What The Matter Is

My very large and very heavy printer has arrived.

The booklets are beginning to accumulate. It turns out we can bind the books more quickly than the printer can print them, which isn’t what I expected at all. To keep up, the printer has to be working all the time, which makes for a nice smooth rhythm around the house. It’s usually quite a slow tidal rhythm, but in between pages it sometimes revs up and gets quite groovy.

I’ve been drawing handles. They’re for AS HANDLE, one of the five booklets I’m working on.

I’ve been making handles and holders since 2008, but until now they’ve been objects rather than drawings.

Photographs of my three-dimensional handles won’t work for the AS HANDLE booklet because of the documentation problem I wrote about in post #15. I want the idea of the handles to remain propositional (the idea of a handle) rather than particular (the instance of a handle). Drawings seem to do this more successfully.

Nevertheless the drawings I’ve made are somewhat particular. They refer back to the specific things I was drawing, which I had to collect and construct and fix and pose before I sat down in front of them with pen and paper. Moreover they aren’t perfect static and faithful renderings of their objects: they are sketchy and the lines wobble, telling something about the particular moment of drawing. If they step away from the particulars of their originary physical objects, their medium brings a new particularity.

But this kind of particularity is different.The distance these drawings make from their objects is the aproach they make towards their author. The drawing, and its wobbliness, make a story on the surface of the page: the proposition is no longer ‘the idea of a handle’ but ‘the idea of drawing a handle’.

It brings to mind the particulars of the fictional characters in some of the stories of the AS MACHINE and AS CONDUCTOR booklets.