Tomorrow afternoon I’m at Five Years Gallery giving a short talk I’ve called TEXT as TOOLKIT, drawing from Franz Kafka’s short story The Burrow as my source of tools for grappling with practices of art writing.
My presentation is part of the afternoon’s Art Writing Field Station, which is one of the discussions taking place during Field Recordings:
Field Recordings is a programme of events timetabled by Edward Dorrian to address the concept of the Field Recording. The Art Writing Field Station was put together by David Berridge in response to this theme. Our aim is to gather texts and practices that might constitute the ‘field’ of the art writer, and from these materials to develop a working lexicon we might use in our discussion of that field. Read the rest of this entry »
On January 20 antepress performed an experimental lecture on ekphrasis at the David Roberts Art Foundation, as part of Damien Roach’s exhibition Shiiin, Jet Stream, White Earphones.
An audio recording of the lecture has now been posted on the exhibition blog, From a Darkened Sunroof. My contribution to the lecture drew on my ongoing research into the instructional form of address, and particularly the potential for frustrated instructions to work as ekphrastic figures.
By issuing instructions to the other speakers – instructions that weren’t followed – I tried to create an alternative potential version of the lecture, which in turn caused the actual version of the lecture to appear as just one possible version of it. It was an attempt to make the lecture a reflexively ekphrastic event: an event that describes itself, using just itself as a description. Read the rest of this entry »
On the radio tomorrow afternoon is a different take on the text I’ve been writing about this week. Here’s an extract of the broadcast:
“Now to keep you all together, I’d like you to bear in mind that not all of you will be hearing my voice at the same time. If you’re listening to this on the internet, the sound will reach you with something like a 384 millisecond delay, so you’ll hear what I’m saying just under four tenths of a second after any listeners on analogue radio will be hearing me. If you’re listening online you can account for this lag by playing almost four tenths of a second after my beat.”
The text I described earlier this week has 554 words and 39 of them are “can”. In total there are only 173 different words in the text, and all the others are repeats. Whenever it was possible to use a word I had already written, that’s what I did.
The high incidence of functional words is unremarkable in the text. There are 31 instances of “the”, 29 of “to”, 16 “and”s, 15 “them”s and 14 “a”s. They don’t particularly show.
Most of the other repeated words do pretty much the same job each time they come up: “tell” (10), “each” (9), “inhabitant” (9), “rhythm/s” (10), “tap” (3), etc. But I’m interested in the words like “make” (11), “part” (9), “play” (6), “pause” (6), and “you” (37), which from time to time shift their referents in significant ways.
My Resonance FM broadcast next week will be called Musica Practica, which is also a working title for the text I wrote about yesterday. Below is the full text as it stands at the moment.
The materials you need to commandeer the frequencies of short-wave radio stations are things you probably already own. You can make the transmitter part small enough to carry with you to somewhere high up above the buildings. Then you can turn the transmitter on and the people in the buildings you can see can hear you. First you can tell them there are certain materials they probably own or can find in the buildings they are inhabiting, and that while you give them a fairly small pause they can collect them.
A short text I’m working on at the moment ends like this:
Then you can start to group the amended inhabitants into a number of parts and tell each part the names and orders of certain musical notes part by part, and you can tell them how many beats they can have in each second. Part by part you can count each group briefly and very quietly back into the general song and when you have told everyone to play there can be applause.
The text is a set of less than explicit instructions that repeatedly uses the form “you can” to explain how to commandeer the frequencies of local short-wave radio stations and then how to instruct the listeners at home to communally play a piece of polyphonic music using constructions they can make from household objects.
My radio play What The Matter Is came up in conversation the other day, and it reminded me I still hadn’t put it online. So here it is, as it was originally broadcast on Resonance FM in March last year.
“My hole punch is black. It’s just normal. It’s made of black metal, and the underneath is black rubber so you peel it off when you want to get the holes out. At the moment it’s too full of holes to push the top bit down so it can’t actually work. I rarely change the holes because they get everywhere and they aren’t really meant to be all that good on their own, the point of them is to breed and start a community that’s meant to establish itself among your plants.”
I’m still very fond of this short and completely unplanned addendum I made after What The Matter Is, which begins “The ladybirds have settled..”.
Tomorrow evening I’m at the David Roberts Art Foundation with antepress, where we’ll be performing a new piece of work about ekphrasis. You can define ekphrasis in many ways, some of which we’ll try out tomorrow, but broadly you might say it’s a rhetorical device in which an unseen object is described.
I’m interested in how instructions and questions can be ekphrastic things. I’ve written before about how the richness of possibility opened by a question can be truncated and flattened by its answer, and more recently I’ve been working with an equivalent problem in the instructional form: that to fulfil an instruction is to close down its potential for activity. On this basis, I want to think about how ekphrastic gestures can contain their own object and thus maintain their bright mess of potential. Read the rest of this entry »
In The Guardian this Saturday Skye Sherwin previewed Damien Roach’s forthcoming exhibition Shiiin, Jet Stream, White Earphones, which opens at the David Roberts Art Foundation this Friday. On January 20th I’ll be performing there as part of the exhibition along with the rest of antepress. Our performance will be an experimental lecture on ekphrasis, following our readings at the Whitechapel during the Volatile Dispersal Art Writing Festival. More soon..
Tamarin Norwood gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For more information on the AHRC, please see www.ahrc.ac.uk.
