Like a Simile

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’.

TONIGHT: Voicing the Silence

Denisa Nenova has invited Cliff Wright and me to join her for an artists’ discussion at Borders Bookshop on Charing Cross Road this evening.

Denisa is performing her new work Voicing the Silence, I’m presenting my text work Palomar Translations, and Cliff will demonstrate the way he teaches people to draw by seeing rather than thinking. In showing these three practices together we want to begin a discussion about pulling language away and keeping the stuff that’s left over.

LIKE WHEN YOU

This is what I’m doing at the moment:

I’ve got hold of an art space on Vyner St for the fortnight and I’m using it to generate ideas and work around the process of art-making. The process is often a solitary and rather fraught one, which tends to be supplanted by its object as soon as it’s over. Since the artwork is the thing left over from all the making, it often becomes the result or accumulation or culmination of the working process. Like many artists I’m interested in the bit that comes before the culmination, while everything’s still a mess and has yet to yield anything coherent. How does the process remain (in the mind? in the air? in the wood shavings?) after it has conceived an artwork? Which bit is the artwork? When does the art work?

Inhibited Things

I showed Elizabeth what I’ve been working on lately, beginning with the Vampyr text and moving on to Accretions and some of the notes I’ve written to go with them. I also showed her these photos of things I’ve made over the past year, and we talked mainly about the relationship between the objects, the notes and the accretions.

I told her I don’t like making the objects because it feels fraudulent. I told her the clay one was worst of all because at least the other ones are made from real things, that real people can really use too. Even glue is suspect, I said, because it’s hidden, and so I prefer to use string. These measures make me feel less guilty to make things, and less like it’s all a con. (I’ve often thought about this, and I still haven’t worked out quite what kind of conning might be going on – and among whom or what – when I make these things. Last year I made bunches of wool and clipped them onto the ends of the blinds in the kitchen to stop them hitting against the window frames noisily in the breeze, and I didn’t feel guilty about that.)

Jem Finer Lighthouse/Piano/Harp

When I was at art school I spent a week at Trinity Buoy Wharf making some really bad site specific art which was then exhibited along with everyone else’s site specific art. (I also took lots of video, sitting in a boat I wasn’t sure I was allowed to be in, watching a piece of cord swaying obliquely, I must find that and see what it’s like.)

In the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf there are some outdated computers playing a piece of music which is 1000 years long, and on the 31st December 2999 it will start playing again at the beginning.

Yesterday Anton showed me a video of a piano performance by Jem Finer, and afterwards I realised he was the same man who’d made Longplayer.

How To Make Sure This Doesn’t Happen Again

It has been very nasty writing a review of an exhibition I went to recently.

The show was good, and there was lots I wanted to say about it – but after day after day after day of writing, and cutting, and pasting, and deleting, and printing out and correcting, and starting again on a fresh page, and googling artists, and writing lists with arrows, and reading other reviews – it was just getting more and more formless and unwieldy. I’ve been watching this floundering of mine with interest, and wondering how I can make it not happen again. I think these things would help next time:

Thinking about What To Do

The premise of the What To Do talk is something I’ve been trying out in a number of different guises for a couple of years: the possibility of creating analogies between disparate subjects or narratives, so as to draw attention to the surface fact of telling the stories themselves rather than focusing on the matter inside the texts.

I think it’s an ongoing concern of mine that somehow the matter of what you’re saying comes secondary to the fact of its being said, and to some extent we addressed this in the Conversation Piece talk with its questions about blank texts and crossing things out. But despite the overlaying of words in Conversation Piece, the relationship between the matter of the talk and the fact of the talk remained traditional I think: you watch us and we communicate things to you, and what you get when you watch us are the things we’ve written out to explain and perform to you.

Until the shot went on and on and on

Anton sent me a link to a post on Infinite Thought. Of interest, he thought, given our talks.

“I perched in discomfort on the end of my bed and announced ‘I think if there’s a woman with nothing on appearing on the screen no one’s going to listen to the words’, suggesting perhaps he could film our ‘This Exploits Women’ stickers on the tube. Godard gave me a baleful look, his lip curled. ‘Don’t you think I am able to make a c*** boring?’, he exclaimed. We were locked in a conflict over a fleeting ethnographic moment.

The Elastic Dome Plan

Yesterday some of the ideas from my 2006 lecture series came together in a way that makes sense for the What To Do talk I’m going to give on my own. Now, all of a sudden, this talk seems to make more sense than the Conversation Piece talk, even though that’s where all our hard work and thought has been so far.

So I want to work out what interests me about What To Do, and see how that relates to the work we’re doing together.

At the moment I’m expecting What To Do to be a series of six short ten-minute researched talks about six topics. The talks will be related not by the themes of each topic but rather the structure of the talks themselves.

Or will this help?

I sat down to do just what I’d said in my last post, writing and drawing out all my past projects on little intentionally nerdy revision cards, and it seemed completely pointless and, worst, BORING. I’m a great believer in the power of brains to tell you what’s right, and when a brain is bored, it should be doing something more exciting, especially when I’m trying to use my brain to specifically creative ends.

I need to be focusing on the new things not the old things. There are a few things I have never documented together, things I say or do or think or make, which perhaps would be a new thing if I put them together. I’ll try that.

I’m calling these two posts ‘will this help?’ to refer to the way I try to collect things. A sentence or an idea might appear and I think, I’ll keep that, it might help. I have the feeling, and I’m sure it’s quite a standard feeling, that all the ideas I have add (more or less effectively or interestingly) to a single ongoing concern. And because I want to get closer to that concern and understand what it is, I want to collect up all the ideas I ever have and collate them and identify themes, drifts, patterns. When I’ve got all the patterns I’ll be able to see what my project is. I think that’s the rationale behind Major Retrospective Exhibitions too.

Joking aside though, that is what I hope for my artwork, I don’t expect any single piece to do all the work but rather for all the pieces together to make up some final, completed (by my death) suggestion. So in some respects all the pieces do all the work.

So the project of my artwork is to show. To show the things inside my mind, which is just another human mind, but human minds are great things, and if I can focus mine and receive it, it would be useful to show that.