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.

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’.

Things Are Exact

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.

IN LIFE

TONIGHT: Voicing the Silence

Denisa Nenova has invited Cliff Wright and me to join her for an artists’ discussion at Borders Bookshop on Charing Cross Road this evening.

Denisa is performing her new work Voicing the Silence, I’m presenting my text work Palomar Translations, and Cliff will demonstrate the way he teaches people to draw by seeing rather than thinking. In showing these three practices together we want to begin a discussion about pulling language away and keeping the stuff that’s left over.

Commentary: the brink of disintegration

This is my good old friend Tag um Tag ist guter Tag as it approaches my work. Tag um Tag is the painting project by Peter Dreher I’ve written about here and here.

The work is ongoing, and currently comprises over four thousand near-identical paintings of the same glass of water against the same simple backdrop. The glass is framed identically on each canvas, and variation between paintings is restricted to subtle differences in light and colour that reflect the changing conditions of the studio.

Because it is an ongoing project, the work is continually both complete (all there is so far) and incomplete (there is more to come). This duality means that the point of creation remains present in the paintings as a continuous threat to the integrity of the work. The threat is double: that more paintings will be created, disrupting the present unity of the work; and that no more paintings will be created, disrupting the present continuity of the work. Thus the work is continually on the brink of disintegration, and only as long as it does not disintegrate can it continue reassert its presence. It is a work in the present continuous: it is working.

Commentary: richness of possibility

This is Blanchot’s The Most Profound Question as it approaches my work. It’s probably going to precede the Kafka text I posted yesterday in a list of texts accompanying the critical commentary I’m writing about the work I’ve done this year.

The question form “is speech that is accomplished by having declared itself as incomplete” (p.12). The particular incompleteness of the interrogative offers a “richness of possibility” by which we “give ourselves the thing and we give ourselves the void that permits us not to have it yet”. (p. 12) The void contained in the question form is indeed a lack -

“but this lack is of a strange kind. It is not the severity of negation: it does not do away with, it does not refuse. [...] The word ‘is’ is not withdrawn; it is only lightened, rendered more transparent, committed to a new dimension”. (p. 13)

Paper Locks

I’ve got a paper cut-out book about locks, and this afternoon I cut out all of the parts. Together all the parts would make three separate mechanisms: a warded lock, a cylinder lock and a combination lock. The idea of the book is to demonstrate some of principles of these devices, which are easier to understand in three-dimensional working models than in diagrams or plans.

I don’t want to make the models though, I want to leave the book with its pieces out.

Putting Everything on the Wall Together

Ode on a Grecian Urn

The figures on the urn stay still. The lovers will never kiss but will always love. The stillness redeems the tragedy of itself.  Are unheard melodies like fictional retractable pencils that aren’t?

Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats (1795-1821)

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;