ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [27 July 2009]

Recently I painted some things red.

It began because I wanted there to be more colour around, and so I said I want to paint things. I’d meant I wanted to paint pictures of things, so I could put them on the walls and brighten the room up a bit, but then I noticed the very good ambiguity of the words. You can paint an apple and end up with a picture of an apple, or you can paint an apple and end up with an apple covered in paint.

Either way what you end up with is out of real-world circulation. An apple in a picture is separate from the world because it’s a representation of an apple; an apple painted red is separated from the world because it doesn’t work as a real-world apple any more.

I bought some thick red gloss paint and I covered some things in paint. So far I’ve covered an apple, a stapler, a spoon, a plant pot, a jar of herbs, a cup, a saucer and a bottle of shampoo. I painted them into representations of themselves, and then when they were dry I put them back where they belonged before. Now, some of the things around the house are red and they don’t work. You can’t eat the apple, the stapler doesn’t staple, the lids of things no longer open, and so on.

Having these red things around the house is useful for me. The thing on the shelf in front of me was my stapler, and now it’s different. It stands for the stapler, as a placeholder for the space the stapler once took up. And because it no longer works as the stapler but rather represents it, it’s more attentive. It’s not a stapler, but the fact of a stapler.

A painting on a canvas could also represent a stapler, but you couldn’t put the canvas on the shelf in the same way as the stapler. You could depict the shelf in the painting, yes, but it would only defer the problem. You’d end up having to depict the whole room around the shelf, and the whole world around the room. If you could do that, you’d be getting somewhere. Everything would relate directly. But you can’t paint the whole world onto a canvas like a 1:1 scale map.

The red things around the house are useful for me because they’re representations, but the world around them is a real world rather than a represented world. They feel like a step in the direction of art that lacks a frame. They’re useful for me because I’m interested in the ‘blurring of art and life’, as Allan Kaprow would put it, and distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ modes and contexts of things and actions.

The red things are useful for me (and I keep imagining gloriously painting everything red.. would that be a 1:1 scale map of the world?), but I’m still not completely convinced by them.

# 2 [27 July 2009]

I'm still thinking about these things I've been painting red, and why I'm not altogether convinced by them.

I'm keeping them in their original places around the house, and that's a good start, but despite that they've still got some kind of frame around them. Perhaps the paint’s the frame, or their colour, or just the idea that they’re painted.

And then there’s the means of differentiation/representation/promotion, which is painting. It seems unsatisfying – unconvincing – to use a traditional art medium when my interest is life-things as opposed to art-things. As it stands, the red-painted things I’ve made might be interesting in the context of art and what art can do, but they aren’t really doing anything interesting to the world.

Perhaps the problem is the fact that the things are differentiated or promoted at all. No differentiation at all would convince me more, but I don’t know how to do this. Perhaps if I were following Kaprow by the letter I’d carry out the whole process without the paint, something like this:

1) take a stapler from the shelf I keep it on

2) consider it as a stapler

3) put it back on the shelf

4) when I see the stapler from now on, consider it as a stapler

5) do the same thing with everything

... Or, more simply,

1) consider everything

... Or, more generally,

1) contemplate my navel.

I’m not sure I like where this is going.

# 3 [5 August 2009]

Thank you for your comment on post #2 Jane. My reply is ending up a bit long so I thought I’d give it a post of its own.

For me the function of an object has become one index of its position along a continuum stretching uncomfortably between art-stuff and life-stuff. Isolating the function of an object suddenly makes the object appear as the physical thing it is, rather than being concealed behind its purpose. What you get then (says Blanchot) is like a cadaver - or (says Heidegger) is like art.

The Duchampian move has certainly been on my mind lately as I’ve been trying to put together some kind of art-stuff/life-stuff relationship that makes sense for my own work. I’ve also been reading Allan Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, in which he rather sweepingly divides art practices into 'artlike art' and 'lifelike art'. Kaprow and Duchamp both occupy the art/life continuum but I think even they create too clean a relationship between them.

I agree that painting the objects has changed their context while keeping it the same - unless I'm getting two distinct kinds of contexts muddled. The objects can’t be placed in an art gallery, they have to be left about the house where they began. Rather than take a non-art object and put it in an art context like Duchamp’s Fountain, I think what I’ve done is to paint an art context around the object itself - very very closely around the object, using the pigment of the paint - so that the art context is continuous with the art object (it's painted onto it) but barely impinges on the physical space around it.

I find it interesting that paint is the material of this context, given the art historical weight of painting. It's interesting because, as I wrote in post #1, I came to this project because I said I wanted to 'paint things', that is, paint pictures of things.

I think this ties in to your second point: that the painted objects simulate replications of themselves (they look like casts of themselves rather than the real things). They look like representations of themselves, like paintings of themselves, only lacking a canvas. The effect is that the canvas is the space around them, which perhaps means the art context infects the whole house?

As for your last point - I'm afraid I threw the apple away when it went miserable and soft. The paint did conceal and slow its degredation, but I didn't want to look at an Anya Gallaccio going on around the other 'real' apples in the bowl and so I let that object carry on its existence in the bin. Perhaps I threw it away because I don't want the infection to spread. I can't have my house being an art context, it's my house, I have to live there, and I can't have my life being an art object, it would be irksome.

# 4 [8 September 2009]

The attempt to catch moments of time is one of the things that interests me about writing.

One night a few weeks ago I was in bed writing something about the day. I tried to describe the room just as it was. The harder I tried to describe it the more exact it became and, consequently, the more inadequate my description. I wanted to catch the room on the paper so I could have it again later on, when it was gone and the book remained. I was aware of the power of writing to outlive its subject, but also of the gaping distance between the things I wanted to keep and the words I was using to capture them. It was like making a net with holes too loose.

Then I noticed the words were jealous of the book they were in. The book was real, and it pressed down with real, present weight on the blanket, and the blanket touched the bed and the bed the floor and the floor the other furniture and the furniture everything else in the room I was trying to write down. Yes, the words took up space on the paper of the book, and yes, the paper pressed down on the rigid cover of the book that touched the blanket, and so on, but the words betrayed themselves. They betrayed themselves in their way of directness, which claimed to cut through the physical things in the room and intimately name them, and yet naming can never be intimate because a name is so different from a thing.

A line in biro is a thing just as a chair or a hat is a thing. But the extra quality I was giving my biro lines by shaping them into words caused them to depart from the world of things. Each time I tried to look at a biro line I just ended up reading what it spelled. It was sad for me. The words weren’t going to be able to keep the things in the room, and so the things in the room would fade.

Then I drew a biro line from my paragraph to the edge of the page and from the paper onto the blanket, and all the way across the blanket to Anton as he slept. One day he will die, but I have kept in my book a line that touched him.

# 5 [13 September 2009]

I sometimes try to write using things that aren't words, especially utensils. I think it's because like words, utensils already have a purpose - they always already point at some function beyond their physical edges.

This questionably photoshopped arrangement of forks and rortary motors is what I want to try next. I've done it with 6 motors before and 12 forks, and when the motors are close together the forks continually collide and demand constant maintenance - I take a fork out, move a motor, adjust the angle of a fork, unplug a motor, and so on and so on. It becomes a slightly frantic but completely pragmatic conversation between me and these things, which engrosses us all completely.

I want to see how many I can reasonably maintain at once without too much noise and clattering and bending of prongs. In November I'm going to Athens to join a troupe for a theatrical exhibition based around Raymond Roussel's novel Locus Solus, and I'm going to develop a straightforward presentation of these forks for that. I need to buy more motors though, and probably more forks unless we're to eat soup until November.

# 6 [15 September 2009]

This Saturday I'm going to present some work at FormContent with the rest of the antepress group, to mark the beginning of a season-long collaboration with the curators. The idea is that we'll respond to their exhibitions and events with writing of some kind.

On Saturday I plan to present two recent works of mine that explore the relation between writing and its subject, and the possibility of formal contamination between the two. Both of these works comprise lines drawn from the page to the subject.

One of the works (pictured) is a kind of sketchbook I've been carrying with me this summer. Rather than drawing pictures of the things around me I drew lines to them: pencil lines that begin on the page, score over the endpapers of the book, over whatever surface the book's resting on, and on and on until the line reaches its subject.

