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.
