Letter to Alessa

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[A] “When I thought about what I could show you, what I could write you, I thought of this letter.”

[D] “We will take detours along the way tracing spaces in traces, spaces in places, traces in spaces, places in traces. We will have to trust we will find our way home because from there we go out to all other places. Let us linger here together at the threshold…”

[A] “In a letter, in a sentence there are 3 things I determine. The definite things, the names, the things yet to be resolved: the questions and the things that just don’t mean anything at all. I find myself paying attention to these pauses, silences and endpoints. I wonder if I can show you what I mean, I wonder about what we’re all doing and if our thoughts overwrite each other, whether you would hear what I am saying.

How often do we say: “I see what you mean”… well do you? I cannot see what you mean I can only imagine.”

[D] “In truth there is nothing I want to make you see, there is nothing I really mean and this nothing can never be exhausted. You made a distinction between hearing and listening just as I do between seeing and looking. Perception is an act of consumption in which we hazard nothing.”

You said: “When something is conclusive it means it never started; labour does not make a work and perhaps, you wrote, the first and last form is an empty bowl…” This made me entertain a fantasy of pointlessly making bowls which means labour could make a work but only as a device to understand the failure of creating an audience.

Ad Reinhardt

You wrote: Perhaps the only painting is black but there are endless possibilities in black. Old black, fresh black, lustrous black, dull black, emerald black, oil black, sunlight black, shadow black and the black of the lime tree in winter.

Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866

You wrote: Maybe the only score is silent. What does it mean to experience silence as the essence of language?. Being silent is not the same as being mute. Silence is the only form of articulation. This is the gift of language.

I read a story about a child and a house built out of small red bricks. When construction was complete the child squatted next to it, placed a pig inside it and carefully replaced the top. Occasionally she walked away from the enclosure but always returned, opening it carefully, looking inside, emptying or filling it. This was her universe. Then you wrote me a story about a red house, a model that came to be built for real in red brick, found like a little time machine although you couldn’t determine if it goes to the past or the future. There is something tragic about the kind of architectural model created on the kitchen table. A house of meetings but also departures, its walls urge you to remember your compulsion to forget.

What does it mean to inhabit something, to capture its music? You thought about a nautilus shell for a long time and I wondered how you could blend with the darkness of the sea…

                Dear Black Spot…

Gazing into your liquid emerald darkness suffused with silver halide crystals of light, sinking into your inky depths, enveloped in your perfect form, in a slumber dead to the world, an eternal caress wrapt in your tender abyss.

As I write to you I can sincerely say I have lived in this house although I cannot determine whether it is the past or the future. The ghostly sublime of a chair hovers in the background then I realised it never went away because it was never there in the first place. In the distance doors exploded from their origin, nothing is being asked or explained. A serene velocity at the mirrors edge hovers in the silver of the ground.

Symptoms manifested in the smashing of windows, the rehearsal of a ventriloquist act in empty rooms constructing an emotional temperature. I have stood under the darkening sky at the strike of madness where dead fingers dance, the dark matter of corporeal poetry: a shadow soundtrack of whispering grass kicking the air.

[A] “When we believe in a concept so deeply we might make a container for it over and over again…until the object might measure half the thought or the form smothers its nucleus. Just like a faucet that leaks [D: and there is comfort in this sound] concepts survive between half full and drowning.”

Piet Mondrian

[D] “Let us go, you and I beyond the perimeter where the Lime Tree is the tallest tree in sight, taller than the pines, the birches and willows, let us forget the names we give to the things we see.

There on the mossy bank of the lake I shall add my half empty to your half full and we shall wade out into its depths. We will forget that in spring and summer the Lime Tree was green all over and now in winter its branches are black, we will forget we are sad about that. We will forget because here in the lake we will be testing the concepts of surviving and drowning.”

