from www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
A line drawn from pencil to paper makes a dot. It’s a dot upwards through space that begins on the paper and travels to the tip of the pencil, but because paper and pencil meet so closely, the upwards projection of the dot from the paper is very slim.
On Saturday I presented a new work at the Stanley Picker gallery during the Writing Exhibitions symposium. Here’s an outline of my work, which I called Genuine Smiles:
A sheet of paper is attached to one wall of the gallery, and attached just below it is a long piece of string with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. Visitors are invited to hold a pencil and do whatever they need to do to muster a genuine smile. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m practising for the 26th.
Tomorrow evening from 7pm antepress are hosting an art writing event at the Whitechapel. Here’s a bit about us from their website.
Continuing the series of playful and participatory events exploring language and its parameters, writers collaborate with artists to produce games and scenarios that challenge the audiences’ relationship to language.
This Word Play event is hosted by imprint and project platform antepress. The audience is invited to create six unique ‘artist books’, each based on a famous work of art. The books will be published on the night and will be downloadable from the antepress website. antepress was set up in 2008 by Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols, Tamarin Norwood and Gemma Sharpe.
This evening I’m going to describe to some friends the following work, which is the same work that appears in the diagram I drew last week. We won’t be able to put the work into practice because we’ll be at someone’s home and we won’t be able to draw lines all over its walls, and so once I’ve described the work as it should be, we’re going to try to find ways of replicating its effect but within the constraints of the domestic space: no lines on the walls, no lines on the floors.
Genuine Smiles uses a faint pencil line in place of writing – an attenuated, quietened form of language drawn between signified and signifier: between the thing described and the description of it. But once the line is drawn, the thing it started from isn’t there any more.
A sheet of paper of any size is attached to one internal wall of the cube, and attached just above it is a long piece of string Read the rest of this entry »
After some eleventh hour InDesign frantickity the book I’ve been making is finished.
I found out this week that a book I’m making is going to be published by (un)limited store in December. The book will be launched in December at ArtistBook International at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and before that there’s lots of work to do. It’s a kind of instruction manual and I’m calling it DO SOMETHING. Here are some ideas about the book:
In Literature it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!*
DO SOMETHING uses the generic diagrammatic form of the instruction manual to create a specific dance of objects and actions.
The objects in the manual are imaginary, and do not exist outside of their drawings on paper. Arranged about the page as if to accommodate a text which is missing, the images are left to speak on their own. Like a translation whose original has been lost, these floating instructions are a trace without a reference, telling a story that cannot be grasped. Read the rest of this entry »
Address labels you can stick to things. I made these a few years ago but stamping ’stamped’ on things reminded me of them. They’re like inside-out frames.
This weekend there were two art book fairs in London. At the Whitechapel was the achingly official London Art Book Fair, and at Oxford House was the achingly unofficial Publish and Be Damned. I found one thing at each which I want to put together.
(un)limited store had a stand at Publish and Be Damned. They’re a French publisher that produces artist books, objects and prints. I like the way they don’t differentiate too heavily between these three categories: the objects all have ISBNs like books, for instance, and come boxed and labeled to show they’re part of or published by the (u)ls project.
David Lasnier is one of the artists whose objects they publish. I bought a rubber stamp by him which reads ’stamped’. Read the rest of this entry »
