A short called ‘shell’
follows time at the end of three versions of a text called presentation. I begun six months ago with a simple premise and a few weeks to play with. The work will eventually involve writing to people and part of this could be communicative or make sense retroactively. I don't always know what I'm saying but it begins with unanswered letters and cards forty years ago.
And there it is... I write and rewrite something that sometimes looks like video or a painting dream.
2
I remember just sitting there... video time was broken and I'm taking a break, first one, then another.
I broke very easily once upon a time and retroaction piles against something or other. Following Hito Steyerl, I rail against art world storage extravagance and a house full of paintings... do what I can at home addressing emails that go unanswered. It was a text or texts four times over and the texts become video called shell... I take my glasses off, stare at the light of an extension, then up at a smoke detector.
I call time a mystery and what I call work is running out of time. It's more intimate than extimate, saying too much late at night. It's a primordial monologue and I'm talking to myself out there somewhere. Beyond unanswerable emails and texts that remain short website excerpts, glimpsing something can't be sustained.
Timelines spread out uncomfortably... riding a quilt... looking like two iPhones and notebook.
Light bends, turning florescence into common sense, with hats dropping and flopping downstairs.
Did I say hats?
3
What isn’t spread out time is no time at all and scary put together with inevitable moments. Nothing happens and I’m looking into a dream and the dream fuels a text that couldn’t be written. There are two, first unworn clothes then talking and the second is partially written.
Partially written?
I’m partial or partially written and time that’s not spread out is vertiginous.
I fall over creepy time and creepy time is creeping away.
4
Being here I go too far. It’s hot and I’m lying in the shade. Sunlight permeates your hair or it did snd you’re flying over Africa somewhere. I tried to say something while you were here and should pick up from where I left off. There's what Lacan calls lalangue and a syntax that's different. There are stills taken from a plane high above Alps and Africa and plans floating around. Physicality returns and the work has everything to do with slipping bodies.
Angela is watching a film somewhere over Africa, after mentioning film nights and time after supper.
There’s this and something breaking after unworn clothes.
5
Andy mentioned Cezanne, I spread sand, with people wandering through and homophony turning Cezanne into sand.
I spent my time with someone who forgot me on the way to the market. The stage was set for comings and goings that had nothing to do with me.
It was her market or her father’s, with no choosing between them. It could have been worse and it was worse. We didn’t exist and Cezanne spent time on the beach before beach notes. I move around, pirouetting across rocks far out at sea. I say something about unworn clothes and synthetic pigments and there are traps and fine lines, swimming in a Kew Gardens pond.
I learnt to move around from place to place and time to time and Peter Doig’s canoe turns Medusa’s raft into quilt epics.
6
I refer to preoccupations or doing something ahead of talking online.
Painting is unmentionable, or my father thought so... saying something, having nothing left to say. Video comes next and at the end of a text, with a denouement that won’t last. Angela is surprised and a denouement is surprising. I look different six thousand miles away and I’m writing close to online conversation and psychoanalysis.
The ending at the end of video called raindrop is an exception... put together at the end of Angela’s stay
A surprise is surprising... writing on my phone seems surprising... Byung-Chul Han refers to infocracy... and I fiddle anxiously.
7
I tip open a bag, closing it again and repeating the operation. I’m also looking for a lost phone, one that could have been lost six thousand miles away. More than this, I walk around wearing very little. It’s very hot and I wonder what to say, not going too far with the form that something takes. This caprice has to do with sensitivities more than fifty years ago and I’m capricious, making do with sexuality some time after radiotherapy for prostate cancer and surgery for colon cancer. There’s a lot that can be said and I'm saying very little. Timeless time comes first, then something else is possible at the end of the day.
Someone thunders passed looking for a painter called Goya. There’s nothing special here. Grass is closing in and it’s not spring or summer. Putting up with a threesome, I’m put out in the cold. It happened again and again and having nothing left to say, I say it’s almost summer and disdain comes around again.
You wonder where it is, looking up at stubborn clouts and my truculence is Einstein’s, between spring and summer.
8
I don't know if writing to fellow artists and writers (people I don't know) means anything and if it does, how to go about it.
