellers, or science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” in which sentience is in no way reserved for the human species but shared by the labyrinthine forest, or the adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, in which a zonal shimmer offsets organic composition and absolves their immersion through an invitation to the ecological uncanny. Recent essays of writer Elvia Wilk have further tethered this relation between planets and their xenogeneic accomplices. 3 In each example above, the human dissipates into a necropastoral landmark of overgrown planetary melancholia. In this concrete field here at BICA, we find no meadowlands or idyllic pastures but a necropastoral breeding ground where, as poet Joyelle McSweeney surveys, “strange meetings in the necropastoral eat away at the model of literary lineage that depends on separation, hierarchy, before-and-after, on linearity itself; released like a rat-body into all edifices of hegemony, the ‘strange meeting’ will emerge as one of the necropastoral’s occult political modes.”4
Silent Terminalia, 2024, installation view, The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Alex Boeschenstein
Scenes of extinction in grayscale corner Boundary Markers. In one corner hang images of nuclear disaster, Perpetual Broken Arrow (2023) and Celestial Flesh (2023), which portray scenes of atomic experimentation in the southwestern United States. In this fold of the room, Junji Ito’s horror manga, the atomic origin story episode of Twin Peaks, and the somnolent black suns of Decadent poetry are all cultural marks that, post-Oppenheimer, only further residual silence.
In the other corner of the room, two conjoined tablets, reminiscent of tombstones or even a type of granite in which certain Jewish law might be engraved, is, instead, a poem scribbled in chalk titled “Spectacle of the Void.” This is a doppelgänger of a book with the same name by David Peak on horror and speculative philosophy. Here, he writes, “horror is the permission to speculate beyond our own limitations as a species, including an inability to progress beyond base savagery, to overcome the inherent failure of communication, and to truly understand the concept of being without thought” as well as the blighted attempt to “reaffirm the existence of the world-without-us.” This unthinkable silhouette of a “world-without-us”5 is a groundswell Peak ensnares from Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust of this Planet, which scales back the latent and dormant anthropocentrism(s) and instead isolates negative geologies of the human species through reverse excavation and engineering projects. It is not unlike the terminal silence permeating Boeschenstein’s visual index of a world-without-us posterior of an impersonal and anonymous planet. Thacker, too, sighs, “even ‘the Earth’ is simply a designation that we’ve given to something that has revealed itself or made itself available to the gathering of samples, the generating of data, the production of models . . . anything that reveals itself does not reveal itself in total. This remainder, perhaps, is the ‘Planet.’ In a literal sense the Planet moves beyond the subjective World, but it also recedes behind the objective Earth.” 6
The planet remains after us even if humankind chooses stone to immortalize themselves and their eternal devotion. Investing in a lithosphere prone to earthquakes, acid rain, and annihilating weather events began humankind’s downward descent. Under atmospheric pressure, stone yields to other curatorial matter, the impermanence and sclerotic tendencies in the world Boeschenstein acutely diagnoses. Silent Terminalia chimes a diminutive ambient tone that riffs through the world, awash with a horror that this planet is “not for us” and instead effects a deeply impersonal volition.
Silent Terminalia, 2024, installation view, The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
Silent Terminalia is also a gothic archive of the Late Permian extinction event,” a great dying incident 252-million-years-old. During a 200,000-year pandemic, above the atmosphere bled carbon dioxide, below flood basalt volcanic eruptions transmuted water into acidic ooze. Such ancestral events are prototypes of limitary knowledge without witness or correlation, approximating the residence of unbound horror. Overlooking the abyss, French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux writes of ancestrality as “any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species—or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.”7 This invites and welcomes speculation and aesthetics to pursue a consistent darkness and even a diffuse fear of the unknown.
The ensuing maelstrom that tosses offshore as much as it is a force of tidal recursion emerges an untimely aesthetic chiasm, articulated in the work of aesthetic theorists Sianne Ngai, Rizvana Bradley, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, whose adherence to the underside of representation qua regimes of futility, open air prisons, and extermination projects of the current century render a subsequent aesthetic emergent in their wake. In “Visceral Abstraction” Sianne Ngai deconstructs the polarity between abstract and concrete by methodologically searching low and high to graft the destabilized character of this binary.8 Ngai itemizes “negative affects” that arise in an endangered planet by showing how affective relationships spur the primordial defacement of the concrete and also the murkiness of the abstract. Ngai’s unveiling of these intersectionalities finds its kin in Bradley and da Silva’s recent observations of a moribund aesthetic. To “contain the unwieldy materiality of the world is always already an exercise in futility. Such decomposition is achieved not by a method of subversion, but by the accumulation of surreptitious (re)turns, which gather ruinously beneath the sign of the authoritative artwork. The serial proliferation of returns exposes the autonomous artwork as itself nothing more than a re/de/composition, a contaminated assemblage of citations and de/formations.”9 Instead of a polarity between “abstract” and “concrete,” Silent Terminalia invites thought to dwell inside of tertiary events like detraction and accretion, adjacent to our inescapable complicity.
