MAKING IT SOUND LIKE I AM MAKING ART FOR 15 MINUTES

Resonance fm is broadcasting a new audio work of mine this afternoon as part of Digestives, the ongoing art writing radio series from antepress. It’s going to be be aired on today at 4:30pm and repeated Friday 20 November at 7:30pm.

You can listen live by clicking the ‘Listen Now’ mp3 stream at www.resonancefm.com, or tune in to 104.4fm inside London. Afterwards it will be available to download as a podcast at www.antepress.co.uk/digestives.php.

Come to Some Arrangement

STUDIO AND CUBE

This is our new home. In a complete change of everything, this home consists of a white studio. It means rather than making artwork in a domestic space as I have been for the past few years, I’ll be doing domestic things in an art-making space.

Nontheatrical Performance

Allan Kaprow wrote

“[...] here is the ball park I perceive: an artist can

1. work within recognizable art modes and present the work in recognizable art contexts (e.g., paintings in galleries; poetry in poetry books; music in concert halls, etc.)
2. work in unrecognizable, i.e., nonart, modes but present the work in regognizable art contexts (e.g., pizza parlour in a gallery; a telephone book sold as poetry, etc.)
3. work in recognizable art modes but present the work in nonart contexts (.eg., a “Rembrandt as an ironing board”; a fugue in an air-conditioning duct; a sonnet as a want ad, etc.)

Some Things You And I Will Do

One day I will find you standing by the door of the bathroom. You will have cupped your hands together as though you were trying to catch drips from the ceiling, but nothing will be falling. And then I’ll notice that swaying in the air inside the cup of your hands you’ll be watching the plastic pull of the light cord. And as it moves back and forth through the air you’ll be moving your hands in time, so that they always contain it.

One day you’ll have gone out to work and I will still be at home. I will find all the glasses in the house, and I will get the empty jars and bottles we’ll be collecting under the sink, and I will balance them all into a wall against the kitchen window.

Something You Can Do On Your Own

1. Find that the plastic light pull at the end of the cord can be screwed apart, and find that there is space inside.
2. Cut a thin strip of paper, write your name along it, roll it into a tube and insert it into the light pull.
3. Be in the room a few years later when someone who knows your name finds that the light pull can be screwed apart and that there is paper inside.
4. Look at the person when he or she opens out the paper and looks at you and nods slightly but does not say anything to you.
5. Do not say anything while the person rolls up the paper and puts it back and closes the light pull.
6. Do not say anything to the person subsequently about this, and do not expect that he or she will say anything to you about it.

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?

Maths

I was doing some maths with a small girl this evening who always has erasers in the shapes of animals and things. She got out a dolphin one to rub out the top of a fraction.

“Do erasers get names?” I asked.

“No this one hasn’t got a name, it’s just a dolphin one. I gave a dolphin one to my friend though, and now she uses it for her exam mascot and she’s given it a name. But she doesn’t use it to rub out.”

So you can see that if you use an eraser it can’t have a name, and if it’s got a name you can’t use it.

Cress

Johannes Hjorth (2005)

NoMoreNails

This is a story for my friend Nicholas Brown, which I swiftly wrote because the projector at the South London Gallery was having trouble accommodating a very fragile 16mm film made by Rivane Neuenschwander by piercing a hole in each frame of celluloid. It’s a bit of a silly story and not really finished, but it is this morning’s work.

–

Discovering in the absence of the artist and shortly before the opening of the exhibition that the piercing of the holes into the celluloid had weakened the celluloid meant swiftly devising an alternative means for projecting a series of rapidly replacing white discs on the wall in front of the projector rather than allowing the heat of the bulb to cause discs on the wall in white light.

It was swiftly that Nerry devised an alternative means for causing a series of rapidly replacing white discs on the wall on behalf of the artist.