Peter Hobbs

Hello,
I thought I would try to explain my understanding of the orange poncho. As some of you may know, I have been struggling trying to write an essay on
the "queer needle" for an anthology on textile art. I just recently completed a draft and sent it off to the editor. I realise now that what I was struggling with in the work of Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and American artist Jim Hodges could also be said about the orange poncho.
Deleuze and Guattari make the distinction between the representation of desire and its production. In a different context, Dave Hickey makes a similar discrimination. Speaking about art he distinguishes images that "do things" from images that "only do things after we have talked about them." Hickey is not advocating a notion of blind faith, but a corrective form of vision. "If our criticism aspires to anything beyond soft-science, the efficacy of images must be the cause of criticism, and not its consequence - the subject of criticism and not its object" (The Invisible Dragon, p. 12). The distinction Hickey is making is between representation and production.
Deleuze and Guattari conceive desire not as an aggregated entity that arises solely out of our unconscious or conscious will, but as a fractured form of energy that is generated in the mechanics of human interaction. It happens at the subjacent level of things that constitute human interaction: objects, people, and language. Desire is not to be thought of as a by-product of the Oedipal Complex, as it is in Freudian psychoanalysis, but as a product of multiple actions and reactions. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the functions of the human body and the external forces it interacts with as multiple machines. "Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones: machine driving other machines... An organ-machine I plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it... Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines." (Anti-Oedipus, p. 1). Deleuze and Guattari depict the agency of desire in a similar fashion. It too is a series of machines operating on the level of fragments, and in this way is "molecular."
The orange poncho is a "desiring machine" that one plugs into. It is a performative event and, like most performances, the documentation falls short. The portability of the orange poncho is probably its most defining feature. Its ability to show up on the Jasper ice-fields, a Cajun restaurant in Edmonton, and a contemporary art gallery in London, speaks not only about its nomadic function, but also the nomadic nature of desire. "Desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibration and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures - an always nomadic and migrant desire" ( Anti-Oedipus, p. 292).
The orange poncho was bought by two members of Szuper Gallery at Value
Village in Calgary. It is an adult size poncho made of orange vinyl. Like Szuper Gallery itself, the orange poncho exists both physically and conceptually. In other words, one can enter Szuper Gallery or put on the orange poncho both figuratively or literally. Both function as a cross between a circus tent and a think tank.
I like this idea that Szuper Gallery and the orange poncho are machines that produce ideas, experiences, and fun.