I spent a few years trying to write after cancer treatment and time with Ruth, then found my way into a text called talking. One problematic and book size text then led to three versions of another text. Seeing this work in a different way necessitates putting it out there somehow in digital times and these are difficult times in so many ways. To do this, the work has to mean something straight away and it can't just be a cursory note on the end of retroactive and performative text. Writing to you can be the start of a body of work that implies exchange and communication is the wrong word. Something happens with the work of art and various transformations bring about exchange. There's no prize at the end of digital times and Warhol’s fifteen second predilection has everything to do with the formation of new work. It’s not about a growing number of storage sites or digital storage, but about language and form. The work can be found if you look for it and an exchange is possible in saturated times. I can only make my way from something Anna Akhmatova was doing, turning a reclusive moment into something else... turning intimacy into extimacy.
My second three texts are all called presentation and texts ripple with video. Recent video made something of Anne Carson’s barbarians or Greek sheep and current video begins with an ancient shell. It begins with a digital still and event.
In it, a snail from long ago climbs on to a modern building.
The building is not really modern having been a cattle shed on scary nights and the event turns time backwards.
Just in time for the start of new video and a collection of emails that have something to do with unanswerable communication, this passage problematises writing to you. It sets the tone or says what can’t be said in the face of the monolithic nature of the work of art. It all happens at the end of a short text called shell and elaborations run backwards into a body of work.
9
Digital worlds are shrinking worlds and four texts fall apart in Angela’s garden six thousand miles away. It’s also make believe at the bottom of a wardrobe or time travel without a retrospective.
Unworn clothes breathe fresh air in Wim Wenders’ Berlin library, with websites shadowing bodies of work. Something falls and catching up isn’t possible at the end of the day. A dreaming vocabulary adds caution and phrase islands are nowhere to be seen. Being up to date was never possible in the old times, but queues stretched around the block and looking leaves vapour trails. Lalangue can be a vapour trail.
‘email’
Lacan uses the phrase primordial monologue in his anxiety seminar and this monologue is some way from an exchange. I occupy somewhere and my preoccupations come with looking and looking again at a text or video. I sometimes don’t know what I’m looking at and retroaction isn't a short hop in the direction of something shared. Something is considered and reconsidered and sending work off can be one side of an invitation. It's a new direction, this monologue is surplus or I'm surplus. I have some work and something can be shared. It can be form in digital times and the work of art implies an invitation.
Looking back at recent work, it sometimes involves working backwards... stretching back from current work.
2
Masaccio at the beginning of the fifteenth century and Goya’s black paintings in the early part of the nineteenth century can be two moments at the beginning or end of something. In one painting Adam and Eve look put out leaving the Garden of Eden and Goya shut himself away for a while. The work of art or therapy (psychoanalysis) involve both being or not being an artist or therapist and identifications become problematic. It’s not just what an artist or therapist can be in strange new worlds, but what new forms make work possible. A pedagogy and industry sometimes emerge. I begin with some kind of subjectivity, objectality and holes. Language isn't this or that and the retrospective of an artist is some way from retroaction evident in dusty museums.
I make up for what seems like lost time and texts and video contend with extravagance and the work of art.
3
High flying planes were part of another world once upon a time and my world was very small. Infocracy and the internet draw things in some time later and being small hardly matters. I remember turning away from the girl I couldn’t talk to. She’s not around anymore and time and space are something else. Where I live is extended workspace and there’s pressure to round something off. Angela calls in the rest and the rest is the best of the rest. I refer to a children’s story and unworn clothes at the bottom of CS Lewis’ wardrobe and two projects or projections become one running through four texts. I write something and an opening closes following unanswered correspondence. I look at the short version of a presentation and remember time spent checking wardrobes.
Video disappears, texts are performative and painting toughens me up. A painting dream interprets painterly interpretation and I’ll write about a project that can and can't be funded.
4
Once before, I imagined lions and tigers at the bottom of wardrobes and Lacan refers to the neologism lalangue and its effects on the body. I suggested a collaborative children's story, Angela ran for cover and I'm on my own with a Lacanian concept. My feet... and by feet I mean something down there... have little memory of being feet and yet here they are, or there they were, down below. A cold burning is neuropathic, following radiotherapy, surgery and so called bile acid malabsorption and I’m talking about feet, having mentioned Kafka to my analyst... Kafka, Eisenstein and Alec Guinness in the Horse’s Mouth... only the last two didn’t get a mention... and feet didn’t get a mention.
I imagine winter or the end of winter and interpretation following a dream. I say painting makes me feel brave and I'm roughing it with the best. It's hyperbole and lions and tigers are licking my feet.
