Listen to MAKING IT SOUND LIKE I AM MAKING ART FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES

If you missed me making it sound like I was making art for fifteen minutes on Resonance FM the other week, you can hear it again below. It was originally broadcast on November 16th as part of the antepress art writing programme Digestives.

My next Digestives programme isn’t until early February. In the meantime here’s a sneak preview of what I’m looking at in preparation:

Domes Without Looking

I’m practising for the 26th.

Sneak Preview of DO SOMETHING

I hear my artist book DO SOMETHING is back from the printers. The good people at (un)limited store have put a couple pictures on their website, along with glimpses of the other five books in the series. The book launch is at ARTISTBOOKINTERNATIONAL at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from 4-6 December.

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

I’ll say the people holding it

Diagrams

I come back to these diagrams very often.

Line Drawing

knee cushion jumper postcard

Cardigans Rolled Up

Real-World Cause and Effect

Here’s my globe reference guide as it approaches my work. Two earlier posts about the Guide are here and here.

The globe reference guide gives instructions for determining the date of a globe

“by comparing it to the listing of cartographic changes below. [...] As an example: If your globe shows the Philippines as independent (1946); but India is a British colony and not yet independent (1947); then the approximate edition date for your globe is 1946 or 1947. The general area of change is shown in brackets [ ].”

LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATION

Today I am marking up a 1961 Pelican paperback of a book called Language in the Modern World, which was reprinted for about a decade before it presumably went out of date.

It’s very slow marking it up, I’ve been working on it since about half past ten and I’ve only done nine and a bit pages so far. I have to read slowly and mark with pencil almost every single word with its relative importance in the sentence and any significant relations it has with other nearby words. There are only a limited number of marks I can really make if I want to keep track of them without drawing attention away from the words. I make small or word-sized circles, single underscores, double underscores, zigzag underscores, horizontal crossing out, square brackets, round brackets, rectangles around words, double underscores at an angle, curved and straight lines, and arrows.