Also in the papers this week

In the Observer colour supp, Gavin Turk, with his new line of stitched works --- referencing embroideries by Boetti?

-- or colour squares by Richter?

I like what he says: "It's a careful balance being an artist - being clever enough to have an idea and stupid enough to go ahead and actually make the idea a reality." And especially: "I care what my peers think of my work. Art is a dialogue - a living, growing, breathing language - and it's great to have people around who you can have that conversation with."

This is Air & Sea, spelling out his name in English and Farsi -

part of his show till 20 April in London.

And for a look inside his studio, go here (thanks to Jane for the link).

Pseudo-erasure

Or is it reverse erasure? Or not erasure at all?

Puts me in mind of "the scanning line" which goes across a tv or computer screen, replenishing the display, and is unable to translate/transmit some parts of what it "sees". Read the article here. ("Fridge magnet tagline"?)

Book du jour - letterpress progress

The plan was to have the text appearing, like a spreading stain or a puddle - but from where, the middle or the top or...? On re-reading the text I found the word "seeped" right near the end so that solved the problem. 

Working it out roughly on the computer, totally disregarding the line breaks in the typeset version -

Getting to grips with it on galley -

I printed onto tracing paper, so that when the pages were turned the back of the page would look like the way the type had been set - the letter on the bottom with the "top" as a shadow on the previous page -

 At the last session I discovered the lack of As and Es -- and indeed no more in Times 18pt could be found, even in the repository of undistributed type, left by students as far back as 2009. It was "an education" to try to find "my" letters among the many trays of abandonned projects. I needed 10 Es and 5 As, and to get round this shortfall am using italic, which means entire words, higher up in the text, have been made italic. I think it will look horrible and it's not what I wanted with the text, but hey, this is the learning phase! I shall persevere and see what comes of it, and what emerges in terms of doing it better next time.

What, though, happened when I set the second line ... what rogue word slipped in (or got left out of the text I worked with on screen, copied from the electronic file of Mary Ruefle's text)? Next letterpress session is Thursday, but I might have to drop in earlier and have a look.

Another technical problem - I managed to get the lines packed out so they stay (quite) tight - it really shows with the flat surfaces of the "words" - but the bottom lines are looking very uneven. When you start learning something, there's SO much to pay attention to!

The text is about erasure, but for the transparent pages to work, the opposite process is happening - instead of disappearing, the words are appearing. Could this be called "de-erasure" ... hmm, derasure (d-erasure? d'erasure?) - interestingly, deradere is the Latin for to smooth, to rub off, wipe - we are going in circles...

Doorknob delight

Gorgeous, but we left them in the shop - prices range from £50 to £85 for a pair of doorknobs...

Quote for the day

"It's important not to do that which does not need to be done!!" - Elizabeth Barton in relation to time management.


Another quote from her: "Have scissors everywhere."

The "scissors spider", though, is by Christopher Locke -

It's made of scissors confiscated by airport security and was found here.

Book du jour

The plan was to make a back to back accordion book, as seen in Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books (rather like this one) but I got a bit lazy about the length of paper used - this is only an experiment, right?

First, something for the back/inside of the pages - the text would be coming from the maths exhibition catalogue, so I used the French title. It looked very bold when it was the only thing on the page, but almost completely disappeared in the finished book, obscured by the darker pen soaking through the paper -

Each strip is written in four sections, so actually reading the text is initially tricky. In between the lines are the titles of the two pieces, both written by Mischa Gromov  (who said elsewhere, "it is very difficult to write books with a wide appeal, and very few mathematicians are actually able to do that. You have to know things very well and understand them very deeply to present them in the most evident way") - not that the text is mathematical; more philosophical and relevant to the exhibition. The larger writing in finer pen is the title, much repeated -

In trying to find aesthetic ways to present handwritten texts, I'm trying out various writing materials and book structures. The texts chosen for the experiments are ones that I enjoy reading slowly, and thinking about as I write (though too much thinking does lead to mistakes in the copying). If this develops, the text and its presentation should be in harmony - but I'm not yet clear on what that involves. Maybe the work with type (choosing style, size, spacing - and paper) will feed in to this.

The original plan was to make the text illegible ... I seem to be losing sight of that, or rather it conflicts with my desire to have interesting text readable.