You wrote: Perhaps an artist cannot live, but only die in what he or she creates. In reality this appears to be a trifle like a paper cut and ‘when this cut is made nothing is destroyed’, but beneath the work are the cuts, sharp, clean, deep. How do you obtain relief? Breathe and keep cutting.

[A] “I wonder are you bored because time is being consumed. Boredom is when what you want is elsewhere and you are obliged to wait for it, or wait without it.” [D] This absent content is a fragment that shines like gold. There is no sound we can run to in this prototype theatre; we can only act out to the sides.

Roland Barthes writes: ‘There is a scenography of waiting: I organize it, manipulate it, cut out a portion in time in which I shall mime the loss of the loved object”… the object yet to come, the object that should have come and didn’t, the object that might never come, “provoking  the effects  of a minor mourning.” A Lover’s Discourse, Waiting, P.37

I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. I have no sense of proportions. The being I am waiting for is not real. I create and re-create it over and over, starting from my capacity to love.

[A] “In a letter, in a sentence there are 3 things I determine. The definite things, the names, the things yet to be resolved: the questions and the things that just don’t mean anything at all. I find myself paying attention to these pauses, silences and endpoints.”

Fernando Pessoa writes “I think with my feelings and feel with my thoughts”.

[D]                         Do you see what I mean?… I imagine in this instance that you do.

Fig 1: Ad Reinhardt https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30264327612&cm_mmc=ggl-_-UK_Shopp_RareStandard-_-product_id=bi%3A%2030264327612-_-keyword=&gclid=Cj0KCQiAsoycBhC6ARIsAPPbeLtQgCUrkcC2Ctc-JHu1kkto0JtMevpaSmm_YV4-VyK3iwGtVb4SEg4aAqODEALw_wcB (accessed 27/11/22)

Fig 2:  Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866 https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/woman-with-a-parrot/jgHoAxofXjqd_Q?hl=en-GB accessed 27/11/22)

Fig 3: Mondrian https://www.nicholashedges.uk/drawing/mondrians-trees/ (accessed27/11/22)

Currently Reading – Nadja, André Breton

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Léona Delcourt (Nadja), 1920s. Source: Jacques Rigaut

“One of the most iconic works of the French surrealist movement begins with the question “Who am I?“

It is based on Breton’s actual interactions with a young woman, Nadja (actually Léona Camille Ghislaine Delacourt 1902–1941),[1] over the course of ten days, and is presumed to be a semi autobiographical description of his relationship with a patient of Pierre Janet. The book’s non-linear structure is grounded in reality by references to other Paris surrealists and includes 44 photographs.

The narrator, named André, ruminates on a number of Surrealist principles, before ultimately commencing on a narrative account, generally linear, of his brief ten-day affair with the titular character Nadja. She is so named “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning,” but her name might also evoke the Spanish “Nadie,” which means “No one.” The narrator becomes obsessed with this woman with whom he, upon a chance encounter while walking through the street, strikes up conversation immediately. He becomes reliant on daily rendezvous, occasionally culminating in romance (a kiss here and there). His true fascination with Nadja, however, is her vision of the world, which is often provoked through a discussion of the work of a number of Surrealist artists, including himself. While her understanding of existence subverts the rigidly authoritarian quotidian, it is later discovered that she is mad and belongs in a sanitarium. After Nadja reveals too many details of her past life, she in a sense becomes demystified, and the narrator realizes that he cannot continue their relationship.

In the remaining quarter of the text, André distances himself from her corporeal form and descends into a meandering rumination on her absence, so much so that one wonders if her absence offers him greater inspiration than does her presence. It is, after all, the reification and materialization of Nadja as an ordinary person that André ultimately despises and cannot tolerate to the point of inducing tears. There is something about the closeness once felt between the narrator and Nadja that indicated a depth beyond the limits of conscious rationality, waking logic, and sane operations of the everyday. There is something essentially “mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering” about her; this reinforces the notion that their propinquity serves only to remind André of Nadja’s impenetrability. Her eventual recession into absence is the fundamental concern of this text, an absence that permits Nadja to live freely in André’s conscious and unconscious, seemingly unbridled, maintaining her paradoxical role as both present and absent. With Nadja’s past fixed within his own memory and consciousness, the narrator is awakened to the impenetrability of reality and perceives a particularly ghostly residue peeking from under its thin veil. Thus, he might better put into practice his theory of Surrealism, predicated on the dreaminess of the experience of reality within reality itself.”

