Something You Can Do On Your Own

1. Find that the plastic light pull at the end of the cord can be screwed apart, and find that there is space inside.
2. Cut a thin strip of paper, write your name along it, roll it into a tube and insert it into the light pull.
3. Be in the room a few years later when someone who knows your name finds that the light pull can be screwed apart and that there is paper inside.
4. Look at the person when he or she opens out the paper and looks at you and nods slightly but does not say anything to you.
5. Do not say anything while the person rolls up the paper and puts it back and closes the light pull.
6. Do not say anything to the person subsequently about this, and do not expect that he or she will say anything to you about it.

IN LIFE

Bus

Greens

This was a nice arrangement yesterday.

Process of manufacture

It is that the process of manufacture generates through moves of increasing precision a certain articulate outline, which contains and does not constitute the substance of its object. It is that manufacture contains the lack of its object. It is that the process of manufacturing a utensil differs from the process of using it, and that using also contains the lack of its object. That although they produce and are produced from the same object, the two processes are not symmetrical. That there are similarities nevertheless, because the material qualities of the utensil demand specific sympathies that determine its manipulation.

(world (thing (art (world (thing)))))

LEAF STUCK IN WINDOW

This is very bad.

The Problem of the Ladybirds

The reason I’m so manhandling all my recent work and trying to write out the punchlines in bullet points is that I have to come up with a “critical commentary” by early June. The critical commentary is meant to assume some kind of distinction between research and practice, and to demonstrate that one’s research is thorough, relevant and useful to one’s practice. The trouble is that the rubric talks of having a “clearly defined topic”, and of doing research “in areas that are relevant to the chosen topic”.

That means I have to rather awkwardly step backwards trying not to tread on anything and discern a “topic” that my work is about. It seems a bit of a blunt thing to do but I can see some value in it, and anyway I have to do it if I’m going to pass the first year of my MA.

Curiously, because the MA is in Art Writing, the commentary needn’t be in writing. It has to be “equivalent to 4500 words” for parity with other Goldsmiths courses, but it can be constituted by a performance, or a video, or one of the strands of thought in a story, or some of the lines of a drawing, etc.. Needless to say this means that the divide between the critical commentary and the portfolio of artwork can blur to indistinction.

Aim – Effect – Context

At last I’ve got round to starting Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature by Deleuze and Guattari. The chapter I read this morning begins:

A major or established literature follows a vector which goes from content to expression: a content once given, in a given form, one must find, discover, or see the form of expression suitable for it. What is clear in the mind is spoken. [...] But a minor or revolutionary literature begins by speaking and only sees and conceives afterward (‘I do not see the word at all, I invent it’) [The Diaries of Franz Kafka]. The expression must shatter forms, marking the breaking points and the new tributaries. Once a form is shattered, the contents, which will necessarily have broken with the order of things, must be reconstructed. Sweeping along the material, getting ahead of it. ‘Art is a mirror, which goes ‘fast’, like a watch – sometimes.’ [Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka].

It was happy to come across that paragraph this morning, because the other thing on my list for today was write about a piece of work I completed a couple of months ago, in an attempt to see what’s going on in it. The piece of work is an audio recording, and I spoke it before I saw it. What I have to do now is try to understand some ways of seeing it.