I’m practising for the 26th.

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.

Tomorrow evening from 7pm antepress are hosting an art writing event at the Whitechapel. Here’s a bit about us from their website.

Continuing the series of playful and participatory events exploring language and its parameters, writers collaborate with artists to produce games and scenarios that challenge the audiences’ relationship to language.

This Word Play event is hosted by imprint and project platform antepress. The audience is invited to create six unique ‘artist books’, each based on a famous work of art. The books will be published on the night and will be downloadable from the antepress website. antepress was set up in 2008 by Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols, Tamarin Norwood and Gemma Sharpe.

Resonance fm is broadcasting a new audio work of mine this afternoon as part of Digestives, the ongoing art writing radio series from antepress. It’s going to be be aired on today at 4:30pm and repeated Friday 20 November at 7:30pm.

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 with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. The length of the string will depend on the size of the cube: it must be long enough to reach to the furthest corners. Visitors are invited to hold the pencil and do whatever they need to do to muster a genuine smile. As soon as the smile is on their lips and before it vanishes, they should begin to draw a line from the smile to the piece of paper, without ever allowing the pencil leave the surface. This will probably mean drawing a line down their chin, perhaps down some clothing, down an arm, at some point onto the nearest wall or floor, and so on along the surface until the line from the smile reaches the most convenient edge of the paper.

The resulting line will attempt capture on paper a smile that might have vanished as soon as pencil left lips, and was long gone by the time it reached the page. Afterwards, the line will reach down from the page to a position the drawer no longer occupies, having travelled with the line to its ending place. And the smile, after all, might never have been genuine at all.

The residue of the Genuine Smiles event will be the faint pencil lines on the walls and floor of the space and on the skin and clothing of participants, as well as the ends of the lines caught within the frame of the paper.

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.