Text quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadja_(novel) (accessed 28/11/22)

Image reproduced from https://artandthoughts.fr/2014/02/06/andre-bretons-nadja/ (accessed 28/11/22)

The Contingent Object

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Richard Serra. Joe: Torqued Spiral, 2000. Weatherproof steel. 13 ½ x 45 x 36 ½ feet. Plate thickness: 2 inches. Collection of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Saint Louis. Photo by Dirk Reinartz. © 2008 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society, New York.

Abstract forms and spatial experience

The function of copying or transcription

The play between abstraction and representation,

Equivalents – Fall

Artifacts and relics.

The cast and the copy; a function of authorship and reproduction.

Participation as a function of the original

Participation as an act of design or arrangement

Participation as a challenge to authority,

Participation as a vehicle for heterogeneity

Avalanche

Or performance

Of the fragmented mark

Of the symbolic equivalent

Of play between absence and presence

Performing the failure of the mark or trace of bodily action

The Shadow [Detective]

Fingerprint

The Shadow [Detective] collecting commodities and subjects as a basis for subsequent practices.

Slumber

Reproduction as a basis for quotation and reference

Reproduction as mediation and transformation of

Perpetual Photos and Plaster Surrogates

Originals decay or deteriorate.

Mortar and Pestle

Diagrams construct an ephemeral site in place of the object

Diagrams as a form of delay

Diagrams as a form of intent:  

Viewing Matters, Face to Face in the Public Toilets

‘May I Help You?’

‘Yes, I would like a bag of donuts and 3 urinals please.’

 ‘Not Here’

Avalanche

Lick, Lather and Gnaw at impermanence as the index

Lick, Lather and Gnaw at the contingent object

Lick, Lather and Gnaw at the experience

Lick Lather and Gnaw at the material evidence of authenticity

Gnaw at organic materials

Gnaw at chocolate, lard and soap

And yet still there looms a galvanized iron wall and a straight single tube where there dances the

Preserved Head of a Bearded Woman decorated with a String of Puppies

Puppies which need a lot of care and attention

What is this Strange Fruit [for David]?

Painted Bronze, Fountain Meltdown

The scrap metal process separates idea from material truth: an Island within an Island

No amount of Litanies can stop this Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal

The artist’s hand now becomes an object of desire along with Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals.

Drowned Monuments and Shared Fate; a function of external evidence like Every Building on the Sunset Strip

Short Circuit – Casting, Splashing, Torqued Ellipses

a simple ‘verb list’

Remade readymades,

Readymade readymades

Eureka!

Image reproduced from https://imagejournal.org/article/gravity-and-grace/ (accessed 25/11/22)

Micro Critique Paper No.4

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Introduction: Analysis of the following articles have revealed problems in defining the field of chorography as well as methods, theories and insights which warrant further examination. These summaries identify, illuminate and reflect on these issues and their implications in theory and practice.

Paper 4: Curry, M. (2005) “Toward A Geography of a World Without Maps: Lessons From Ptolemy And Postal Codes”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers [online] 95 (3), 680-691. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00481.x/abstract [5th October 2015]

Ptolemy’s world map. This map of the world is from an edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’, published in 1513 by German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller (c.1470-1520)

Curry’s paper is concerned with the conflation of place and space in contemporary discourse which commonly obfuscate and erase their differences. His primary aim is to elaborate upon the terms chorography, topography and geography and delineate their differences by examining their ‘technologies and practices’. He suggests chorography is limited to the geographer’s knowledge, clearly in the context of this research this is not the case and in his own words ‘it is alive and well.’ Curry argues these geographic ways of knowing each have their own objects of study; region, place and the earth’s surface.  He is critical of both their neglect in discussions of place or analyses which focus on scale in relation to these concepts as opposed to form and function. Curry employs a complex analogy of the invention of the US ZIP code to illuminate his argument.