Builders in the house

It's been five long weeks, rather than the estimated two - and the builder(s) are still here. The amount of their tools in my studio has diminished a bit, though not enough to allow easy access to the sewing machine. I've been sitting by the window and writing, mostly. The end may be in sight - only a few bits to add to the bathroom. When they leave we'll paint the hall, getting rid of "magnolia" - so last century! - put up a backlog of pictures, and then, hopefully, have a nice calm time and even do some serious work in the studio.

Although Ryczard and his occasional co-workers have been pleasant and (radio apart) unobtrusive - and do a good clean up at the end of every day - we'll be so glad when he/they leave. You lose "the home as haven" while work is going on, and when the schedule gets drawn out, home becomes less and less your own home. You also lose your sense of being a free agent - yesterday my planned exhibition-plus-lunch escape became a matter of "what else can I possibly do, that will keep me away from home till the builders quit for the day". Wandering in and out of shops simply wasn't satisfying, nor was browsing in bookstores, but I just couldn't face being home till all the mess was cleared up for the day.

And the dust, the dust ... everywhere. When the builders do finally leave, dusting everything off, especially in the overcrowded studio, will involve reassessing whether the item stays or goes. So many decisions! There's a growing sense, probably erroneous, that the longer they stick around, the more difficult the process will be.

The scary bit, though, is the recognition that I'm using "the builders" as an excuse - for all sorts of things: laziness, short temper, lack of effort, an inclination to spend too long socialising, retreating into spending/wasting time on the computer...hmm, probably the very things I do anyway...  It's a short step to blaming the builders for not being able to sleep well, eating and drinking too much, developing a can't-be-bothered attitude... Once they go, of course, we'll have to find a different excuse for any of these sloppy behaviours.

With any luck the renovation will finish next week, the tools will go - and it'll be back to taking responsibility for our own actions.

And speaking of dust, here's an apposite quote from Picasso:  "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." 

Apres-snow

The hillside above the playground at Hampstead Heath is littered with the corpses of snowmen, melting in the sunshine.

Art I like - Clare Gallagher

"If you wait for the exciting bits and ignore the rest, you lose out on massive chunks of life," says Clare Gallagher in relation to her photo project Domestic Drift. " I challenged myself to break out of the routine of home: cleaning, cooking, charging around. I wanted to photograph the things I struggled with." In this project she repurposed French thinker Guy Debord's theory of the dérive, or drift, which he applied  to walking around the city, responding to an environment in playful ways, in search of new experiences. 

Danger signs - Kew Gardens

The Temperate House at Kew Gardens is being surveyed for repairs - £28million is needed and the repair progamme will last up to eight years. The previous repairs to this beautiful building were 35 years ago. It's the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse structure in the world ... a bit high-maintenance, then ....

A wish come true

Ground coffee available locally - all of a minute's walk away! This is "Blake" blend - 50% Sumatra, 40% Indonesia, 10% Mexico - fairly meaningless, but it smells very chocolately and takes just fine. For historical reasons, we keep it in the Illy tin.

Writing lines

Seeing this work by David Shrigley (here) brought to mind a time on the 210 bus, years ago, when the scruffy-looking man in the seat ahead of me was bent over a notebook, writing intently and intensely. I had a glimpse of the same words being written again and again, on line after line. He seemed more of a troubled person than someone making "a piece of art" - but sometimes they could be one and the same, could they not?

It also reminded me of a recent exhibition at the Freud Museum where Sharon Kivland paid her teenage son to copy out some lines from Freud's writings -- sentences about the mother-son relationship. The notebooks, each with one quote written again and again, were displayed on music stands in a circle at the centre of the room.

But mostly it will take people back to the punishment of "writing lines" at school. (What a waste of time! but so easy to measure the results, to ascertain that the task has been done.)

Yet Shrigley's lines are not "written" - not in joined-up (cursive) writing, with its smooth, rhythmic flow.  With each letter drawn separately, they look stabbed onto the paper. "Writing lines" might help with venting anger or frustration, or grappling with obsessiveness, but do they soothe a troubled soul?

"Stacked journalling" - and graphite

The "over-writing" technique I'm using has many possibilities - they are exhaustively set out in a tutorial here (thanks, Sandy, for pointing it out). It's fun fun fun - do have a go!

My over-writing project arose from journalling in two ways - from the crossing-out of old journals, and from the delight in making textures with handwriting, initially writing down my secret (and very boring) thoughts . Now my focus is on copying out plangent* texts - with a view to suiting the medium to them. I'm still at the stage of trying to define and refine my intention - and if I continue, I'll have to "explain" how this fits into my "everyday journeys" project.