I turn whereabouts into workspace in a would-be project and they first turn up in a text called talking house. I say, lalangue is political and politics is possible wandering through forests or lying at the bottom of a wardrobe... a contention is contentious and work is possible in surprising circumstances. It’s workspace and lalangue. It's what I’m trying to say and can’t say, with and without collaboration... mistaking wood and trees... with syntax struggling between phrase islands nearly seventy years ago.
I could name an imaginary project, but can’t go beyond what Lacan calls primordial monologues on my own. It’s text and video and a fledgeling project.
It's an attention to the work of art in difficult circumstances and lalangue subsists beneath language, implying a singular correlation.
It's saying something and not saying something about a project. A premise is simple and what Lacan calls lalangue can be an undercurrent... you hear something when sentences and phrases fall apart.
5
It happens briefly… what happens briefly? not a lot it seems… it’s the moment of video or something like it… some things are possible and other things happen.
I want to say something about what I called phrase islands and lalangue. I could say there are lions and tigers at the bottom of a wardrobe in four previous texts... and learning to read is one thing and lalangue another. I did my best going back to college for the third time. A professor told me I was an island coming from an island and I met Zizek in a bookshop and did my best to paddle away from a matriarchal British school… coming across Peter Doig’s canoe on the way… settling on phrase islands, trying to say anything about lalangue.
I could write video or thought I could and lalangue perpetuates a short passage of time or short thinking.
Angela came and I finished te video, raindrop in the nick of time. She was going for the third time and her savour faire includes putting something together at the last moment. Anne Carson’s sheep are one thing and the psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas Salome said it all once before. Tautologies are drawn out as a body of work and lalangue can be a second death. Your voice in the voiceover isn’t what It should be and you’re flying away. I give up trying to say something about phrase islands and lalangue, but make do with fleeting moments. I’ll write to a few people, highlighting a few passages in this text. It’s not what I intended, having already written too much, but I’ll call two projects one and do what I can with brevity. It’s like the end of the latest video... there’s novelty, retroaction and a second death.
7
I'll write to the arts council and don’t always know what I’m saying. I read what I’ve written and don’t think it’s good enough and lalangue is beyond description. I attach a difficult idea to a project that can be costed. A beginning and end is impossible or it’s what can be heard between the lines and learning to read at the start of the text called presentation can be hearing language for the first time. There are imponderables and the work can be singular or a singular project.
At the end of a letter to the arts council, I wrote, I've worked after serious illness and the loss of a partner and only felt persistent after a while. When I couldn't do what I thought I could do, something seemed possible.
8
I remember short sentences on the beach, writing to two people, then following it up overlooking the same beach. Worse still, a text accompanied video and everything happened leaning out of a Southampton hotel. The rest or half of the rest fell apart while I fell apart without knowing it... and four or five texts follow. There’s no stopping making a start... short sentences run onto video without timelines and grass turns into wood and trees.
9
Besides wood and trees I’m here and not here. Not here last night when I couldn’t keep up and not here today because something fell away with hot pursuit and work tied to a body of work. I talk too much and talking follows not knowing what to say and the corollary phrase islands. I can say it begins when it begins with what I can see and closing my eyes follows talking too much. Grass is long enough and the painter, Stephen McKenna once noticed I was grassing things up. Silence before Cage’s silence was too much silence and some moments keep counting. It takes my breath away in one dream and the rest is unimaginable.
‘wood and trees’
I have a title and a few minutes ago thought I had nothing to speak of. I like this last phrase and can go back to this text again after reading a little. I was a habit. I’d read a little then write, but now I’m listening to talks. I didn’t know what to say about project and language, then thought it didn’t have to be that good and my analyst agrees. My reticence must be a problem. Was a problem when there were no platforms. Just arts worlds tucked away after art school and the sort of difficulty I’m writing about. Linking intimacy and extimacy or sending something off. I’ll write to the arts council, then to a few people and carry on carrying on with something.
I’ve said something about workspace when it’s mist needed and said something about unconscious language. Something more than beach notes forty years ago. First learning to read, then learning to write and a place for texts and video in digital times. There isn’t one for video and texts take time to read, but form in one place can be form in another for a while… and I’m talking about lalangue or think I am.
2
Bringing two projects together won’t necessarily work and tying intimacy and extimacy may be wishful thinking, but something else when both fail. There are texts and video and form effects a hopelessly ambitious project. The work is real and a project falters, but I can begin with work that can be seen and a workspace is possible with funding. It can be a bureau for artists and writers who are getting old or are ill. In this sense, the unconscious or lalangue is political.
It is what it is or what it can be and I would find collaboration helpful following reclusive times.
*continued