from www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
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.
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This is my good old friend Tag um Tag ist guter Tag as it approaches my work. Tag um Tag is the painting project by Peter Dreher I’ve written about here and here.
The work is ongoing, and currently comprises over four thousand near-identical paintings of the same glass of water against the same simple backdrop. The glass is framed identically on each canvas, and variation between paintings is restricted to subtle differences in light and colour that reflect the changing conditions of the studio.
Because it is an ongoing project, the work is continually both complete (all there is so far) and incomplete (there is more to come). This duality means that the point of creation remains present in the paintings as a continuous threat to the integrity of the work. The threat is double: that more paintings will be created, disrupting the present unity of the work; and that no more paintings will be created, disrupting the present continuity of the work. Thus the work is continually on the brink of disintegration, and only as long as it does not disintegrate can it continue reassert its presence. It is a work in the present continuous: it is working.
I write a diary every day, usually in biro, always in some kind of a hardcover A5 book. I’ve been writing them since 1995 with about ten books each year, so now I’ve got shelves of them. They take up quite a lot of space, and as physical things they’re very important to me. If there were a fire in the house I’d throw them out the window first and jump after them. I stick things in, I monitor my handwriting for mood, I put new covers on them, I shelve them, I browse their spines, I leaf through them.
Rather than writing about what’s happened every day, the important thing is that there’s something there to mark my participation in each day, or my presence during it. The days in the books have to bear witness to the living days. When I was working with Nick the other day trying to treat things like words and vice versa, I started to wonder how I could produce a diary by making daily things instead of writing them.
Locks allow canal boats to navigate sloping terrains by raising or lowering the level of the water. Read the rest of this entry »
Crown Derby plates decorated by Quaker Pegg
Brass and jade rings by Richard Pousette Dart
Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge
Both plates and rings become imaginary.
We are planning to make a theme tune for ourselves. We are going to write a song and video aspects of our daily lives and edit them together into something snappy and indicative, then we will play it on a screen each morning as we wake up (it could work as an alarm clock) and last thing at night.
The beginning and end theme tunes will need to be subtly different, for instance the beginning tune will need to conclude with a fading chord so that it leads encouragingly into the opening scene. Since each opening scene will be generally similar – turning off the alarm clock, getting out of bed etc – those first moments might in time be assumed by the closing chord of the theme tune and fade into repetition, so our actions in real life gradually become part of the videotaped theme tune. Once that happens, perhaps eating breakfast will be sucked in to the theme tune too, and so on and so on. We wonder how far outwards it will stretch, and likewise for bedtime before the end theme tune begins.
I can’t leave Tag um Tag alone. Here’s where I got to last week when I was writing about it in terms of what I seem to be calling its ‘event character’, following what I wrote about originality in repetition. Écriture féminine makes an appearance, which shouldn’t surprise me given the relationship I suggest in Afterward between gendered writing and my idea of ‘flatness’
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Last month I considered Peter Dreher’s Tag um Tag ist guter Tag in terms of originality and repetition. My assertion was that the work’s unending repetition extends its visual stillness to the point of propositional flatness, so that we see not the fact of a painting, but the fact of its repetition. I argued that because of this, the work operates as a circular translation of itself, and thus short-circuits the alienation of the viewer by acknowledging and integrating their distance from the work.
Building on these ideas, I want to describe a relationship between the propositional flatness I perceive in Tag um Tag and some definitions of Alain Badiou’s ‘event’, in the context of post-structural écriture féminine.
