What The Matter Is

I sometimes try to write using things that aren’t words, especially utensils. I think it’s because like words, utensils already have a purpose – they always already point at some function beyond their physical edges.

This questionably photoshopped arrangement of forks and rortary motors is what I want to try next. I’ve done it with 6 motors before and 12 forks, and when the motors are close together the forks continually collide and demand constant maintenance – I take a fork out, move a motor, adjust the angle of a fork, unplug a motor, and so on and so on. It becomes a slightly frantic but completely pragmatic conversation between me and these things, which engrosses us all completely.

I want to see how many I can reasonably maintain at once without too much noise and clattering and bending of prongs. In November I’m going to Athens to join a troupe for a theatrical exhibition based around Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus, and I’m going to develop a straightforward presentation of these forks for that. I need to buy more motors though, and probably more forks unless we’re to eat soup until November.

The attempt to catch moments of time is one of the things that interests me about writing.

One night a few weeks ago I was in bed writing something about the day. I tried to describe the room just as it was. The harder I tried to describe it the more exact it became and, consequently, the more inadequate my description. I wanted to catch the room on the paper so I could have it again later on, when it was gone and the book remained. I was aware of the power of writing to outlive its subject, but also of the gaping distance between the things I wanted to keep and the words I was using to capture them. It was like making a net with holes too loose.

Then I noticed the words were jealous of the book they were in. The book was real, and it pressed down with real, present weight on the blanket, and the blanket touched the bed and the bed the floor and the floor the other furniture and the furniture everything else in the room I was trying to write down. Yes, the words took up space on the paper of the book, and yes, the paper pressed down on the rigid cover of the book that touched the blanket, and so on, but the words betrayed themselves. They betrayed themselves in their way of directness, which claimed to cut through the physical things in the room and intimately name them, and yet naming can never be intimate because a name is so different from a thing.

A line in biro is a thing just as a chair or a hat is a thing. But the extra quality I was giving my biro lines by shaping them into words caused them to depart from the world of things. Each time I tried to look at a biro line I just ended up reading what it spelled. It was sad for me. The words weren’t going to be able to keep the things in the room, and so the things in the room would fade.

Then I drew a biro line from my paragraph to the edge of the page and from the paper onto the blanket, and all the way across the blanket to Anton as he slept. One day he will die, but I have kept in my book a line that touched him.

Thank you for your comment on post #2 Jane. My reply is ending up a bit long so I thought I’d give it a post of its own.

For me the function of an object has become one index of its position along a continuum stretching uncomfortably between art-stuff and life-stuff. Isolating the function of an object suddenly makes the object appear as the physical thing it is, rather than being concealed behind its purpose. What you get then (says Blanchot) is like a cadaver – or (says Heidegger) is like art.

The Duchampian move has certainly been on my mind lately as I’ve been trying to put together some kind of art-stuff/life-stuff relationship that makes sense for my own work. I’ve also been reading Allan Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, in which he rather sweepingly divides art practices into ‘artlike art’ and ‘lifelike art’. Kaprow and Duchamp both occupy the art/life continuum but I think even they create too clean a relationship between them.

I agree that painting the objects has changed their context while keeping it the same – unless I’m getting two distinct kinds of contexts muddled. The objects can’t be placed in an art gallery, they have to be left about the house where they began. Rather than take a non-art object and put it in an art context like Duchamp’s Fountain, I think what I’ve done is to paint an art context around the object itself – very very closely around the object, using the pigment of the paint – so that the art context is continuous with the art object (it’s painted onto it) but barely impinges on the physical space around it.

I find it interesting that paint is the material of this context, given the art historical weight of painting. It’s interesting because, as I wrote in post #1, I came to this project because I said I wanted to ‘paint things’, that is, paint pictures of things.

I think this ties in to your second point: that the painted objects simulate replications of themselves (they look like casts of themselves rather than the real things). They look like representations of themselves, like paintings of themselves, only lacking a canvas. The effect is that the canvas is the space around them, which perhaps means the art context infects the whole house?

As for your last point – I’m afraid I threw the apple away when it went miserable and soft. The paint did conceal and slow its degredation, but I didn’t want to look at an Anya Gallaccio going on around the other ‘real’ apples in the bowl and so I let that object carry on its existence in the bin. Perhaps I threw it away because I don’t want the infection to spread. I can’t have my house being an art context, it’s my house, I have to live there, and I can’t have my life being an art object, it would be irksome.

I’m still thinking about these things I’ve been painting red, and why I’m not altogether convinced by them.

I’m keeping them in their original places around the house, and that’s a good start, but despite that they’ve still got some kind of frame around them. Perhaps the paint’s the frame, or their colour, or just the idea that they’re painted.

And then there’s the means of differentiation/representation/promotion, which is painting. It seems unsatisfying – unconvincing – to use a traditional art medium when my interest is life-things as opposed to art-things. As it stands, the red-painted things I’ve made might be interesting in the context of art and what art can do, but they aren’t really doing anything interesting to the world.

Perhaps the problem is the fact that the things are differentiated or promoted at all. No differentiation at all would convince me more, but I don’t know how to do this. Perhaps if I were following Kaprow by the letter I’d carry out the whole process without the paint, something like this:

1) take a stapler from the shelf I keep it on

2) consider it as a stapler

3) put it back on the shelf

4) when I see the stapler from now on, consider it as a stapler

5) do the same thing with everything

… Or, more simply,

1) consider everything

… Or, more generally,

1) contemplate my navel.

I’m not sure I like where this is going.

Recently I painted some things red.

It began because I wanted there to be more colour around, and so I said I want to paint things. I’d meant I wanted to paint pictures of things, so I could put them on the walls and brighten the room up a bit, but then I noticed the very good ambiguity of the words. You can paint an apple and end up with a picture of an apple, or you can paint an apple and end up with an apple covered in paint.

Either way what you end up with is out of real-world circulation. An apple in a picture is separate from the world because it’s a representation of an apple; an apple painted red is separated from the world because it doesn’t work as a real-world apple any more.

I bought some thick red gloss paint and I covered some things in paint. So far I’ve covered an apple, a stapler, a spoon, a plant pot, a jar of herbs, a cup, a saucer and a bottle of shampoo. I painted them into representations of themselves, and then when they were dry I put them back where they belonged before. Now, some of the things around the house are red and they don’t work. You can’t eat the apple, the stapler doesn’t staple, the lids of things no longer open, and so on.

Having these red things around the house is useful for me. The thing on the shelf in front of me was my stapler, and now it’s different. It stands for the stapler, as a placeholder for the space the stapler once took up. And because it no longer works as the stapler but rather represents it, it’s more attentive. It’s not a stapler, but the fact of a stapler.

A painting on a canvas could also represent a stapler, but you couldn’t put the canvas on the shelf in the same way as the stapler. You could depict the shelf in the painting, yes, but it would only defer the problem. You’d end up having to depict the whole room around the shelf, and the whole world around the room. If you could do that, you’d be getting somewhere. Everything would relate directly. But you can’t paint the whole world onto a canvas like a 1:1 scale map.

The red things around the house are useful for me because they’re representations, but the world around them is a real world rather than a represented world. They feel like a step in the direction of art that lacks a frame. They’re useful for me because I’m interested in the ‘blurring of art and life’, as Allan Kaprow would put it, and distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ modes and contexts of things and actions.

The red things are useful for me (and I keep imagining gloriously painting everything red.. would that be a 1:1 scale map of the world?), but I’m still not completely convinced by them.