Describing Genuine Smiles

This evening I’m going to describe to some friends the following work, which is the same work that appears in the diagram I drew last week. We won’t be able to put the work into practice because we’ll be at someone’s home and we won’t be able to draw lines all over its walls, and so once I’ve described the work as it should be, we’re going to try to find ways of replicating its effect but within the constraints of the domestic space: no lines on the walls, no lines on the floors.

Genuine Smiles uses a faint pencil line in place of writing – an attenuated, quietened form of language drawn between signified and signifier: between the thing described and the description of it. But once the line is drawn, the thing it started from isn’t there any more.

A sheet of paper of any size is attached to one internal wall of the cube, and attached just above it is a long piece of string

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)

THE PEAR HOLDER IS BACK

Some other holders are here.

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.

Camper Bike

I would like to have something like this.

It makes me think of my raft, so I will take us, my friend.

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.

Getting balloons into a suitcase

The thing I did on Thursday:

Balloons

Getting balloons into a suitcase.

Skyline

I made this today. It’s been a day off. There was a street party going on outside, with egg and spoon races and a quiz.

Commentary: blissful falling asleep

This is Kafka’s The Burrow as it approaches my work. This month I’m working on a set of a dozen texts like this one, each of which presents a text or idea as a tool which operates, or is operated by, the central argument of my commentary (which I can’t post here yet, it isn’t finished). I’m thinking of calling my central commentary the verb and all these texts objects.

(Page numbers are from Kafka’s Selected Stories (Norton Critical Editions, trans & ed. Stanley Corngold 2007.)

The animal periodically exits its burrow only to find it feels more protected from the outside, watching potential predators fail to notice its entrance and imagining the safety of its private underground world, and “the lovely hours [spent] half peacefully sleeping, half happily wakeful [...] in passages that are designed precisely for me, for comfortable stretching, childish tumbling, dreamy sprawling, blissful falling asleep” (p. 175)

Such hunger for surveillance reflects the reality of a life underground blighted by such fear of mortal threat that the animal “hardly knows an hour of complete peace”, even in sleep dreaming of a “lascivious snout sniff[ing] incessantly around” (p. 162). Yet during its excursions the animal appears oblivious to any danger as it lingers unguarded on the forest floor. On watch outside the burrow, the animal seems unreal, like an impalpable projection of itself cast by its burrow-dwelling self out into the world to survey its own safety: