Genuine Smiling

The Real Experiment

Allan Kaprow again. One characteristic of the lifelike art that was emerging in the sixties:

“Various performative modes became the effective way to deal with this shift to the actual environment. Performing was doing something, not acting in theater – moving furniture, for example, just to do it, or because you were changing apartments.”

The Real Experiment (1983)

Inside the White Studio

The picture below shows the framework of a discussion we held last night at the Vyner St space. We talked about LIKE WHEN YOU in connection with Claire and Altair’s Empty Studio Interviews project, as a way to think more about correspondences between studio and gallery spaces.

A number of practising artists came along and talked about how they use their studios, and many of them didn’t feel the space of the studio presented any specific problems.

Real-World Cause and Effect

Here’s my globe reference guide as it approaches my work. Two earlier posts about the Guide are here and here.

The globe reference guide gives instructions for determining the date of a globe

“by comparing it to the listing of cartographic changes below. [...] As an example: If your globe shows the Philippines as independent (1946); but India is a British colony and not yet independent (1947); then the approximate edition date for your globe is 1946 or 1947. The general area of change is shown in brackets [ ].”

Making Things About Things

I write a diary every day, usually in biro, always in some kind of a hardcover A5 book. I’ve been writing them since 1995 with about ten books each year, so now I’ve got shelves of them. They take up quite a lot of space, and as physical things they’re very important to me. If there were a fire in the house I’d throw them out the window first and jump after them. I stick things in, I monitor my handwriting for mood, I put new covers on them, I shelve them, I browse their spines, I leaf through them.

Rather than writing about what’s happened every day, the important thing is that there’s something there to mark my participation in each day, or my presence during it. The days in the books have to bear witness to the living days. When I was working with Nick the other day trying to treat things like words and vice versa, I started to wonder how I could produce a diary by making daily things instead of writing them.

under standing between

My father phoned from the car while I was on the bus to tell me about an old friend he’d met today. His friend has begun to paint religious icons, using traditional methods in every measure. To paint an icon is something like prayer, she said; the bringing together of the marks, the gathering of the image in anticipation of the prayers to be said before it, asks for a certain preparation of mind. The iconographers are only people, and the people praying are only people too, but there is an understanding between them.

How To Make A Button

Vampyr

Half a page of text following the imagination of a film. A shadow moving across the wall without an antecedent body. Elizabeth Price’s Vampyr watched in its absence during the original 1932 version of the film. The difficulty of sustaining the conceit throughout because of enduring interference of the present image. The impossible absence of the stony-faced man, the wax, the thickness of a corpse, the doctor’s bag; the impossible presence of  theatre seats in their stead. The attempt to serially unsee the picture as it persistently unfolds. The fragility, between breaths, of hallucinating its inverse and superimposing the negative over the positive to flood the celluloid with black.

Frames vs. Links

Over the past few weeks I have tried to think more carefully about how my interests relate, with a view to gathering them into a research project I can approach more systematically specifically within an academic context. To this end my method so far has been practice-based. This is a messy distinction to make, but I’m using the term to indicate that my secondary research decisions (what I choose to read, etc.) develop from my artwork: my primary research. I might messily try to say that my primary research develops decisions from itself, which is to say that it is – I think – researching itself: digging into itself to try to get at what it’s trying to say.

Practically speaking this means periodically returning to and reviewing my artwork and trying to draw themes together as an external critic might. Having revisited recent artwork and writing I have broadly located an ongoing interest in ‘framing’: hierarchical relationships between elements of a work or situation, and the potential each has for variously claiming authority for or over the other elements.

The Donkey Brays

Apparently we can describe water as being extraordinarily sticky.

Apparently between Deleuze, Agamben, Hegel and Heidegger we can read the following things.

The donkey brays, the duck quacks, the rooster crows. What does the human do? Human beings do not have a ‘voice’ of this kind because it has been replaced by meaningful discourse. Human language is an articulation of the vanishing trace of the animal voice at its death. Human speech is founded on a thing that is removed. Speaking beings and living beings are split. Speech and voice are split. In the gap of the split another voice appears: He that speaketh in me. The voice becomes a double negative: firstly it is the ‘having been” of the original animal sound; and secondly it cannot be spoken by the originary of its taking place. It is no good that speech has this negative foundation. Speech will continue to be founded on death as long as it refers back to the voice and as long as He that speaketh in me continues to have existed.