The Chamber of Silence

01

Separation

Untitled © Denise Startin

“I can only find myself as far as I regard myself as a diapason-subject, as a living tuning fork that must be held right in front of a loud speaker in order to detect a possible resonance. The world as soul opens itself according to a place: a movement is needed to find the position that renews me. The soul and the world are always one, and always new. (If indeed they are there).

For often there are dead spots

Every sound body has them […] those places on the neck of a guitar that will not resonate to the vibrations of the strings – places where, locally, resonance will be forever extinguished. Similarly there are zones in my body that are irresponsive to the music out there – occasionally this concerns my whole body. Outside of resonance my body is a mere object, a mass, a cadaver. It is world-less, place-less, and merely an object in homogenous space. A thing among things, it is then like a heart that has stopped bleeding, a resonance that has been extinguished, an interval that has imploded, or a syncope that has left it’s orbit…”

Cont’d: An absent presence the body (anaesthetized) and the subject (evacuated) are trave[ai]lling on a continuum from the ecstatic to the forensic subject, a euphoric memory fettered, crippled, occasioned by the touch of death.

Quoted text reproduced from Lyrical Bodies: Music and the Extension of the Soul by Sander van Maas, quoted in Chrono-Topologies: Hybrid Spatialities and Multiple Temporalities, Ed. Leslie Kavanaugh, 2010, p.160.

Goodbye to all that

Wish you were here © Denise Startin

Wish you were here © Denise Startin

“Resolve to perform what you ought, perform without fail what you resolve” Benjamin Franklin, polymath

Resolve: decide with an effort of will, separate the component parts of, make clear, settle. conclude, determine, intend, disentangle, explain, solve, unravel…
Resolute: firm in purpose, bold, constant, determined, dogged, persevering, purposeful, steadfast, undaunted, unflinching, unshaken, unwavering
Resolution: Declaration, determination, intention, purpose, firmness of conduct or character, act of resolving
Actions: Be, be, be, Do, do, do, Commit, commit, commit, Act, act, act, Reflect, reflect, reflect, Repeat, repeat, repeat, Anon [‘anon anon’]

‘It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little

– do what you can!”  Sydney Smith, English Writer and Clergyman

Yours for a resolute 2015

Dmonogram1

Quotes reproduced from http://www.famous-quotes.com/author.php?page=1&total=40&aid=6825

Dangling Modifiers & A Curious Love Letter, Micro Performance Lectures, Ragley Hall

Dangling Modifiers & A Curious Love Letter, Micro performance Lectures, Warwickshire Open Studios, Ragley Hall, Warks

Dangling Modifiers & A Curious Love Letter, Micro Performance Lectures, Warwickshire Open Studios, Ragley Hall, Warks

 [Briefly she enters another’s space becoming a site of inscription like the blank page…
he advances towards her with short, sharp stabbing motions. Can she subject her
sensuous gesture to his nervous tic? Following the curve of her S she drops down
heavily into its base disappearing from his line of site. She sways at the bottom before
rising and finds that he has become a woodpecker, his nervous tic feverishly
inscribing the trunk of a tree.]

“Dangling Modifiers” is the textual re-performance of a physical performance. High on a hilltop in the Lake District Denise engaged in an improvised choreography attempting to dance with the artist Paul Klee (1879-1940); to coax the performer’s body and Klee’s silent drawing into speech . Klee’s rhythmic line is expressive, lyrical, poetic and figurative evoking transcriptions of music. “The letter is not directed to the body; the line however, exists only through the echo it will encounter in other bodies where it will generate itself as a danceable volume, polyphony, scene, texture, at palpitating fingertips…” [1]. Positively performing a Kleeché  (taking a line for a walk), Paul Klee’s Drawing Knotted, 1920 was utilised as the performative score translating the drawing into movement by falling, jittering, twisting, snaking, weaving and shimmying on a hilltop like a deranged walker.

“Echo who cannot be silent when another speaks. Echo who cannot speak at all unless another has spoken. Echo who always answers back.” [2]

A Curious Love Letter is equally a failed attempt at speech, letters of love to an absent and unreachable addressee, based on an original reading of a performed letter at which Denise was absent. Separated by distance, time, space and location Denise has ventriloquised the original speakers voice into her own, reconstructing and miming the unheard text. Other voices and figures have been incorporated including artists Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian & Michael Craig-Martin and literary figures such as Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes and Fernando Pessoa. The result is a polyphonic word and image divigation and a very curious love letter indeed.

Dates & Times: Saturday 5 th July 2pm & 3pm, Sunday 6th July 2pm & 3pm – Saturday 12th July 2pm & 3pm, Sunday 13th July 2pm & 3pm.

[1] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Driftworks, Semiotext(e), Inc, (Columbia University: New York, 1984), p.86/87.
[2] Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1997), p.75/77.