Beaks

This afternoon I drew the tip of my pencil with itself and the nib of my biro with itself. I drew them in my line drawing book, which makes them the first traditionally representational drawings on its pages. They continue my exploration of the line as a representational tool that joins word to thing, and here the pencil and biro use the paper as a pivot for representation.

Line Drawn from Pencil to Paper

A line drawn from pencil to paper makes a dot. It’s a dot upwards through space that begins on the paper and travels to the tip of the pencil, but because paper and pencil meet so closely, the upwards projection of the dot from the paper is very slim.

Smiles on Paper

On Saturday I presented a new work at the Stanley Picker gallery during the Writing Exhibitions symposium. Here’s an outline of my work, which I called Genuine Smiles:

A sheet of paper is attached to one wall of the gallery, and attached just below it is a long piece of string with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. Visitors are invited to hold a pencil and do whatever they need to do to muster a genuine smile.

Tamarin is talking very FAST

Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg documented today’s 10 Performances event with a live feed they updated throughout the day. By the time my performance What To Do begins they’re halfway down their third page. I love their occasional attempts to type out variations on everything I was saying. You can read what they’ve written here.

The text of What To Do is available to download as a pdf from the 10 Performances website, but I’m not sure I recommend you read it: the effect of reading the text on a page or a screen is very different from the effect of the performance itself.

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.

THE PEAR HOLDER IS BACK

Some other holders are here.

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.)

Bricks

Yesterday we made some straight lines.

Line Drawing

knee cushion jumper postcard

Painting things red

Recently I painted some things red.

It began because I wanted there to be more colour around, and so I said I want to paint things. I’d meant I wanted to paint pictures of things, so I could put them on the walls and brighten the room up a bit, but then I noticed the very good ambiguity of the words. You can paint an apple and end up with a picture of an apple, or you can paint an apple and end up with an apple covered in paint.

Either way what you end up with is out of real-world circulation. An apple in a picture is separate from the world because it’s a representation of an apple; an apple painted red is separated from the world because it doesn’t work as a real-world apple any more.