I have to decide where on the page the lines should start, and which and how many of the things around me I should draw lines to for a given double-page spread. I have to label the lines so it's clear what they're pointing to, and decide how much information the labels should contain.

Wherever I've been drawing in the book there are faint pencil lines left over on the surrounding tabletops and upholstery and floorboards, whose beginnings and endings mark routes between objects that are no longer there. These abandoned lines are arranged in approximate star shapes because each set radiates out from a single rectangle, which is missing from the scene, but which contains all of them.

I like the idea of returning to these star-shapes and finding the right page of the book and lining it up perfectly again, but the stars are all over London and Scotland and Inkpen and Wales now, with lines so faint they might be irretrievable.

FormContent is www.formcontent.org

antepress is www.antepress.co.uk

# 7 [30 September 2009]

This weekend there were two art book fairs in London. At the Whitechapel was the achingly official London Art Book Fair, and at Oxford House was the achingly unofficial Publish and Be Damned. I found one thing at each which I want to put together.

(un)limited store had a stand at Publish and Be Damned. They’re a French publisher that produces artist books, objects and prints. I like the way they don’t differentiate too heavily between these three categories: the objects all have ISBNs like books, for instance, and come boxed and labeled to show they’re part of or published by the (u)ls project.

David Lasnier is one of the artists whose objects they publish. I bought a rubber stamp by him which reads ’stamped’.

You can’t go wrong with it. So far I’ve stamped the corner of my desk, the edge of my laptop (it might rub off), the box from the stamp, many pieces of paper, my teapot, my hand and some glass jars. It’s very straightforward. If something’s been stamped it says so, if it hasn’t it doesn’t. And the word is continually there regardless, embossed in rubber in its negative form, ready to be removed from its cardboard box, inked and stamped, and wherever it’s stamped it will necessarily apply.

Its exquisite circularity reminds me of a couple of the print by Donald Urquhart I saw at the Rocket stand at the Whitechapel on Saturday.

It's a black and white print with the words ‘SOMEONE JUST KILLED ME’ written messily in thick letters across a white background. At the bottom of the image, where the phrase ends, an outstretched hand with its forefinger dipped in the ink/blood of the message indicates that the words have been daubed with a fingertip. The final stroke of ‘ME’ smudges downwards, presumably as the writer slumps towards his death.

The killing – the infliction of the fatal wound – has taken place before the writing begins. There’s time between being killed and dying. But the victim writes as if from within death, as if he is already dead, with his murder already completed in the past perfect tense. For the statement to be true, the phrase needs to be completed and its writer needs to die. In the drama of Urquhart’s print these parallel processes are timed impeccably: the writer slumps just as the final letter is being completed. As though one were the cause of the other, no sooner is the description complete than does the thing it describes become actual.

# 8 [5 October 2009]

In November we’re holding a workshop at Goldsmiths around circulation, distribution and dispersion of artwork.

I want to think about artworks that make claims about not being circulated. My interest in this area stems from my own work, but I want to use the opportunity to research things other people have done. Because of the nature of the subject I don’t anticipate sticking exclusively to examples from art, but I hope to draw some conclusions that have relevance to art.

Most of the work I’ve found on this subject is around event-based art. A starting point could be the dissemination of happening-type work Allan Kaprow calls “lifelike art”. In his 1966 lecture How To Make A Happening he urges us to “happen” in the real world and not in art, and not to put on shows for audiences. He differentiates between the happenings and the instructions or descriptions of them, saying that the latter are not art, “just literature”. Nevertheless these happenings enter an art context and find an art audience through this “literature”, or informally through anecdote.

The anecdotal form of dissemination has parallels in the contemporary brand-building of celebrities, through tales recounted never by the rock stars themselves but by less cool people on the sidelines of their activity. Doing crazy things needs to be kept separate from the drive to tell people you’re doing them or they won’t be crazy any more.

In Sartre’s Nausea the protagonist cynically writes “for the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must – and this is all that is necessary – start recounting it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. But you have to choose: to live or to recount.” (1965:61)

There are examples of prehistoric cave paintings produced in places so inaccessible that we assume they were meant not to be seen by other people. Christian churches are topped with intricate carvings invisible from ground level.

