Break the law, just short of breaking off communication entirely.

Dear Sirs

Forgive my negativity, but there seems to be some problems here, on my side and your side.

The problem is despite efforts to carry out rigorous investigation into specific ideas or problems, despite efforts to develop forms of notating that are both open and somehow strangely foreign, despite efforts to work, there seems little interest in in fact developing artistic practice that uses the speculative, the intimate, the spacing as a anything more than an idea or concept. Although art is often advertised as the place where one could manifest, think through, even suggest an alternative mode of accumulation this seems nothing more (more often than not) than talk. Because in the end there is always an agenda, and the agenda must be pushed. And we all know that statements spoken in the imperative are more easily perceptible than statements spoken with a sense of trepidation, spoken like a shuddering weather pattern that never settles, but is unsettling.

I will tell-you-what-I – am-doing-so-there-no-point-in-doing-it-anymore.

There seems to be a problem here, and that problem is something apparently I have to address. To be honest, I simply cannot take any more rejection. Any way, not clearly opposing intersections of opinion. Truthfully, I can’t bare opinion any longer.

I know that if I told stories that moved from a—b—c there would be a life for this or these interests of mine, but you see that’s where the problem comes in on my side. It’s not only the things, the things I think about that I want to rattle, but also the ways in which they are communicated. I won’t deign to say I am anything like anyone, I've already been described as watery, detached, diaphanous, compared to that “hard edged shadow”. I tried to suggest relations, relationships before and look where it got me: watery, detached, limp. To be honest, I find these adjectives confounding, what on earth does that mean? If I had TOLD you about a certain path, all those problems I encountered, “shared” would you feel I was more connected to what I do? If I had said, Oh look I found a thing, and now I’ll “share it “ with you, would that appear as more solid—everyone likes evidence you know. What on earth does it all mean?

I won’t deign to say I am anything like anyone, but perhaps one has to be angry sometimes, or at the minimum frustrated. But what on earth to do with all these watery emotions that float around in my detached and diaphanous self, clearly there seems a problem.

What I know is that antagonistic empty letters like this don’t help, and don’t “change” anything. But perhaps it bares consideration to think why I’m dong this.

Why is it that in the language of art, art making, artists, that we often feel so far on the edge? We already know we are the exception but does this have to become a costume? Do not write things in the state of anger, and break the law just short of breaking off communication entirely. Woops, I’ve done it! I’ve again said the words of someone else, but I am certain someone will point this out to me, let me know just how detached it is. Of that I am certain, there is always a someone who wants to help.

But in any case I’m working on a wonderful documentary about the founding fathers of a remote artistic commune, which consists of INTERVIEWS and some archival material cut out of magazines and put in vitrines and READING ROOM which opens and expands on the issues addressed in the documentary with A LOT of interviews. I will also lean some sticks against the wall, and work with you-tube to readdress how I talk.

Break the law, just short of breaking off communication entirely.

Yours &c.

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)