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’.

Biro Line

In June I wrote a short audio play called Things Are Exact, which you can listen to here. I wrote it forwards rather than backwards: intuitively, to find something out by writing it rather than writing it to show something I’d already found out. It means listening to it remains a useful way for me to find things out.

The play draws to a conclusion around the idea of catching and joining together moments of time. Here’s part of the dialogue:

- Why do you always cry?

- I think we have to calibrate things. I think things have to be clear enough to mark differences between them. [...] I cry to mark things out.

- Do you cry because things are exact or so that things are exact?

- So that.

- Then it doesn’t have to be crying. It could be something else that joins things together. String.

LEAF STUCK IN WINDOW, reflection.

One of the leaves remains attached to the plant but is trapped under the closed sash window adjacent to the plant’s pot. To accommodate their constriction the leaf and stalk are drawn at an unnatural angle towards the base of the window frame. It has been in this state for three days and the portion of leaf caught outside is now dead. The portion on the inside of the window is presently alive because it maintains a slim connection to the roots of the plant, but is yellowing and will die shortly because of fractures to the three major arteries leading to its stalk, which has already begun to weaken. The portion of leaf entirely hidden within the wooden frame will soon disintegrate and become indistinct from the untreated wood of the window frame. The houseplant’s remaining leaves flourish in the domestic air.

(This follows my discovery of April 23, below)

With its eyelids propped open

This is part of the accretions text I’m working on. Today I’m trying to equate it to the relationship between question and answer, and the relationship between the manufacturing process of a utensil and the process of using it once it’s complete.

That the completeness of sleep would dislodge the sleeper from the sad substance of its body, leaving the body lucidly present in the waking world to be posed without consent to brutal ends. It is that with minute delicacy the body of the sleeping animal might be posed to appear awake. That even its sleeping eyelids might be propped open on invisibly thin supports to stare blindly at the world, in complete oblivion appearing to reciprocate.  That while no sound is made without and no jolt within, it might continue to people its sleeping world with dreams that tumble and sprawl, and with its silent eyeballs superimpose their moves among the watchers. It is that the watchers might follow the patterns of breath and blood beneath its fur to trust its dislocated imagination and commune approximately with its dreams on the forest floor.

The Accumulation of Objects

I’m trying to find out more about what things do. This morning I read an article called The Tyranny of Things by Bill Brown (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2002) pp. 442-469).

“What Twain helps us to recognize is how the accumulation of objects (and not the desire for the object) might be considered the (futile) effort to materialize that abstraction-to fill up that abstraction, as it were, with particular contents. ‘The House Beautiful’ chapter of Life on the Mississippi registers that effort with a five-page catalogue of objects: ‘ingrain carpet; mahogany centre-table; lamp on it, with green-paper shade. [...] Other bric-a-brac [...] quartz, with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint.’ Despite the hyperspecificity of the catalogue, these are simply the generic contents of the generic “residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis.’ However passionate the particularity, it has no particularizing point.” (p. 465)

Is the sky blue? – Yes.

It might be helpful to frame my ideas about things going off the ends of themselves through Blanchot’s treatment of the interrogative form in his essay The Most Profound Question, in The Infinite Conversation (1969).

The nature of a question is to be incomplete: it demands something else, namely an answer. Blanchot argues that while the question is incomplete as speech, it is not incomplete as a question: “on the contrary, it is speech that is accomplished by having declared itself incomplete” (p. 12). He continues:

“Through the question we give ourselves the thing and we give ourselves the void that permits us not to have it yet, or to have it as desire. The question is the desire of thought.” (p. 12)

Vampyr

Half a page of text following the imagination of a film. A shadow moving across the wall without an antecedent body. Elizabeth Price’s Vampyr watched in its absence during the original 1932 version of the film. The difficulty of sustaining the conceit throughout because of enduring interference of the present image. The impossible absence of the stony-faced man, the wax, the thickness of a corpse, the doctor’s bag; the impossible presence of  theatre seats in their stead. The attempt to serially unsee the picture as it persistently unfolds. The fragility, between breaths, of hallucinating its inverse and superimposing the negative over the positive to flood the celluloid with black.

Uncanny Valley

Look at this:

This thing is living at the end of itself!

Look I have found a leaf which has come detached from my plant:

It seems to have sprouted roots of its own so it can start again as a new plant, but having found no soil to root into, I think it’s growing a new plant at the end of itself, using itself as soil. I’m not sure if this can be true.

Conversation Piece: VIDEO

Conversation Piece is a ‘blank’ or ‘crossed out’ talk, collaboratively written to negotiate possibilities for live speech to exist under erasure. Passages of simultaneous speech interrupt the communicative potential of the individual texts while opening new interpretive possibilities between theory and practice; research and everyday life.

This is a 7:30 minute edit of the half-hour talk, performed on July 30th as part of the Stain Upon the Silence exhibition. Apologies for the poor resolution of the video – the audio remains unscathed.

Conversation Piece was written and performed by Tamarin Norwood and Alexandra Hyde.