What The Matter Is

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.

On Saturday I presented a new work at the Stanley Picker gallery during the Writing Exhibitions symposium. Here’s an outline of my work, which I called Genuine Smiles:

“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.”

It relates to the book of line drawings I made over the summer, in which I recorded some places and times by drawing lines from the pages of a blank book to nearby things. Once a set of lines had been drawn and the book had been put away again, the objects, furniture, walls, floor were still marked with lines, all of which converged about a single rectangular gap.

There are lots of these rectangular gaps lying around the house now. The gaps mark places in the room where the book can be reinserted, with the appropriate pages spread open, to reconnect the detached elements of the record.

The lines drawn in the book are like deictic words, which have a fixed semantic value but a unfixed denotative value (words in English like ‘you’ or ‘here’). The semantics of each line is the way it looks and the way it runs off the edge of the page, and the denotative value of each line is the thing it points at. Taken as a self-contained book, separate from the pencil marks drawn around the room, the references of the lines on the paper are frustrated. You don’t know what they’re saying other than that they mean to say something. Not waving but drowning.

The book that fills all the gaps is safe drowning on a shelf in the hallway at the moment. But even if it returns to one of its rectangular gaps and connects up to each line correctly, the other ends of the lines – the lines touching the objects I wanted to record – are still precarious. As things get rearranged, put away, tidied, nudged, so the lines that reach them splinter and rotate and move until they are pointing somewhere else, or end abruptly, or dissipate in angular ways through the house.

In November we’re holding a workshop at Goldsmiths around circulation, distribution and dispersion of artwork.

I want to think about artworks that make claims about not being circulated. My interest in this area stems from my own work, but I want to use the opportunity to research things other people have done. Because of the nature of the subject I don’t anticipate sticking exclusively to examples from art, but I hope to draw some conclusions that have relevance to art.

Most of the work I’ve found on this subject is around event-based art. A starting point could be the dissemination of happening-type work Allan Kaprow calls “lifelike art”. In his 1966 lecture How To Make A Happening he urges us to “happen” in the real world and not in art, and not to put on shows for audiences. He differentiates between the happenings and the instructions or descriptions of them, saying that the latter are not art, “just literature”. Nevertheless these happenings enter an art context and find an art audience through this “literature”, or informally through anecdote.

The anecdotal form of dissemination has parallels in the contemporary brand-building of celebrities, through tales recounted never by the rock stars themselves but by less cool people on the sidelines of their activity. Doing crazy things needs to be kept separate from the drive to tell people you’re doing them or they won’t be crazy any more.

In Sartre’s Nausea the protagonist cynically writes “for the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must – and this is all that is necessary – start recounting it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. But you have to choose: to live or to recount.” (1965:61)

There are examples of prehistoric cave paintings produced in places so inaccessible that we assume they were meant not to be seen by other people. Christian churches are topped with intricate carvings invisible from ground level.

It might be appropriate to make reference to some concerns of my own practice, and perhaps cite part of a discussion I had at FormContent with antepress about whether you can ‘break’ a work by showing it, and whether no audience is audience enough, and how a group of works can be one another’s audience. Following my Vyner St LIKE WHEN YOU project, some thoughts about the ‘white studio’ (c.f. ‘white cube’) might also find themselves in here. I’m going to have another look at Ranciere, Heidegger, Agamben and Blanchot too, and their various treatments of the event.

This weekend there were two art book fairs in London. At the Whitechapel was the achingly official London Art Book Fair, and at Oxford House was the achingly unofficial Publish and Be Damned. I found one thing at each which I want to put together.

(un)limited store had a stand at Publish and Be Damned. They’re a French publisher that produces artist books, objects and prints. I like the way they don’t differentiate too heavily between these three categories: the objects all have ISBNs like books, for instance, and come boxed and labeled to show they’re part of or published by the (u)ls project.

David Lasnier is one of the artists whose objects they publish. I bought a rubber stamp by him which reads ’stamped’.

You can’t go wrong with it. So far I’ve stamped the corner of my desk, the edge of my laptop (it might rub off), the box from the stamp, many pieces of paper, my teapot, my hand and some glass jars. It’s very straightforward. If something’s been stamped it says so, if it hasn’t it doesn’t. And the word is continually there regardless, embossed in rubber in its negative form, ready to be removed from its cardboard box, inked and stamped, and wherever it’s stamped it will necessarily apply.

Its exquisite circularity reminds me of a couple of the print by Donald Urquhart I saw at the Rocket stand at the Whitechapel on Saturday.

It’s a black and white print with the words ‘SOMEONE JUST KILLED ME’ written messily in thick letters across a white background. At the bottom of the image, where the phrase ends, an outstretched hand with its forefinger dipped in the ink/blood of the message indicates that the words have been daubed with a fingertip. The final stroke of ‘ME’ smudges downwards, presumably as the writer slumps towards his death.

The killing – the infliction of the fatal wound – has taken place before the writing begins. There’s time between being killed and dying. But the victim writes as if from within death, as if he is already dead, with his murder already completed in the past perfect tense. For the statement to be true, the phrase needs to be completed and its writer needs to die. In the drama of Urquhart’s print these parallel processes are timed impeccably: the writer slumps just as the final letter is being completed. As though one were the cause of the other, no sooner is the description complete than does the thing it describes become actual.

This Saturday I’m going to present some work at FormContent with the rest of the antepress group, to mark the beginning of a season-long collaboration with the curators. The idea is that we’ll respond to their exhibitions and events with writing of some kind.

On Saturday I plan to present two recent works of mine that explore the relation between writing and its subject, and the possibility of formal contamination between the two. Both of these works comprise lines drawn from the page to the subject.

One of the works (pictured) is a kind of sketchbook I’ve been carrying with me this summer. Rather than drawing pictures of the things around me I drew lines to them: pencil lines that begin on the page, score over the endpapers of the book, over whatever surface the book’s resting on, and on and on until the line reaches its subject.

I have to decide where on the page the lines should start, and which and how many of the things around me I should draw lines to for a given double-page spread. I have to label the lines so it’s clear what they’re pointing to, and decide how much information the labels should contain.

Wherever I’ve been drawing in the book there are faint pencil lines left over on the surrounding tabletops and upholstery and floorboards, whose beginnings and endings mark routes between objects that are no longer there. These abandoned lines are arranged in approximate star shapes because each set radiates out from a single rectangle, which is missing from the scene, but which contains all of them.

I like the idea of returning to these star-shapes and finding the right page of the book and lining it up perfectly again, but the stars are all over London and Scotland and Inkpen and Wales now, with lines so faint they might be irretrievable.

FormContent is www.formcontent.org

antepress is www.antepress.co.uk