I’m trying to finish this article and I keep thinking about how you put up tents. You lay the whole thing out flat on the ground so it’s more or less in the right shape, then you can get it standing, and then once it’s up you have to go round again tensioning all the pegs and lines until there’s no slack.
The trouble is I’m still laying out bits of my article on the ground this evening while other bits are quite nicely driven in with pegs. I’m hoping to get the whole thing up before bed tonight, then tomorrow morning I can go round tightening everything and checking the lines are taut. There are certain tensions I want to string up between words and images that recur in different sections of the text. The article would stay together without them, but it’d be a bit saggy.
There. An extended metaphor.
I’m exhausted tonight. All of us in the studios have had unproductive days for some reason, not for want of trying. It’s horrible being stuck at my computer when there’s all of Linz to explore. Once this article’s out the way I’m going to go up the hill I can see from my studio window and visit the castle at the very top. Apparently there’s some kind of grotto up there, and a train.
Haven’t been able to concentrate today. I’m somewhere between sleepy and jumpy. But this afternoon I found this, which John Berger wrote in 1987:
“Image-making begins with interrogating appearances and making marks. Every artist discovers that drawing – when it is an urgeny activity – is a two-way process. To draw is not only to measure and put down, it is also to receive. When the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one, through the appearance of whatever one is scrutinizing. Giacometti’s life’s work is a demonstration of this.
The encounter of these two energies, their dialogue, does not have the form of question and answer. It is a ferocious and inarticulated dialogue. To sustain it requires faith. It is like a burrowing in the dark, a burrowing under the apparent. The great images occur when the two tunnels meet and join perfectly. Sometimes when the dialogue is swift, almost instantaneous, it is like something thrown and caught.
I offer no explanation for this experience. I simply believe very few artists will deny it. It’s a professional secret.”
Nice isn’t it. And nor do I deny it. But I do deny it’s happening to me today. Today I haven’t got the energy to sustain an urgent dialogue with the Armando drawing I’ve been copying and trying to write about. I’m finding it boring, and I know it isn’t a boring thing.
I think I need a break. The past month or so has been madcap preparation for my exam last Friday, then packing and moving to Linz on Saturday, and not really having time to think throughout or since. I have to finish the article tomorrow and I’m running behind, but I wonder whether the evening would be better spent, say, outside in the dark where there’s snow racing through the air, instead of here in the studio where there’s nothing racing through anything. I’ll see what I can write until 6, and then I’ll go outside.
No video today: I’ve been writing instead. And drawing a bit.
I spent the first part of the morning in the studio copying out a drawing, the second part of the morning getting lost trying to find the post office then getting lost inside the post office trying to send some olololos to London, and the afternoon writing about the drawing. (olololos are these)
I copied the drawing out of a book called Writing on Drawing (ed. S Garner 2008). It’s by a C20 Dutch artist called Armando, who did many of his works with eyes shut or blindfolded. I’d been reading Glyn Maxwell about line breaks in ‘On Poetry’ (2012), a conversational kind of book in which he suggests copying out other people’s poems onto blank paper so you understand how the lines sit in relation to the fullness or emptiness of time that had been contained in the page’s blankness until the words mark it into something different. Then John Berger describes first mark of a drawing like a fish dropped into the glass tank of the blank page, turning the environment from blank water into a condition in which the fish can live. And how adding a second mark isn’t just like dropping another fish into the water; rather it fixes the first firmly in place by relation to itself. That was in ‘Life Drawing’ (1960) — such a different perspective to Derrida’s in ‘Memoirs of the Blind’ (1990) in which drawing emerges from the dark in an act of blindly groping forward, with the pencil breaking a path through blackness.
I copied Armando’s drawing so I can examine these different perspectives first through drawing itself, then through a written account of the process. I’ll be working on the written account for the rest of the week, and hope to have it finished on Friday.
This video makes a square. Or really a rectangle.
Now. I’m a bit suspicious of the timing and speed of my edit. It reads to me like one of those very efficient (comically so?) instructional videos. I decided to cut it so tightly because I just wanted the facts of the matter — this is the shot; this is what the pencil is doing — and more information than that was superfluous to the experiment. That’s the argument I made to myself anyway. Then I wanted to match the timing of the second part to that of the first, so that the camera moves about the rectangle in recollection of the pencil’s work.
I think this does come out, but the speedy edit is very loud and I think it talks over anything else that’s going on. I have to learn about editing.
Meanwhile, what I am happy with is the parallel emerging between the work of the pencil and the work of the viewfinder. Each makes evident a rectangle. I’d like to see the two parts playing simultaneously. I tried them in reverse order and it was unsatisfying, but using a split-screen to line up the timings exactly might be good. Then: which on the left and which on the right? I’ll have a go now.
We’re all working really hard here. It’s good. Although I found myself turning down an invitation to an art school lecture this afternoon because I had too much to do. So much for relaxing after my PhD exam. (Oh I passed! Draw a line under that.)
This little charmer is the only video I managed to make today. At least it has a cut in it. It’s a cut like dropping a bundle of string on the floor.
This afternoon I met with the other artists I’m exhibiting with next month. We ate good, good bread and exchanged powerpoints of works we’re planning to show (planning to make, in cases like mine). It looks like we all treat language as material of one kind or another – languages of various kinds and materials of various kinds. At present we’re planning to partner the exhibition with a ‘library’ component showing books made by the contributing artists, as well as a series of off-site posters that slyly reference the exhibition while remaining self-contained artworks. The works we showed in our powerpoints will make up the main part of the exhibition, which will be across the Salzamt gallery and project space. All this and it opens on December 18, so there’s plenty to be getting on with.
In the meantime, tomorrow I’m making lunch. We five resident artists take it in turns to cook so that on balance we all have more time to spend in the studio. It’s nice. For one thing it means I haven’t bought a thing to eat since I arrived, apart from some disappointing Flocken which I didn’t think were going to be oats. Still, oats for breakfast tomorrow, then the shops.
If I’m to stop buying things like Flocken I do need to improve my German. (Flocken are fine, just a bit gruelling neat.) The five of us are from all over Europe and English is the common language among us, so instead I brushed my teeth late last night with German phrases on my headphones. I learned how to accept and decline invitations for evening activities, and how to describe one’s daily routine.
Now. Tomorrow:
– buy food
– the sim card again (didn’t manage today)
– again, some kind of a CUT video
