What The Matter Is

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.

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

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.

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.