We started before the start, in a sort of rabble talking over the start time. Everyone milled about the big yellow room, already comfortable in the same way you might be in a friend’s kitchen. There were five tables, seventeen metal spoons—some connected by wire, others not—a few boards of stained plywood leaning against the walls, and an audio system connected to a speaker. When that speaker began to sound, quietly at first and then loudly, two people crawled in from the hallway, one staggered in front of the other, touching head to hip. Anyone still standing found a spot on the floor or a space to lean against a wall. Could it be time to eat?

On the third floor of a bustling Canal Street building in Chinatown, Lucía Reissig offered a performance titled a necessity, a form on June 10 at the Golden Monkey Trading Company, as part of curator Tamara Khasanova’s seven-week residency, “Outlines for a Dispersed Commons.” Reissig—an Argentinian sculptor based in New York whose work considers care, domestic labor, and informal economies—proposes the domestic realm as a magical site and everyday objects as sculptures waiting to be activated. The premise that evening was simple and slightly unnerving, that this room, a few makeshift tables, some spoons, and a crowd of strangers might reconfigure how we touch and receive touch.

Minutes after the two performers, Devi Rayne and Jay Beardsley, crept in, one of them—impossible to tell which, given their entanglement—took out a cardboard tube that was serving as a table leg. BANG! The materials dispersed from their previous form. It was unclear, then or afterward, whether it was an accident or a decision. Regardless, the contact between body and object would repeat throughout the performance. Contact made everything possible, meaning anything could go either way and the fall of a table was no more a mistake than the spoon was a utility for eating.

There was an athleticism to Rayne and Beardsley: not the self-perfecting labor of gym rats, but rather a more social form of expenditure. The two came together, scattered, then returned in a cycle. They slid along the floor, climbed walls, hung upside down, folded themselves like tables, and then tumbled over and/or tucked beneath each other. Their movement around the room was effortful and jerky, their bodies dragging and gripping more than flowing. They stayed low and exerted themselves on and in everything they touched, pressed on, and brushed up against. In doing so, they accentuated the relational quality of this assemblage of bodies and objects in space, and found in friction a sociality. Against our typical expectations of smooth circulation and exchange—be it at a performance or on a dating app—their bodies insisted on the textured experience of rubbing along the floor and against each other and us.

What work, then, can those spoons do? Haptic work. The object-as-social process was borrowed from Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, whose relational objects meant nothing until a body took them up, their content being the encounter itself. Building on Clark, Reissig’s utensils invite connection through the experience with form itself. For instance, when the two performers disentangled for a moment, Rayne crawled straight for a spoon on the ground, which previously had been atop the now fallen table. They lay on the floor, neck arched back, face pointed up, clutching the spoon and guiding it toward upturned lips before extending their tongue to touch it. Contact activated the object’s generalized history of use for sustenance—as we all knew—which exceeded the individual who happened to be holding it. The spoon, as it was activated by Rayne, became an unfamiliar opening to social experiences that are normalized everyday practices, such as eating.

The critic Suely Rolnik once described Lygia Clark’s objects as instruments that disarticulate and reassemble how bodies inhabit sensation.11Suely Rolnik, “Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark,” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel, exhibition catalogue (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999), 102. The spoon that had been, minutes earlier, ornamental—set at a table—and that had been, only seconds earlier, the trace of an error—a fallen object among others—became an instrument of intimacy on Rayne’s tongue. Nothing about the spoon changed, only its use and the body available to receive it. Reissig stages the movement from disarticulation to reassembly through the promise of feeding and being fed, an unglamorous, usually invisible, usually gendered labor. The spoon is where personal sensation turns toward social experience, where touch stops being mine and becomes a thing felt in common.

The commonality of touch was also audible. At the edge of the room, another performer, Grace Villamil, ran the edge of a tarnished silver spoon along the rim of a tarnished silver bowl while three transducers converted the friction into sound. What the spoon did with the bowl replayed as a dissonant relation, less a note than a series of inseparable differences sounding at once. The sound of the rabble and the friction of crawling bodies on the floor was fed back to us as something we already had produced together, without noticing, from before the start.

The disorder that we initially had walked into—the milling, the talking-over, the comfortable mess of strangers—was not the prelude; it was the work’s material form. Reissig de-territorialized the meal and gallery alike until what was left was simply a crowd touching, feeding off itself, and jostling along—the object disarticulated from the subject and toward the social. a necessity, a form puts faith in the new potential of the encounter, rather than leaning on social custom.

Tamara Khasanova’s residency title hints at what the work performs: a commons existing between the condensed and dispersed bodies and objects, a sustenance no one could reach alone. After the performers had moved back into the hallway and the yellow room loosened again, what stuck was the sensation of having fed and been fed by strangers who were, by then, not so strange. There was no food.