Word Play at the Whitechapel Gallery

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.

Genuine Smiling

I’ll say the people holding it

Things Doing Things

You can keep doing things until things happen to them. Here are three people who know how to do this.

Discussion

Cardigans Rolled Up

Floor Circle

It was my first day in the Vyner St space today. There is this too.

Conversation Piece

Chris and Gabor have offered me two evenings in the forthcoming A Stain Upon the Silence show with which to do anything I like. Brave. The exhibition is curated around “Samuel Beckett’s nihilism”, which Chris describes as a crisis between the existential position that “human meaning is layers upon the inevitable void with the purpose of avoidance”, and the postmodern position that “meanings are little more than chains of empty signifiers relating more to each other, or to habit, than to the real world”.

I don’t know how far I share these interests but I find sufficient correspondence between what he’s written and what I’ve been working on to feel I can just produce something – anything – that I’m convinced by and interested in, and the parallels will be there. This is good, and unusual.

So. I’m taking it as an opportunity to work on the lecture series I was planning last year. My interest with them was, I suppose, related to this idea that “it is not that nothing can be done but that something must be done and that we cannot be sure what to do”. It’s the idea of purposeful inaction – as I wrote in that curious manifesto text a while ago: “I am for losing my way and marching onwards purposefully towards a thing which I wish would work”. I want a sense of purpose in the talks, but purpose and direction towards something uncertain, that remains open and inconclusive.