Curry compares and contrasts these terms by tracing and re-interpreting their origins to distinguish them from contemporary understandings. He locates chorography and topography within foundational concepts of place and memory. Chorography was a qualitative way of interpreting the world, both celestial and terrestrial, and this knowledge was located in ‘signs or symbols’ which aimed to perceive relations ‘between events, places and the times of their occurrence’.  He relocates topography’s association with mapping by placing it in the oral tradition and the ‘art of memory’. In this context places are created, narrated, performed and re-formed through symbolic associations. Place and experience are coextensive with each other and this element of the mnemonic has already been established independently in prior research.

For Curry the importance of this argument is not simply a matter of different scales of apprehension, but more significantly is intrinsically linked to repositories of knowledge, dissemination and retrieval. He argues space was ‘invented’ against the backdrop of place, due to emergent technologies necessitated by an increase in information, leading to an erasure of the chorographic and topographic by the geographic. Chorography and topography represent human patterns of knowing and belonging in contrast to the panoptic vision of geography. The implications of this observation equate to an erasure of memory practices and a movement from an embodied and emplaced performance of knowledge to its commodification. Places are increasingly mediated by technology and this also applies to the digital records of archaeological fieldwork. For instance when I was introduced to archaeological fieldwork at Erddig, Wales the corresponding planar database managed by the Historic Buildings, Sites and Monuments Record comprises 24 topographic views of each location in the field; a complex palimpsest inconceivable in a single view. This centralization of information which allows for the preservation of heritage data becomes an abstracted space of typology and categorization devoid of the people that inhabited them or the places that created them.

Curry’s analogy of the standardisation of the ZIP code can, in the context of this paper, be equated with geography reaching its empirical, scientific, mathematical and spatial exactitude in the art of cartography. This organisation of geographical knowledge, in the case of the ZIP code, privileges spatial points and co-ordinates whereby the particularities of place, regions, difference, the local and thus topography and chorography are subsumed and erased by spatial systematisation, the realm of demographics and the global organisation of information.

Image reproduced from https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/428654/view/ptolemy-s-world-map-16th-century (accessed 03/11/22)

Placeways Glossary

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Cacotope: A bad place.

Chorophilia: Love of place.

Energy: The capacity to cause changes in interest, feeling or action

Expressive Intelligibility: Making sense through a whole experience of perceptions, ideas, images, dramatic encounters and stories; knowledge with its centre in the life of feeling.

Expressive space: A specific milieu laden with emotional and symbolic features of experience: a place that contains feelings and meanings, which may be expressed through objects, structures, forms, surfaces, images, stories, myths, memories and dreams.

Pathetecture: The process of building feelings and meanings by the arrangement of material objects, especially through construction, dilapidation, and excavation.

Periegete: A guide to a place.

Place: A location of experience; the container of shapes, power, feelings, and meanings.

Ruins: Physical remains shaping a location of experience that is past but not completed.

Structure of mutual immanence: The system of effective presences dwelling together in a place.

Theoria: An ancient way of grasping experience that involves all the senses and feelings.

Therapeia: Close attendance.

Theraputae: People who give close attendance.

Topistics: A holistic mode of enquiry designed to make the identity, character, and experience of a place intelligible.

Topoclasm: Destruction of a place.

Topomorphic revolution: A fundamental change in a mode of dwelling together in a place.

Topotherapy: The responsive dwelling, close attendance, cultivation and care of a place.

Wilderness: A location of unsettled experience.

Walter, E,V. (1998) Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, USA: UNC Press Books. p.215