It might be appropriate to make reference to some concerns of my own practice, and perhaps cite part of a discussion I had at FormContent with antepress about whether you can ‘break’ a work by showing it, and whether no audience is audience enough, and how a group of works can be one another’s audience. Following my Vyner St LIKE WHEN YOU project, some thoughts about the ‘white studio’ (c.f. ‘white cube’) might also find themselves in here. I’m going to have another look at Ranciere, Heidegger, Agamben and Blanchot too, and their various treatments of the event.

# 9 [30 November 2009]

On Saturday I presented a new work at the Stanley Picker gallery during the Writing Exhibitions symposium. Here's an outline of my work, which I called Genuine Smiles:

"A sheet of paper is attached to one wall of the gallery, and attached just below it is a long piece of string with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. Visitors are invited to hold a 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 allowing the pencil to leave the surface, until the line from the smile reaches the most convenient edge of the paper."

It relates to the book of line drawings I made over the summer, in which I recorded some places and times by drawing lines from the pages of a blank book to nearby things. Once a set of lines had been drawn and the book had been put away again, the objects, furniture, walls, floor were still marked with lines, all of which converged about a single rectangular gap.

There are lots of these rectangular gaps lying around the house now. The gaps mark places in the room where the book can be reinserted, with the appropriate pages spread open, to reconnect the detached elements of the record.

The lines drawn in the book are like deictic words, which have a fixed semantic value but a unfixed denotative value (words in English like 'you' or 'here'). The semantics of each line is the way it looks and the way it runs off the edge of the page, and the denotative value of each line is the thing it points at. Taken as a self-contained book, separate from the pencil marks drawn around the room, the references of the lines on the paper are frustrated. You don't know what they're saying other than that they mean to say something. Not waving but drowning.

The book that fills all the gaps is safe drowning on a shelf in the hallway at the moment. But even if it returns to one of its rectangular gaps and connects up to each line correctly, the other ends of the lines - the lines touching the objects I wanted to record - are still precarious. As things get rearranged, put away, tidied, nudged, so the lines that reach them splinter and rotate and move until they are pointing somewhere else, or end abruptly, or dissipate in angular ways through the house.

# 10 [30 November 2009]

Here’s an outline of Genuine Smiles, which I showed at the Stanley Picker on Saturday:

"A sheet of paper is attached to one wall of the gallery, and attached just below it is a long piece of string with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. Visitors are invited to hold a 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 allowing the pencil to leave the surface, until the line from the smile reaches the most convenient edge of the paper."

I want to think about the line as a visible rendering of the relationship between a word and the thing it describes. The line is constructed from the same stuff writing is constructed from, and because of this the line feels something like an unravelled word. But it stretches and attenuates the possibility of being a word: it doesn’t occupy the same space as a word because it travels to and touches its object, and travels to and touches another object too, which is the piece of paper. At the moment the direction of travel seems less important than the fact that movement takes place. I’m not sure what to make of the piece of paper yet.

The piece of paper stuck to the wall at the Stanley Picker gallery was the place people were asked to draw their lines to. As a result it felt as though the smile was only ‘written down’ once it had touched the paper, and indeed people generally stopped their lines as soon as they’d passed the edge of the page.

Once the line was on the paper the smile was ‘kept’, and while the line was just on the wall, floor, foot, trouser leg, arm, chin or mouth, the smile was still precarious and at risk of evaporating. The line doesn’t change in quality when it reaches the paper, but something changes.

I think the paper's special because it's temporary and removable and is the one part that can be kept once the event is over (the wall will be washed over, the people will go home and clean the lines from their skin and clothes). Perhaps it's special because pencils go with paper, so a pencil line is resolved when you conclude it on paper. And it's also special because it’s shared between all the smiles: all of them end there, and so the paper is where all the smiles go to be collected up.

I want to think more about what’s left in the gallery once the people and the paper have gone. The pencil lines remaining are tethered neither to their endings on the page nor their beginnings at our lips. Just the middle part of the deixis – the blank fact that something’s referring to something. Just smiles in passing.