*plangent (it felt like the right word but I had to look it up) = loud and resonating, often melancholy.

Another strand to this project is to be aware of subtle things and " meaningful accidents". For instance, using a fine pen that was running out of ink needed really hard pressure, and the paper underneath ended up covered with impressions - and the sheet of paper under that one still showed some marks - so before covering it with graphite, I used the defective pen to write another text, which bit deep into the paper. After 9B graphite was added and polished, it became reflective and almost readable -

On the other side, a light coat of graphite on the raised texture of the writing, and denser graphite around the edges to try to pick up the fainter marks of the ghost writing -

It looks like "nothing" - and in a way, it is...

Stitched writing

"Continuum" by Denise Moraze, 2010 (from here; see a closeup of her stitched "writing" here).

Another Canadian artist using indecipherable writing is Sylvia Ptak

(photo from here)

Book du jour - more copying

The book is the catalogue of an exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999. Artists (listed here) include "process artists" like Marcia Hafif, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Gordon Matta Clark, Agnes Denes, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman - late 60s stuff - and there are thought-provoking essays by Pamela M Lee and Cornelia H Butler. One way to read the essays (and think about them) is to copy them -

One of the benefits of transcribing every word is that there's opportunity to stop and look up the words that sorta make sense when you're reading quickly (or can be overlooked) - but can be seen to need explanation when you're reading slowly, and when you're reading art-speak... I should be keeping a list of them. One was "Heraclitean" (Heraclites was an ancient Greek philosopher who maintained that strife and chaos are the natural order of the universe); another was "entropy" (the natural tendency of the universe to fall into disorder - Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that).

The essay on "duration" includes the word "temporality" rather a lot, and indeed the function and use of the time factor in making and viewing art is of considerable interest to me -

In choosing this text for copying/transcribing, I'm using a considerable amount of time in a way that (by my criteria) doesn't "waste" it, and I'm learning about other artists' use of time - indeed, this slow reprocessing of "old" text about "older" art makes for many layers of time. The over-writing makes the time used in the current work double back on (or reinforce) itself. The illegibility aspect ... well, it just IS. I don't think the viewer needs to be able to read the actual words...the only person deriving didactic benefit is the (re)writer; hopefully a viewer would find the aesthetic, and perhaps conceptual, dimension to be sufficient - and there would be some sort of title to help them with this.

Winter at Kew Gardens

The snow was starting to melt by the time we got to Kew Gardens yesterday (trains don't start running till 9.30), but there was time to get some of the usual snowscene photos -

 Didn't expect to see any peacocks, though -

 Families had built snowmen in various places - an echo of the Henry Moore sculptures at the gardens several years ago -

Because of flight cancellations at Heathrow, you could hear the birds rather than the planes. A real feeling of stillness, no wind and the muffling effects of the snow.

Meeting Montaigne

"If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved."


That comes from Michel de Montaigne, the man who invented "the essay". I first read him in my late 30s - when old enough to appreciate his insights.


Yesterday I picked up a small book to read while travelling and it turned out to be The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton. Opening it midway, I found myself reading about Montaigne's 17-month journey in 1580-1 through France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy,  encountering different practices in different places and viewing them with an open mind: "I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind."


He re-wrote his Essays several times, and didn't worry about contradicting himself. (Your thoughts change over time, right?) Here's his annotated copy of the 1588 edition, the last one printed during his lifetime -

The revised edition was published posthumously. Montaigne wanted to write "as long as there is ink and paper in the world", and kept amending the Essays right up till his death in 1592. First published in English in 1603, they exist in many editions -

Downloadable versions are available via Project Gutenberg. 

Book du jour - and some thoughts on copying

Trying out various formats for the over-writing - using a strip of masking tape to make a blank area in the page, for example. The text is from the catalogue of an exhibition we saw at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in December (the exhibition goes till mid-March) - "Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere" -

Above, large writing with a pale pen, needing a lot of pressure, on onion-skin; below, small writing added with a pen that gave a darker line and flowed nicely over the paper. Writing on both sides, held up to the light, with and without the strip of masking tape -

Writing out other people's words is a pleasant thing to do, though old habits die hard and I'd like to edit a little here and there (after all, who would know?). You get very close to the words - not as close, though, as with copying other people's drawings, where there is so much that needs attention - the direction of the mark, the pressure on the pen, the relation to adjacent marks. The marks in the drawing are so direct; the connection to the artist is so immediate. With words there are many levels of processing before the words reach you - from the author's handwriting/typing and its revision to the printed page and finished publication. Copying the marks of handwriting - the immediate words - would be a different experience. It might feel a bit like trying to become that person? How close to, or far away from, that do you get by borrowing their words and putting them in your own handwriting? Why am I using someone else's text? How would I feel, re-writing various kinds of text - what to do next, what to do first?

