Beaks

This afternoon I drew the tip of my pencil with itself and the nib of my biro with itself. I drew them in my line drawing book, which makes them the first traditionally representational drawings on its pages. They continue my exploration of the line as a representational tool that joins word to thing, and here the pencil and biro use the paper as a pivot for representation.

days x mice

Belles journées, souris du temps,
Vous rongez peu à peu ma vie.
Dieu! Je vais avoir vingt-huit ans,
Et mal vécus, à mon envie.

from Le Bestiaire, Guillaume Apollinaire 1911

Singing

This is a departure.

My Ladybirds

I recorded this short commentary as an addendum to What The Matter Is, a 60 minute audio play I created for Resonance 104.4fm.

Bus

Cooking in a Bedsitter

I bought a second-hand book on Saturday called Cooking in a Bedsitter. (The plan was to mark it up like Language in the Modern World but it isn’t quite suited after all.) I don’t live in a bedsitter now, but I used to, and I used to relish the solitariness and the makeshiftness of everything. It was one room, and in the corner of it was a sink with one working tap (the hot tap, which only ran cold) and a very bad immersion heater above it which ran either cold or steamingly, hand-scaldingly hot. Next to the sink on a knee-high table was an unhappy baby belling, and next to that on the floor an indifferent fridge.

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.

Making Ends Meet

1) Whistling;

2) Practising smiles;

3) Closing and opening eyes.

Frames in fiction/life/writing/art

In The Dictation of Poetry (1996) Giorgio Agamben gives a historical summary of the relationship between speech and life in the context of poetry, fiction and autobiography.

He works forward from the Gospel of John (“life is what is made in speech and what remains indistinguishable from it and close to it“), through Provençal poetry (with the razo text as “an experience of the event of language as love“) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (in which “life now stands on one side, and poetry, on the other side, is only literature, mourning the irremediable death of Laura”),  to twentieth century Italian poet Antonio Delfini, who “evokes and, at the same time, wards off with terrible scorn [...] a vision of life forever departing from speech [...] and presuming to state officially that it lives“.

I want to look at the relationship between speech and life in terms of art and writing, and how one may frame, dictate, or critique the other. To add to Agamben’s account:

Theme Tune

We are planning to make a theme tune for ourselves. We are going to write a song and video aspects of our daily lives and edit them together into something snappy and indicative, then we will play it on a screen each morning as we wake up (it could work as an alarm clock) and last thing at night.

The beginning and end theme tunes will need to be subtly different, for instance the beginning tune will need to conclude with a fading chord so that it leads encouragingly into the opening scene. Since each opening scene will be generally similar – turning off the alarm clock, getting out of bed etc – those first moments might in time be assumed by the closing chord of the theme tune and fade into repetition, so our actions in real life gradually become part of the videotaped theme tune. Once that happens, perhaps eating breakfast will be sucked in to the theme tune too, and so on and so on. We wonder how far outwards it will stretch, and likewise for bedtime before the end theme tune begins.