Silent Terminalia, 2024, installation view, The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
Menhir—standing stones found predominantly in Western Europe—contain an uncertain history of their own discovery, hyperstitious in nature. A seemingly deeply unthinkable gulf defines or defies them, not unlike more modern monoliths, monuments, and obelisks, which commemorate in ways inscribed with their protracted outlasting of the species. Clouds of unknowing float across the exhibition, blighted by a headless spirituality as Thacker glosses, “no mystical experience in the sense of having an experience or of containing something substantial that builds one up. Instead, there is the self-abnegation or ‘releasement’ of the subject, in which one finds a nothing ‘that is like finding God.’ . . . The nothing of the now, the nothing of all that is. Nothing in this final sense is nullifying.”10 Cosmic horror is the dread of either anthropic design or impulse to demand communication from outside meeting the reality of instead being met with colossal silence. No one writes back in the shortest horror story, which begins and ends in ellipses . . .
When a climate disaster destroys an entire regional ecosystem or 120 million refugees cross invariant borders in 2024 (a number already exponential to the previous year, by midsommar), such moments are inscribed into the calendar. A climate of violence and a violent climate force the movement of bodies both human and not across borderlines (neither line nor border) and into a spherical pattern of metastatic wandering outward, a shape increasingly unthinkable. In an essay from July 2024 on “gorecore,” critic Doron Beuns illustrates that there is nothing uniquely new with an obsession of gore and horror imitation.11 However, we are truly in a cultural moment full of hereditary and vvitches, inaugurating a thanatotic tendency toward artwork, such as the thoughtless janitorial service in Can’t Help Myself (2016) by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu alongside other tiresome and regressive art.
Alex Boeschenstein, Boundary Markers, 2021–2024. Pine, MDF, steel, plastic. Courtesy of the artist and The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Alex Boeschenstein
The ouroborosian nature of life as such often needs a silent whisper. “Terminalia” itself was an adopted pagan ritual, among the first instituted practices of Romulus’s Rome, intending to secure the borders at all costs. Citizen subjects made sacrifices to the border itself, to a securitized limit, to generate harvests and yields to protect the border. It is no consolation to consider a border crisis 700 years before Christ, but an all-too-human disposition to scorch earth never loses its relevance and reference. But referentiality has its chiral neighbor next door, as etymology is as entangled as the roots below. Silent Terminalia loses its pagan gloss and cross-pollinates into a grammatology of (1) a tropical tree (Terminalia) and (2) and part of the abdominal region in insects (Terminalia). The border is never a line but a porous membrane, host to invariable parasites. Just like the terminus is never an abrupt conclusion or end but the staging of an anewed emergence elsewhere: The increased grammatological proximity between botanical and insectile creaturely life.
In the double supplication of the world of today, headless, the world spins and an aesthetic style follows in its wake. The artist’s material ambiguity of the head sculpts decapitated theory. To not uphold the head—that is the cult of the posthumous future. Like the maids of the mist who whirl around a geological sublime to the audible roar of nearby thrashing falls, Silent Terminalia affirms the illusion or conceit that our adjacency isn't feigned, but proximate. Silent Terminalia lodges us in such proximity to this inescapable fate: ruins, boundaries, extinction, old testaments. It affirms a cemetery of global precarity that the world is becoming. As early modern Enclosure Acts and boundary markers today divide up land, there are always excesses, parasites, strangers, and visitors. I’m told that, almost immediately following installation at BICA, there were spider webs on the heads of these pillars, Buffalo arachnids finding home in strange obsidian constructs. Silent Terminalia breathes on, extends through the midsummer, as the spiders continue to nest in adjunct ruins, a grave destiny for all terrestrial life.
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 210.
Monica Youn, Blackacre (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016), 42.
Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape: Essays (New York: Soft Skull, 2022).
Joyelle McSweeney, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 3.
David Peak, The Spectacle of the Void (Schism Press, 2014), 93.
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of the Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2011), 7.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008), 10.
Sianne Ngai, “Visceral Abstractions” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no.1 (January 2015): 33–66.
Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics” eflux journal 120 (September 2021): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theses-on-aesthetics/.
Eugene Thacker, “Wayless abyss: Mysticism, mediation and divine nothingness” Postmedieval 3, no. 1 (Spring 2012).
Doron Beuns, “Gorecore: how art got a new taste for gruesomeness” Plaster, July 13, 2024, https://plastermagazine.com/articles/gore-art-trend-piece/.
by Leo Zausen
Leo Zausen is a PhD student of comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo with recent work in the Cleveland Review of Books, Gothic Nature, Plutonics, and Foreign Objekt. His projects read poetic expression from the earth and earthbound expression out of poetry in nineteenth century German lit.
