A piece of text about something that describes the landscape as well as the journey and hopefully gets to the final result. The work is about the process someone once said. And one mostly avoids, or tries to avoid, the word ‘space’: instead the use of ‘synonyms’ makes the text more diverse. But when does the text become a partitioned language set aside from dialogue? When is it instructional and when is it directional, informative or discursive: when is it then descriptive as well as informative and critical? These definitions of what a language, an artist’s ‘linguistic-visual’, come in to their own through visual diversity. This happens within dissemination and project-work that defines by way of and passed the result, then the aftermath, the publication, the exhibition before a catalogue; or the advert for the show.
Here comes along the notion of forming sites. Virtual sites with viaducts in cyberspace, or hyperlinks: something readily available and accessible to the public eye and arching with diversity in artistic language. At this point visual preoccupations become something of the discourse that goes in to them, archives them and documents them. It is self-generative. There is now a field of vision that comes from observing experience. There is now a verge of disturbance and a river, a viaduct again and then more trees whilst I converge towards something descriptive as well as explanatory.
I am explaining something that is an archive of events, objects, experiences, writings and other nuances. Or works. These are collated somewhere between the definition of Stating and Showing an idea, the instructional drawing of how to solve a puzzle – the photocopy of the original that forwards to the negotiation of space; a puzzlement in real space that eludes then to virtual dissemination.
Somewhere in Liverpool there are some stickers I used to make wall drawings so high up in to ceiling that no one dares get so far to take them down. These are recorded digitally, but also they form a selection of a permanent collection within the architecture. This is how they work in permanence even though the affect was supposedly ephemeral: wall drawings are not meant to last. But this one does. It’s homage to what went before and deserved of publication through text, image and descriptive quality. It stated and now remains to show. Its shows something of a statement of what was once shown.
So what goes now is the negotiating of a space between Exposition and Exhibition. Somewhere along the line and endurance of knowing your studio-site and your exhibition-site: the language of objects and the conversations of recorded and re-presented imagery are superimposed, delivered, installed and re-recorded, then cropped and then uploaded, then downloaded – written about.
I’m writing about something now I am sure of that. But how does this build around the hanger of my practice ready to sprout some projectile machine that has a general direction?
Lets talk about general directions. What sort of direction does an artist’s work go in and where is its resultant destination, the countryside of peace and mind? The industry of beginning? Or the edge of reason that has no reason but to be remote without social recognition? The South, the Mid-land, the North and the so far beyond north, that ‘North’ becomes more like South again? The border between England and Scotland is like a reflection of itself. So somewhere on the journey to and fro something happens where I become a reflection of myself. The only way I can keep track of this is to use terms that elude geographical problematics, instead they confront the notion of a ‘site’: a site with language, with form, and with accessible/updatable space.
The track then becomes the journey of an online sketchbook, which works as a generator for writings and ideas and the placement of images, titles and then further ideas.
Text can be collaborative. See the next post, which links to the next pylon or pillion. There is relativity in what I now write as my thoughts are on this screen that is blanched with sunlight through the window that, for me, never moves. Yet on the outside – as towns and stops and electrical lines pass by – they move with a force, a direction, a plane of organised vision. If only artistic directions could be so time tabled just as much as they are accommodating.
