from www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
Tomorrow from 12-6pm I’ll be at FormContent with antepress. Here’s a bit about them:
FormContent is a curatorial project space, initiated in 2007 by Francesco Pedraglio, Caterina Riva and Pieternel Vermoortel in London’s East End. Its mission is to create a space in which to experiment with ideas and exhibition formats, to foster an active collaboration between artists and curators while challenging their roles.
… and here’s a bit about what we’ll be doing there:
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.
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Things Are Exact is a short audio play between an indistinct number of matching voices battling between script and spontaneity. The voices try to catch time. They try to distinguish their sore throats from sadness, their sadness from the passing of time, and the passing of time from the impossibility of shared experience.
Things Are Exact was first broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm on July 13 as part of the antepress Art Writing series Digestives.
Some of the work I’m making has trouble sitting in the world. With the ocagraph and the cut-up books and the marked-up books there’s some tension about whether they’re real or not – are they examples? Propositions? Who’s meant to have made them? Doing some experiments with one of the cut-up books yesterday morning it became clear that I have to think of them as propositions or they don’t do the right thing.
With this in mind, I want to go over my ideas for exhibiting the body of work I’ve made over the past year. My intention up to today has been to put all the work on a desk in boxes and files – like a reading room – and to display a schema charting the relationships between the works. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m reading a book at the moment by Rancière called The Politics of Aesthetics. I’ve been having to write whole paragraphs out again somewhere else before I could start shaking the ideas clear of the words. It’s a library book, and the words I’m trying to read from the page are in stubborn allegiance to an unknown previous reader, and they won’t come unstuck from the paper.
The pages are more than annotated. They’re marked up. It looks like they’ve been prepared for assembly like the flat plan of a paper model. There are no pencil marks in the margins, only among the printed words. And the marks themselves are never words, just shapes, brackets, lines, operating like braces and pulleys. They look like they’re trying to help the sentences along, pushing the words out into palpable, physical relationships with one another.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Locks allow canal boats to navigate sloping terrains by raising or lowering the level of the water. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing a talk to be heard rather than seen reminds me of the 1968 Author’s Note that begins John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, in which the author pairs each text in the book with suggested modes of apprehension:
Menelaiad, the story composed for printed voice, descends into this kind of thing: Read the rest of this entry »
