Nib/Brute, and Pencil/Sharpen Her
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Andy Roche and I’s cycle of films, Bardic Visions From Britain and the Americas/Hands Across the Water, can now be found together in one place. The four films are also printed onto one 16mm reel, with optical sound. This reel was shown for the first time at Roots and Culture gallery in Chicago, where Andy will have a show later this year.
When the work was first shown we produced a double sided acetate edition of the titles (each film has one title by each of us), which also appear as title-cards within the films. Both sides of this sheet can be seen here.
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In reference to the previous entry, I have been thinking about the sense of indeterminacy in the text of The Fielders in part due to having begun writing something else, another kind of book, about which I will say as little as possible now. This reticence is entirely contrary to my own instincts, and the nature of this website.
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The Fielders, a novel (12 chapters and a postscript).
I have very recently finished writing the novel that is mentioned, somewhat elliptically, in previous entries (or dispatches, or indeed posts). Whilst the text remains in the indeterminate state of having been written, but having not been published, and only read by very few people, I may occasionally make chapters of The Fielders available in PDF form. The first chapter is here. If a hypothetical reader happens to be so curious, puzzled or infuriated that they wish to read it a greater speed than this occasional and fragmented means of publication, they may contact me by the email address at the top of this page to negotiate another sort of delivery.
On a more general note, the possibility of ‘publication’ by these means raises the question of the literary ethic of the writing. Or perhaps I mean ethos; the spirit in which the text is written. The novel is, to a degree, about the distribution of language and text, and a chaotic and almost accidental sequence of intertextual collisions, diversions, dissolutions and translations. Although the novel as a whole is meant as a book, in the most conventional sense of the idea, it is also a book made up of the structural principles of other books, and of the gathering together of narrators, plots, genres and dialects. But given its beginning, that which is set out in the first chapter, it seems appropriate to at least make its founding public document available in a form that is freely available but may quite easily never be found or read.
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Whilst printing, pools and marks of shellac remind me that I have very little interest in painting…
… as do blankets.
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Vltavín (Clapton), super-eight film transferred to video, with sound.
A work from the Vltavín series, originating on film. The soundtrack is an early arrangement of the chord sequence to a song by The Margins, entitled Keine Problemo, which in its final version includes the chords to the chorus of Lamplight by the Bee Gees as its bridge. In this Vltavín the image is barely visible, and the film-gate is badly framed in the transfer. The previous films in the series are afflicted by an excess of light, whereas this one is weighed down by gloom.
Another, new film in the series will feature in the evening of artist’s film screenings curated by G. Leddington - Between the Plotter and the Plot - at the Voorkammer in Lier later this month.
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Further, Darker and Last Thoughts on the Number Twelve
Somewhere below, writing about the series of print works derived from the plates I used to make the triptych Thoughts on the Number Twelve, I say that they will form the basis of a film. I am not sure that they will, although this short clip is a (technically) failed experiment into what that film might be.
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The Troubles With Barcelona, super-eight film transferred to video, with sound.
This is the final work I made during a residency in Barcelona, described numerous times below in regards to the videos, prints, talks and music made there. During the three weeks of the residency I used a super-eight camera rather like a stills camera, shooting at odd moments, and with only one cartridge for the entire time. The film describes, in an elliptical way, the conversations and images that were the result of the residency, and in many ways were the residency. As well as the presence of Gary Leddington and Maurice Carlin (and their words and works), the film also contains rehearsals or miniature versions of the works I made there. The Troubles With Art, the quasi-documentary film I showed at La Escocesa, lends part of its name, although the focus is slightly broadened here, out onto the streets of rage (in fact, streets entirely without rage. But one of Carlin’s works made use of Streets of Rage itself) beyond the walls of studio building. Richard Hamilton’s work about ‘The Troubles’ became an odd, displaced theme in our conversations, in some sort of Hamiltonian nexus that touched on Ireland, mark-making, computer imagery, wild cats, the Pakistan versus England test series, the Berlin Biennial of 2010, the nature of print editions (the condition of edition, in other words), Sherlock Holmes, minimalism, an imagined appearance by the artist Yuko Mohri in Byker Grove, Acadian Driftwood, crusty stumps of bread and Pavement. With the rotten device of a very basic super-eight camera, I’ve now said all of this more than twice.
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The Space of the Page in the Writing of Don DeLillo, or The Writer as Advanced Artist
These images are of the final hardback version of my PhD thesis, completed last year but only bound very recently. I will, perhaps, make available at some point an electronic version of the thesis, and will introduce it in greater detail then. In short, though, the thesis proposes that Don DeLillo’s novel produce artworks, and the space for artworks, in a manner analogous to the ‘advanced-art’ practises described in the art-historical writings of Thomas Crow, especially but not exclusively the works of Christopher Williams. However, after lengthy chapters establishing this thesis, and analysing the novel Libra through it, the dissertation then takes a more material and bibliophilic turn, with a text and paper artwork imbedded into the ‘academic’ text of the whole. This work is a series of reproductions of stages of DeLillo’s drafting process, made using a typewriter (as he did). The source material for these reproductions is the DeLillo collection at the Ransom Center library at the University of Texas, in Austin, where I spent several weeks amongst the research papers and drafts used to write Libra.
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Hard Lemon and Soft Wood, screen-print on Magnani paper, edition of 3.
This is the print work I showed in Barcelona, and which began the series of screen-prints described in several entries below. The superimposed images are of a lemon that had become hard, and a piece of wood that had become soft. In fact, the print shown here is an artist’s proof outside of the edition, in which a fragment of the wood is missing. It was this print, rather than one of the edition, that was actually shown at La Escocesa. The printing was done by the redoubtable Alejandra Alonso of EL.TA (avec un grand merci a Fabien pour son travail avec les ecrans).
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From a few years ago, one of my Adjacent Primaries lithographic prints in a drying rack. My father’s computer had a kind of meltdown, and reset itself leaving this photograph on its desktop; a photograph I didn’t know that I had taken.
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Vltavín (Hackney), video with sound.
The second in the series of video works proposed several entries below, in the description of Vltavín (Poble Nou).
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Knäckebröd and Emerald Pill (Raygun raised aloft), screen-print on BFK Rives paper, edition of two.
This is the third in the series of screen-prints superimposing objects, after Hard Lemon and Soft Wood, and Liquorice Patch. Those two are described below. The objects in this print, however, are not ‘themselves’, in the sense that the screens are not derived from photographs of objects taken by me, but are taken from photographs of Claes Oldenburg multiple-objects. The Oldenburg crisp-bread was in cast iron, and the pill in painted aluminium, so the colours are reversed.
This work is dedicated wholeheartedly to the artist and teacher David Skingle, who sadly died very recently. One of our last conversations was regarding the nature of editions, objects being depicted in (these) editions (of mine), and about Oldenburg’s editions of objects themselves. I had wished to dedicate this work to him anyway, before hearing the sad news. It happened by accident, or fortune perhaps, that Oldenburg’s shadow was triangulated in the making of the work - the arrangement of the two objects, I realized afterwards, resembles the Raygun works. At least, it fits the criterion of an arrangement of approximate right-angles. This raygun, however, is raised to the heavens in salute.
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Liquorice Patch, screen-print on Arches 88, edition of two.
This work is the second in a loose series that begins with Hard Lemon and Soft Wood (which is described somewhere below, and better photos of which will be taken when it is returned from Barcelona). The puncture-repair patch is printed in black, and the liquorice-stick is printed in the orange colour of the edges of Rema Tip-Top patches. The cross-pollination between the two, both materially and conceptually, is inexact.
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