SEAN McELROY

PROTEIN PRISM

SEPTEMBER 2024

Supine under the sway of a certain Plant a vision - an epigenetic memory? - came to me: I was telling a story in a language I don’t recognize, while using an obsidian knife to separate the skin from the pearlescent fascia of what I think was a tapir.

I opened my eyes and thought: language is a knife

In a logorrheic era when a box of 10 snap-off utility knife blades costs $8.60 it is quite impossible to appreciate the tenuousness of these two technologies, which developed together, incrementally, over hundreds of thousands of generations, long predating the emergence of Homo Sapiens. 

Stone knives evolved from rough-edged clods into shimmering foliate instruments. Language developed from apely grunts to intricate systems wrought with tense, number, mood and aspect, prepositions, particles and gerunds. As the knives became sharper, and our languages became more precise, Homo Sapiens became more able to hew, describe and render our environment. We told stories to each other and cut up the world, were fruitful, and multiplied, and had dominion over every living thing that moveth…

Ideogram, alphabet, logic, geometry, double-entry bookkeeping, quarterly report, Instagram

Stone knife, bronze-iron-steel knife, cannon, table saw, laser, drone

In its deepest structure, language is a process of separation: to call something a horse is to separate it from everything in the universe that is not a horse. Speaking is cutting, and it is natural that language - an ontological knife - would develop alongside the ability to perfect and use an actual knife. And that the continued abstraction and expansion of communication would proceed apace with tools of rending and violence. 

A steak is a drawing in red and white that contains information about both its past and its future when read by a butcher, a chef, or a USDA inspector. The quantity of white and the delicacy of its distribution are related to the life that the cow lived and what it ate in its final days. This drawing is also a reliable indication of its degree of flavor and tenderness. A steak is a protein prism, at the same time interior and exterior, past and present. 

A knife imposes its planar logic onto a knot of muscle tissue, creating a steak. This marble(d) slab is seared and placed on a white plate, salted theatrically with a flaky finishing salt before being served to a man at a business dinner, whose mouth will alternate between chewing the steak and discussing strategic challenges for the upcoming Quarter. 

Four steaks, unmoored from their doomed destiny in time-space, float out to an island in Darien, CT, and erect themselves vertically on the shoreline. Perhaps they impelled by an epigenetic memory to relive the sandy crawl of the first terrestrial mammals. Or perhaps they are evincing a monument to a lost civilization that was fruitful and multiplied until it ate up the entire world.

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Sean McElroy studied Classics at Brown University and Painting at the University of Washington. He uses sculpture, painting and performance to explore the mythic landscape of what might be recorded in History as the Final Years of Great Abundance. He is a founding member of Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE), a performance group and mystical order devoted to uncovering a ritual language for the VHS/internet age.