Where is this going and what's it about .... ah, don't know yet ...

Fair share chocolate

Yup, that seems fair to me! Encountered here.

Another project on the go

My "over-writing" project has moved on to clean sheets of paper - an old box of onion-skin (remember onion-skin? flimsy transparent stuff, usually used in typewriters with carbon paper .. which by the way is another wonderful material) - a box dating back to typewriter days, pre-A4 size days ... salvaged from a stationery-cupboard clearout at work many years ago. Paper with history.

The round thing is simply holding the folded bits down, to show the method behind this madness.

Too much margin = not enough inside... Both sides:

As well as the negative space, can the translucency contribute? Can the pages be combined? -

This text is the introductory essay to an exhibition of Susan Derges' photography - it was in a book that happened to be on hand (role of accident, chance...).

I sit at the table in front of the window and copy text - a calming and even soothing thing to do - especially when the builder isn't here, and the other members of the family are out (preferably at work). It's an easy way to get into the studio and do "something" in the space available.

More letterpress

The paragraph of text is now all set - with a small problem, running out of As and Es - for the moment I've used italic -

That proof will help me find them to replace them, as they are now upside down -

I'm having difficulty keeping the lines in place ... in future I shall be paying more attention to getting it right in the composing stick, before transferring it to the galley. With one print, the paper had too much packing and the force needed to print actually dislodged the (powerful!) magnets holding the type in place -

Great effect - barcodes having a party?? - but not something you actually want to repeat - putting the lines of type back together took a surpisingly long time.

Why show the "I"? That just kinda happened with the first few lines of type - I was finding the punctuation and spaces weren't interesting enough, and knew that more Is would appear in the rest of the text. In speech, "I" is much used and little heard, so foregrounding it seemed a reasonable thing to do. However, next time I'll turn the Is upside down and see how that works ... it will change the look/importance of the row of dots through the black ... after all, rows of dots ... are so appealing ... and so useful ...

Eventually, and gradually, the black squares will be replaced by the text - simply a matter of turning each letter over.

I was hoping the punctuation would be more visible ...  this was the most punctuation-rich bit of text I had available at the moment it was needed, but the next phase of this project could be to use another bit of text with commas, quote marks, etc all over the place. And ampersands. Such variety in ampersands.....

Fun with erasures

Wave Books obligingly supplies texts that you can erase on screen - what fun!

It's almost a poem ... after a bit of editing, even more of an almost-poem ... yet it won't be an "erasure poem" without the erased spacing.

Insects

small and contemptible,
we wonder and discover
as much as
we can imagine

different parts
with the power of action

the work of the hand
capable of pleasure
as well as cruelty

Have a go at wavepoetry.com/erasures/index.php

Letterpress project

My first idea for a project involving letterpress was to set one of my poems but by the time it came to starting I wanted to do "something with punctuation" - taking out the words and leaving just the commas, dashes, quote marks - and the spaces, for spaces are as important in the flow of words as the pauses signalled by stops, semi-colons, etc. When I ran the idea past James, the letterpress guru, he suggested turning the type upside down and printing with the bottom of the slug - brilliant!

The text is a paragraph from an article on erasure by Mary Ruefle that happened to be in my handbag. I decided to leave the first person pronoun, as I occurs several times in the text. Here's the first proof of the first three lines -

I really enjoyed getting to know where the letters can be found in the type case (this is Times 18 point) and seeing the lines fill up. It's slow going, though - imagine setting an entire book!

At the end of the (short) day there was more type and a proper proof -

That's about half the paragraph. The "mistake" of the T being right way up has me thinking about how, by turning the type over, letters and words could appear along the lines, gradually revealing the text.

Advice to writers/artists

Henry Miller's Commandments are stolen from here. Worth taking notice of :  Add no more new material; stop at the appointed time. Work on one thing at a time. Work with pleasure. Concentrate - narrow down - exclude...

Wordless Wednesday