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)

After some eleventh hour InDesign frantickity the book I’ve been making is finished.

As I’ve been working on it a couple of things have been running through my mind. The Envelope Constructions video I made in 2006 has the same feeling of purposeful inconclusiveness – of working intentionally towards an end point which is in no way differentiated from the process of reaching it. I must put the video online soon. And there’s Apitchapong’s film Syndrome of a Century, in which the same plot repeats itself twice over the course of the film but with different actors, settings and details. The matter comes last. “Working entirely in process with no content”, said a man on the radio yesterday about something different.

This is our new home. In a complete change of everything, this home consists of a white studio. It means rather than making artwork in a domestic space as I have been for the past few years, I’ll be doing domestic things in an art-making space.

It will be very good to see what becomes of all the artwork I’ve made which I feel lives best in a domestic space now that the only domestic space I have is in the service of artwork. The pear holder and the cup handle holder and the things painted red. And to see what becomes of the ‘blurring of art and life’, as Allan Kaprow would say.

On Vyner Street a few months ago Anton and I found ourselves at either end of a piece of string and began to walk together to fold it in half. It was a nice thing to suddenly find going on, but then we noticed we were in an art studio and what we were doing might be ART. We let go of our ends of string somewhere between embarrassment and disdain. We’ll have to see what happens.

I come back to these diagrams very often.

I found out this week that a book I’m making is going to be published by (un)limited store in December. The book will be launched in December at ArtistBook International at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and before that there’s lots of work to do. It’s a kind of instruction manual and I’m calling it DO SOMETHING. Here are some ideas about the book:

In Literature it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!*

DO SOMETHING uses the generic diagrammatic form of the instruction manual to create a specific dance of objects and actions.

The objects in the manual are imaginary, and do not exist outside of their drawings on paper. Arranged about the page as if to accommodate a text which is missing, the images are left to speak on their own. Like a translation whose original has been lost, these floating instructions are a trace without a reference, telling a story that cannot be grasped.

Accordingly the apparatus of the diagrammatic form – dotted lines, arrows and image borders – occasionally slip through into representation and, on a par with the objects they describe, take part in the action and become themselves objects of description.

Instructions are repositories of potential activity. Though the diagrams cannot be enacted as they are, DO SOMETHING invites reciprocation. Enacting the careful dance laid out on paper implies improvising alternative objects from whatever one has to hand, approximating the movements of arrows and dotted lines in the air nearby. Transferred from potential to activity the manual is opened and undone, and resolves into a broad but delicate imperative:

It is not that nothing can be done, but rather that something must be done and that we cannot be sure what to do.✝

* Anthony Kerrigan in his 1962 Introduction to J. L. Borges’ Fictions.
✝ Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), referring to Derrida’s refutal that the undecidability characteristic of deconstruction makes ‘the taking of any definite moral stance either arbitrary or impossible’.

Address labels you can stick to things. I made these a few years ago but stamping ’stamped’ on things reminded me of them. They’re like inside-out frames.