Stating/Showing

At restaurant dissonance

I waited for half an hour after passing the friend I was supposed to meet on time in the street (we didn’t see each other the first time). She had with her another extended friend in the burgeoning summer hazy heat. I had sweaty feet. We finally did meet half an hour later. We then walked to their Thai restaurant; we had not booked a table. They gave us a table for four for the three of us to sit at. But they gave us a time scale there to decipher order wait drink eat pay and leave. We had around an hour – so we were quick to it. We also had an hour to fit in all of the chat we had in us and to talk of things happening and things to happen… but how do you do this whilst munching away on over priced precious parcels of food depository?

I ordered a soup with things swimming in it. We were especially vermicelli and delicious and I couldn’t use shops sticks for shit, so had to use the tips of my tired fingers to pluck noodles out of the broth. These noodles were then transferred to my mouth – these movements, these eating habits reflected my mind field of thoughts: thoughts that were digested in to words helped out by the accentuating veins managing the movement of my twiddling thumbs. The other two, they were used to their chops-tick action and had mastered the talking and eating effortlessly at the same time sort of thing.

I sat observant of this and ready to learn.

Chop/then/stick/then/MOUTH/and hand and ‘cover’ […]whilst chewing whilst speaking – a dichotomy of acts well placed to put an idea here and there across the table using the side plate and ceramic spoon for transport. This all happened at once with wonderful red lanterns glistening in eyeball soups alongside dishes and salads and cucumber shavings. Next came the carrots and the bean sprouts and chillies – all tangled together to save from cacophony, wrapped in a suitcase for safe depositing in destination mouth.

It then became an interview whilst I copied their melodious napkin movements, an interview in table etiquette with good healthy side plated conversational interludes. An orchestra of vegetables, the odd bit of meat… who eats what and why and when and how – and how – how do words work alongside one other rather public function of the mouth?

“Chop then stick then mouth and hand and ‘cover’…” That’s how.

Unfinished acts, live shaving and completed avocado stones to polish and keep as our own

OR using a tool to make a fool I asked for a ‘long stand’

Using a tool. Function: to mark out and measure to stop flow and keep straight. I would then to mask off his face, write off his vision to focus his view. Focus to draw. Focus to write a sentence or two. Discover other ways to behave and to keep straight, to keep straight; to mark out and to measure. I would then seek my own form of balance: re-setting the foreground or performing and re-writing the stage. Re-set, edit, copy, paste (paste, copy, edit re-set – start again). Re-set edit copy paste. Perform acts that should precede performance – but ‘acts’ in their own write non-the-less written.

Act: hanging up lanterns for soft light to play its resolute twirl of affection. Reason: the home is the object the studio and these objects do transfer and travel.

Act: revealing projections (a projection or two) of shared studio antics. Reason: to reveal process and to show character-intrigue. Projected on to board from laptops (one mine and one his) two different versions in the same resolution, in the same mode of focus, with the same time lapse and loop functions. Laptops seemed to be our lifelines and this is how we began, next to the plant and the tree and the chair the cushion the tea. And these were our portraits self-instructed through type, text exercises in description. Result: self-instructed portraits bringing studio endeavours – findings-out – in to the live act: in text in time in film in words. We would share the shoulders first and then the heads as we stood opposite each other as equals – each of our characters resistant yet to be revealed through the other.

Act: turn on the stage light to make the mould of dramatic effect – to focus again with light upon something soon to be a live act. Spot the chair, the line, and the ‘tool’ the stool prop for the fool: the drawn line ‘drawn’ out for full-spot centricity. Reason: to make shadows of meeting points (the barbers shop next door to Tesco near South Tottenham station, across the road from avocado superstore). We had it then, a masking of photographic-us – a performing power.

It is now that as I sit down in full light from three sources, after three acts and three reasons for doing so – the bringing of lantern light from home, the shared studio light and duality of projectors, and the stage light ‘the reasoning of live act’. It is now that as I sit the masked-collaborator steps out from behind the curtain and follows masking tape along the floor towards me. Fellow creator and opposite, frame-setter, picture maker and ‘record’ button red presser. He crawls his way towards me down the steps, taking a sharp right and down to all fours, from the background and in to the set.

“…I sit unfinished… still. He reaches me and takes away my sight with a blind-fold hidden in the left breast pocket of his black shirt. I can no longer see the audience or their reaction, how are you meant to perform without feeding off their disinterest or avid-eyes? …his sleeves rolled up he then pulls a pair of battery-powered clippers from his right breast pocket, takes them to my head shaped as an avocado. He shaves. Its like being sat back in Surrey Street in Sheffield, not being able to see my own reflection and too young to decide the direction of the blade. He makes a fucking hash of it. But then again we’re all for a bit of flesh left over when peeling an avocado – its what we do with the stone afterwards. That’s interesting. That’s when we’re more …complete.”

She was used to confined spaces but when in open air could not help but walk in to walls and trip over herself and her capabilities. She spent a lot of time clotted in bruised corners making work in the middle of sleeping and humming and spying.

“Consider the following case: She has been taught a use of the words “lighter” and “darker” (a practical use she, in the end, uses to decipher which stones belonged where…). She’s been shown objects before of various colours and sizes and has been taught that one calls this a darker colour than that, trained to bring an object on being ordered “Bring something darker than this”, and to describe the colour of an object by saying that it is darker or lighter than a certain sample, etc., etc. Now she is given the order to put down a series of objects, arranging them in the order of their darkness and size. She does this by laying out rows of books, writing down a series of names of animals, and by writing down five vowels in the order u, o, a, e, i. We ask her why she put down that latter series, she says, “Well, o is lighter than u, and e lighter than o”. – We shall be astonished at this attitude, and at the same time admit that there is something in what she says. Perhaps we shall say: “But look, surely e isn’t lighter than o in the way this book is lighter than the page we happen to be upon”. But she may shrug her shoulders and say, “I don’t know, but e is lighter than o, isn’t it?””

“…in the path’s of our of our garden one finds beautifully coloured smooth shaped pebbles, varying in size from two to eight centimetres. She cannot resist picking up these unusual stones, and little by little builds up quite a collection of them, which lies on the window-cill of my workroom. Unconsciously I begin to sort these out by size, obeying a lifelong fascination with the sizes of things, equivalent to the interest painters have in the weight of colour in its darkness and shades of light. By rejecting those pebbles whose difference in size was too small to be perceptible, she reduced my collection to a series of thirty-six whose size-difference amounted to 4% of the size of the stones (in the stream). It at once became apparent, however, that if the pebbles were spread out at random, they could be seen to belong to clearly different groups. One could start by picking out the largest ones, until a point came when none were left that belonged to that size. A smaller group, again of a same type of size, then revealed itself. In this way the pebbles sorted themselves out in to five groups, each of six or seven stones which one assessed to be the same sort of size.”

GO FORTH…

The new studio and car in between

The car was as yellow as several hundred spines of national geographics stacked together high upon a shelf; it was ready to take us to the places its pages would depict. We had to find the road first though it was a bank holiday so we decided to escape the city and soft-top convertible our way towards a new studio. As summer was beginning to find its place upon the banks of the loch we took a minor road and parked upon a verge, next to a ruin, a pylon with mountainous lands in the distance. There we took a walk.

Ten minutes down we entered in to character – there, aside a pond and upon the rocks we came across something other than ourselves. Something of a reflection or two: one of each for us to find.

Stream rock ready water dam then leach sunscreen tadpole. Tree, root rock again then bones with antlers for us to fish out of the pond. One of us wanted to build a boat like the one in the river next to the mountains, shaped like a rice bowl, simplified for finding small fry. We would use masking tape for this, we would explore documenting what we make and the appearance of these characters that habituate and ruin the micro-eco-system of this place: with straight lines in the midst of nature’s curves. And then ducks followed by their children dressed in spotted feathers float effortlessly across to the man made destruction. It was all her fault, the found-character and her eyes and ears and meddling feet that looked like hands and her straight Patti Smith hair

We set up the equipment with tripods and lenses and remotes and props to prop our ideas up with. We then gave the landscape over to these characters. And they were away amongst the odd dip in to conversation like the fingering of cool water to take stock amongst the hot sun of work. Photograph next to film, object next to movement and the drowning of lanterns bought and brought from Chinese porn shops behind Leicester Square.

We had exhausted our lens shots and it was getting hot. The found limbs and extenders, she had finished her stream as a straight hairline extension. We have pictures for that. She misses the month ago birthday when shit hit the fan but here she seemed at peace.

We decided to pack up our shit and leave this place so that’s what he did. Stepping over pond, fish, antlers, bones, rock and root. Reversing over tree and passed the dam and across the stream we documented our departure to an envelope on the floor: we had fifty pounds to spend on refreshments atop the hill and next to a gray man guitar player. So that is what we did.

He then wanted walls after lunch so they went in search of them. GO FORTH along the road against the traffic to another grassy verge. The ruin was about us and the dell was beyond to a fork in the river. We found something altogether different there or rather he found us outside his home in a field. The grass took the oncoming rain along with the wind and all colour dissipated to duotone. We have photographs for that too.

You can have a look.

“… it was a bank holiday so we decided to escape the city and soft-top convertible our way towards a new studio. As summer was beginning to find its place upon the banks of the loch we took a minor road and parked upon a verge. There we took a walk, we walked, we found fifty pounds and bought ourselves an expensive lunch and a shandy or two. Ten minutes down we entered in to character – there, aside a pond and upon the rocks we came across something other than ourselves…”

(Passage from ‘escapades’, 1985)

Homage ‘too’ characterisation too (self-versus-another) – see video

With self-characterisation there is an element of performance through histories, balances, extraordinary linkages and staring with one side of you in to the other. This eludes to the creation of researched drawings, tight, singular graphite creations that come from a variety of interrogation and experiments… these come at the end so do NOT expect them now. They come at the end like the illustration of a dialogue.

A necessary process is to play one thing forward and then to create a duplicate of this to, at the same time, play in reverse. Therein you will spot connections, discrepancies and ways forward. This is also explorative of measurement, how does one thing measure itself against another… This gives way to open space: what is open can be measured in more modes than that of simple scale/size, there are certain things immeasurable so you just have to make documentation in its stead and hope to gain something from there. To gain something from observation through ‘documentation’: the docuperformer. Documenting the documenter.

There is something here – something explored through having two equal measured spaces next to each other. What do you then make homage too but your own histories and accounts of character that amount to you occupying this space…? What then is the definition of ‘versus’? One team versus another, one person versus another: one artist versus the character that made him or the characters that this artist then makes. Where are these characters made and what is needed for them to exist and should they have any essence of cross-division. What does it mean to bring the outside in to the measurable inside…

Racoon likes Chinese lanterns
This is one such character

How should it then be described? And what should then be used to document it? And what exactly is ‘it’? Perhaps a story would then suffice… a link please.