Come to Some Arrangement

THE PEAR HOLDER IS BACK

Some other holders are here.

Forks

I sometimes try to write using things that aren’t words, especially utensils. I think it’s because like words, utensils already have a purpose – they always already point at some function beyond their physical edges.

This questionably photoshopped arrangement of forks and rortary motors is what I want to try next.

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.

THE FORKS ARE BACK

The Things Painted Red

The things are back where they came from now, only red. There’s a nasty hierarchy now among my things. The painted things indicate the nakedness of all the other things. Are the red things fake, or are they the only things that are real, because they acknowledge themselves? They look smug about it.

Bus

Meeting

Greens

This was a nice arrangement yesterday.

Inhibited Things

I showed Elizabeth what I’ve been working on lately, beginning with the Vampyr text and moving on to Accretions and some of the notes I’ve written to go with them. I also showed her these photos of things I’ve made over the past year, and we talked mainly about the relationship between the objects, the notes and the accretions.

I told her I don’t like making the objects because it feels fraudulent. I told her the clay one was worst of all because at least the other ones are made from real things, that real people can really use too. Even glue is suspect, I said, because it’s hidden, and so I prefer to use string. These measures make me feel less guilty to make things, and less like it’s all a con. (I’ve often thought about this, and I still haven’t worked out quite what kind of conning might be going on – and among whom or what – when I make these things. Last year I made bunches of wool and clipped them onto the ends of the blinds in the kitchen to stop them hitting against the window frames noisily in the breeze, and I didn’t feel guilty about that.)