The Real Experiment

Allan Kaprow again. One characteristic of the lifelike art that was emerging in the sixties:

“Various performative modes became the effective way to deal with this shift to the actual environment. Performing was doing something, not acting in theater – moving furniture, for example, just to do it, or because you were changing apartments.”

The Real Experiment (1983)

I’ll say the people holding it

DO SOMETHING

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.

THIS

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.

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.

Le Cosmicomiche

I like the putting together of music, pictures, movement, speaking and crossing out in this presentation from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomiche. If you don’t speak Italian you could wait for the video to load completely then scroll through the whole thing at high speed.

Holidays Vocabulary on Resonance fm

Tomorrow afternoon’s Digestives broadcast on Resonance FM is Holidays Vocabulary, a new work of mine based on the sound files I unearthed on an old dictaphone of mine last month. It’s an experiment in translation.

Holidays Vocabulary airs tomorrow at 4:30pm and is repeated this Friday at 7:30pm, and you can listen 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.

Imagining Forks at Locus Solus

[I've been reading Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus lately, and the other day I started wondering how my forks would appear if they turned up in Professor Canterel's garden. Below is a treatment of my forks in light-hearted homage to the novel, to see how they might look from a distance. This text is one of several I've been experimenting with over the summer as a way of replacing objects with descriptions. The work is developing towards my contribution to Locus Solus by Out of the Box Intermedia. For more about the project, click here.]

This irregular clicking gained clarity as we approached a wide doorway cut into the right-hand wall of the inner corridor. At the professor’s instruction we passed through the doorway and formed a small congregation immediately inside a darkened rectangular room the diminutive proportions of which, on account of the low ceiling and flickering candlelight, lent a domestic air to the tableau set before us.

A slim wooden table occupied the central section of the room before a wooden chair of similar design. The chair accommodated a young woman absorbed in the unsystematic maintenance of several intersecting clockwork machines spread about the tabletop in front of her.

What To Do

Here’s a short extract of What To Do, a 35 minute ‘blank talk’ that flattens its own text as it goes along.

Just for fun, below are some rough copies of the diagrams, some of which eventually appear in the talk itself.