Genuine Smiling

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)

I’ll say the people holding it

Diagrams

I come back to these diagrams very often.

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.

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.

Le Cosmicomiche

I like the putting together of music, pictures, movement, speaking and crossing out in this presentation from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomiche. If you don’t speak Italian you could wait for the video to load completely then scroll through the whole thing at high speed.

Imagining Forks at Locus Solus

[I've been reading Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus lately, and the other day I started wondering how my forks would appear if they turned up in Professor Canterel's garden. Below is a treatment of my forks in light-hearted homage to the novel, to see how they might look from a distance. This text is one of several I've been experimenting with over the summer as a way of replacing objects with descriptions. The work is developing towards my contribution to Locus Solus by Out of the Box Intermedia. For more about the project, click here.]

This irregular clicking gained clarity as we approached a wide doorway cut into the right-hand wall of the inner corridor. At the professor’s instruction we passed through the doorway and formed a small congregation immediately inside a darkened rectangular room the diminutive proportions of which, on account of the low ceiling and flickering candlelight, lent a domestic air to the tableau set before us.

A slim wooden table occupied the central section of the room before a wooden chair of similar design. The chair accommodated a young woman absorbed in the unsystematic maintenance of several intersecting clockwork machines spread about the tabletop in front of her.

What To Do

Here’s a short extract of What To Do, a 35 minute ‘blank talk’ that flattens its own text as it goes along.

Just for fun, below are some rough copies of the diagrams, some of which eventually appear in the talk itself.