Visitor Log, Institutional Building is a fresco-secco of a figure’s transit into an institution. The plaster is located inside a 3-ring binder- a modular object associated with a system of marking that takes place when entering a building. 

The performance is a monologue of the exchange at an entrance: the presentation of an ID card and the request for a signature. The pen tapping at the page reveals a harder sound than might be expected and the edges of the sign-in sheet are irregular, and more characteristic of a liquid than a solid. 

“In an untitled 1963 work [Agnes] Martin used red ink to trace a small, simple, regular grid, framed by a single line that leaves a definite border. As they terminate, the lines create tiny puddles of ink down the right hand side, and the bottom of the grid. These are literally differences at the margins, a series of terminal points.”* Just as Martin resumes each successive line and releases it at its end, the performance Visitor Log charts a repeated individual path easily expunged, reduced to precarious conditions; a figure subject to politics, which is the composition and decomposition of forms of power inside and outside of an institution. 

* Briony Fer, “Drawing Drawing: Agnes Martin’s Infinity,” in 3x An Abstraction (Yale University Press, 2005), 189.