The Donkey Brays

Apparently we can describe water as being extraordinarily sticky.

Apparently between Deleuze, Agamben, Hegel and Heidegger we can read the following things.

The donkey brays, the duck quacks, the rooster crows. What does the human do? Human beings do not have a ‘voice’ of this kind because it has been replaced by meaningful discourse. Human language is an articulation of the vanishing trace of the animal voice at its death. Human speech is founded on a thing that is removed. Speaking beings and living beings are split. Speech and voice are split. In the gap of the split another voice appears: He that speaketh in me. The voice becomes a double negative: firstly it is the ‘having been” of the original animal sound; and secondly it cannot be spoken by the originary of its taking place. It is no good that speech has this negative foundation. Speech will continue to be founded on death as long as it refers back to the voice and as long as He that speaketh in me continues to have existed.

The Appalled Protagonist

When I showed Michael my What To Do notes he said the references were too esoteric to enjoy. He said it felt like information was missing.

Information was missing, and it was missing on purpose, but I wanted the absences to read like presences. The unfinishedness of the texts was the whole point of what I was trying to say, and the actual words and stories I used to fill the texts – the ‘matter’ – were just a placeholder for the structure. I think my big mistake was to let the words and stories come out louder than the unfinishedness of them, so the gaps in information were acting upon the matter rather than the structure, and it was just coming across as frustrating.

What I think I’ve been missing is the level of the appalled protagonist I described the other day in The Third Policeman. Some kind of explication needs to be pulled down into the text itself to indicate the presence of the lack and, perhaps, to indicate an experience of that lack. 

Art is Dead etc

Anton sent me a link to this article about a couple of Russian exhibitions in London at the moment, which bring up questions of the post-WW1 ‘Art is Dead’ movement to abolish art. Here are the beginning and the final three paragraphs, but the whole article’s worth a look.

Die Kunst ist Tot, es lebe die Neue Maschinenkunst

From Russia, Royal Academy and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography, Hayward Gallery.What would a world be like without art? And why did the most talented artists of the period immediately after the First World War end up advocating the abolition of art altogether?

Showing Work

I want to show work. I should perhaps see making work as a process of ’showing’ what there is in my head, which makes the journey from making the work to exhibiting it less fraught. Because it can be fraught, when the prospect of an audience interferes with the work while I’m making it, or dictates what I put with what and when.. and as someone who’s used to writing a private diary, the idea of making work to show can throw the whole enterprise into question. It makes me worry even more than normal about how other people fit into the equation; how their interpretation count and, worse, what they’ll think of me. Words like ‘pretentious’ or ‘elitist’ keep plaguing my unhelpfully.