What The Matter Is

This month I’ve spent some happy hours reading the Artists Talking blogs. I’ve been picking a “Choice Blog” for the month, and landed gladly upon David Minton (see this page here).

Separately, I’ve been struck by the role of the studio in many of the blogs: it appears variously as a place separate from the proper bits of life; the only place where proper life happens; a place where mistakes are allowed and enjoyed; a place where things are still; where things are never still; where things stay and wait until the artist next returns. (Do the things dance around like Woody and Buzz while we’re away, and flop back down in naturalistic poses just as we open the door? Wouldn’t that be nice. Maybe we should spend more time out of our studios to let the artworks play on their owns.)

I don’t seem to have a studio. I work at home, at the end of a room with my desk and my shelves and a view of branches and leaves and birds. I love the view and the desk and the shelves. When I come upstairs with my teapot and a couple of books I can stay here for hours and Mean Business. But there are also days when I don’t quite make it: I stay downstairs at another table, I de-fur the kettle, I linger online, I flap up and down the stairs distractedly doing odd jobs unnecessarily slowly. I ask myself whether things would be different if I had a specific medium that I knew I worked in.

Imagine I were a painter. I think if I were a painter I would know that paint brushes, paint and something flat would make a good start. I imagine I could go to a room and spend time with these three things, and that would already be something. I wouldn’t even need to paint. I could mix the paint, or smell the paint, or look at the grain of the canvas, run my fingernail across the bristles of the brushes, transfer bits of paint between canvasses using these bristles.. is that what it’s like? Perhaps not. I’ve never been a painter. As a painter, I imagine I would also paint actual paintings, but I imagine the time I spent with my equipment would count too.

With what I do, what counts? What doesn’t count? Since I don’t have a specific medium, perhaps choosing which teabag to have today is a thing that counts. It’s a slippery slope. It isn’t that choosing the teabag is itself ART (hello Allan Kaprow) any more than smelling the paint is painting – but it’s part of the work. I mean the verb of the work not the noun.

Perhaps one of the things writing a blog can do is make the teabag count. This is a platform for artists talking. If I write about the teabag, then it’s the voice an artist writing about the teabag. The teabag becomes part of my story about my practice. Perhaps the blog serves in lieu of a real studio: by writing things down in here I can get them to count. It’s comforting but I’m ambivalent about its effect- it’s just a story after all.

In the closing pages of Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre’s protagonist listens for the last time to a voice singing on a familiar gramophone record, and he writes:

“Couldn’t I try … Naturally, it wouldn’t be a question of a tune … But couldn’t I in another medium? … It would have to be a book: I don’t know how to do anything else. But not a history book: history talks about what has existed – an existent can never justify the existence of another existent. […] Another kind of book. I don’t quite know what kind – but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, something which didn’t quite exist, which was above existence. The sort of story, for example, which could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence.” (1938; trans 1965, p. 252)

Emphasis mine. TEXT AS MACHINE.

Lately there are always birds outside my window.

Fitfully watching these birds as I approached a writing deadline last month I was continually distracted by the thought that they looked a good deal better equipped for writing than me. The birds have certain ways of being that I think would lend themselves to the practice of writing. Ways of organizing ideas, putting sounds together, getting priorities in order. I’d like to learn about writing from these birds. I don’t know how to begin.

So I’ve been trying to approach the birds via the smoother detours of other non-writing practices: human practices rather than avian ones, but physical, material, manual practices distinct from writing by their direct interaction with the physical properties of the world. Writing like bottle collecting. Writing like potholing. Writing like ornithology. Writing like repairing drains.

On Friday night at The Pigeon Wing I read a few extracts from books on topics like these, manhandled into instructions for writing. I’ve scanned a couple of examples to post here.

Over the coming month I’m writing at The Pigeon Wing as part of the WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION programme, and I hope to put some of these instructions into practice while I’m there.

A line describing a curve:

Procrastinating on Moday, looking out of the window: