I guess there would be a question here somewhere about internalisation.

Positions

Clearly it is the exception.

These images, the one of the woman in the installation, for some reason I can't find a decent version---but none the less, this image of the woman, the artist in her installation preparing for an interview with national television seems to me to articulate some kind of positioning that may be where we are now---a circling, a watching, but a constant estranging or separating.

These image are ones I've been interested in for a while now, and I've wondered how to work with them. But perhaps through this sate of positioning is one way? I took these from the Hocken Collections in Dunedin, NZ. The Hocken somehow co-hosts NZs longest running artist in residency programme, it is also prestigious. The residency is named after Frances Hodgkins, who for many years had two pubic city galleries- Dunedin and Auckland-- dedicated almost entirely to collecting her work and her work alone through their aquistions budget (along side her they collected the work of Colin McCahon who had that retropsective at the Stedelijk in 2002, initiated by Rudi Fuchs in 2002). But the point was, this residency is somehow co-hosted by the Hocken Collections (you remember this image from Technocratic Openess Free Aggression?) and at the end of the time you "get to have a show at the gallery!" This photo was taken in 1982, a few years after her show, she is reinstalling and preparing for the interview. Entry to another position, that is beyond exception and in its own terms.What are those terms?

First lets start with a new colour: green?

NEW LANGUAGE

Finding anything

There is a poem I like to repeat form time to time, it's called Forerunners by Charles Brasch, a NZ poet and publisher. I never remember it in it's entirety, all I remember is 'fore runners, they came before us'.

The other thing about that empty table, is it is still. It is also empty. An empty still table. Strangely attractive. I wanted to look at it again as I spoke to a lingust yesterday about sign language- the form (shape) is equivilant with consonants, and the movement is equivelant with vowels. The movement is the vowel, the stillness is the consonant. One requires both for tranmission.

Empty table, rattle my head

meeting point

Hi Lee,
I'm a little bit tight with my schedule, but I'd like to give you some clue of what I could do in the context of the show at the shop. Concerning ideas about silence, I have some texts lying around that are specifically dealing with this topic and of which I know had some influence in the work I'm making now, but I need some piece and quiet to gather my thoughts. I make the proposals sound quite concrete, but they are nevertheless still very open for change. In my experience this concrete way of putting things can help speed up the process. Let's see...


Sign: Meeting point


stool without seat


wavy line

Proposal I
Group of sculptures at the spam-shop:
- wavy line as graffiti on the wall parallel to the stairs that lead to the second floor
- suspended triangular sign, "trefpunt", painted wood, blue/yellow
- stool
- divider wall with halogen industrial lamp, wood, hemp, glossy mint-green paint
- playing on plastic spacy 50's video monitor downstairs; video 'scrap'






Proposal II

- 3 wasco drawings or ink-jet print
- divider wall, mint green, halogen lamp
- light, sort of floating, wooden sculpture of table game
- 'scrap' video, same monitor as in proposal I


table game


drawings (they are supposed to be horizontal)

Waiting

One could deprive everything and also completely give over to a kind of imagined power through a waiting. but by now an idea of waiting is probably a bit fashionable and not really what we mean.. "Oh! I'm so exhuasted all the time etc."

Several short systems:

Take dust jacket off

Collect all images

Relaxation

Deny everything

Hyper ventilation

Lying on the ground under a table

Table falls on top of you and you can't move

Smoke starts

Whole place catches on fire

Black Box

further-further to deprivation

I keep on thinking how freezing to a pose and disrupting the archive could be related. Perhaps what really happens in the situation that Pavel describes (maybe there are more thinkable scenarios) is that through freezing the pose, the camera becomes part of the or interferes with the script. Applying that same language, thus speaking of role-change in approach to the archive or scripted material (history), perhaps its possible to say that to freeze is a an expression of the desire to interfere with this script.

I am still not able to answer your question who or what changes role in the performance situation or imagine how 'it' could perform. I can only attempt to imagine 'it' performing, when I draw back on moments in preparation to work with a certain material, hence this crazy talk about transcendence.

I was scanning through an article by Flusser, printed in F.R. David (with the fish), I think you own a copy as well. In it a nice alternative is given to how Pavel speaks about the power of imagination. Flusser says an inversion has taken place of the historical roles of reason and imagination. That history /writing /reason instead of explaining and critcising the imagination, has become subservient to image making. That (in the worst case) writers write scripts for new images, so called techno-images and this cycle becomes a kind of 'eternal return of life in apparatus that progresses by its own inertia'. This is a very black-and-black summary, but I feel more for this vision of imagination then Pavel's. My own interpretation of this short text on an intuitive level goes hand in hand with my experience with the government archive and social service. The role that objects play in the images that document the Social Service around it's instigation in the '60s, perform a rational, divisional, hierarchical, standardized function or sometimes frustrating relation between user and provider. In the present situation, co-existant to some of these still present 'older' objects, is a much more irrational image cycle at hand, one that seems to make physical this notion of techno-imagination: 'a tecnnical progresss that has become autonomous of human decision'. They are images of people performing, personalised models. I didn't know how to call this phenomenon, still don't, it becomes too easily a judgement; but some kind of temporal cyclical time, with no sense of history. (obviously)

Back to freezing, Flusser also talks about a black box which feeds on history, text or script (lineair time) and freezes it into techno-images (cyclical time). He then asks himself how and if this can/should be resisted. Before reading any further, I let my imagination flow unobstructedly and imagined us in front of this black box, before the histories and texts are devoured, posing before it, maybe becoming script ourselves and then many possible ends:
- devoured by the black box
- unmasking the script (that it is in fact scripted), then devoured by the black box

Perhaps I can wear my dust-jacket on the opening and hang yours on the wall in the Transmission gallery, as evidence of our collaboration and your absent presence?

I like this object (in combination with a mirror), maybe it's something to keep in mind as a form for the booklet or a photo-album (ruth at work/ touching objects)

I had interpreted your photograph of the light obscuring your face as an intentional light flash from a lamp pointed towards the camera. Could this dual reading, between determination and failure be similar to the relation between performance and pose? Performance, carrying the progressive connotation of presence instead of representation, while posing as an attempt to resemble oneself is always doomed to fail?

"Posing is like waiting for a moment, the shot, of which one knows nothing except that it must be the 'right' moment. It's like a simple yet obscure emergency, the emergency of having to resemble oneself at a specific moment, that will occur, which always occurs almost-now, always quite soon, always at the risk of coming to early or too late"

So, in response to this quote, maybe in approaching the material that we want to work with, we create a state of emergency/ a moment; pose to let the material 'perform'. (I'm actually always a bit scared to use performing in connection to objects or material although I am very interested in their hieroglyphic representation of social relations, if that's what happens in the drawings...)

I like when illumination fails (or as in this case is in excess and consequently fails).

Marina sent this image of the face down woman, and above a nice comment my friend Ruben made about the photo of me with my flash covering my face....