‘to extract pictures from the flow of constant changes and from their perennial possibilities of movement…Stagnation, fixation, death should provoke change and life’
This reminded me of Spoerri’s book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance… Fluxus artist Daniel Spoerri analyses the 80 objects on his blue table, recording stories and anecdotes that arise. The book is a seemingly exhaustive catalogue / itinerary / archive of the objects found on the table on October 17, 1961 at 3.47pm. There is a drawn map of the position of the objects on the table at the back of the book.
“The procedure of the Topography, its modus operandi, is beautifully simple: a selection of objects and associations they evoke are described, and these in turn give rise to further associations in the form of anecdotes. An apparently infinite process is unleashed, like a walk taken in every direction at once’
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had time to make it shorter” Blaise Pascale (Letter 16, 1657) “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Marc Twain I don’t know what Twain’s awareness of Pascale was when he wrote the first quote, in fact I got confused trying to find the owner of this sentiment but it seems they were connected across centuries by their thoughts. We’ve invited Tony Grisoni, film maker to come and discuss editing with us, and the implications of the choice to edit or not to edit.
Frances Benjamin Johnston Stairway of the Treasurers Residence: Students at Work from the Hampton Album
On the very first page of Richard Sennett’s Together this image is printed. Having only read a few pages, I can’t do justice to the text itself and it’s something we’ll need to look at but Tash and I were both drawn to the picture of the staircase as a staged image of co-operation. It’s difficult to articulate why it feels so relevant – the object in the image, still under production is beginning its life as a conveyor, a passage, an elevator, a descender and all hands are committed to different aspects of its manifestation. Alice posted a comment yesterday reminding us of the importance of the object – desks, working spaces and furniture. Can stairs be added to the list?
In Thinking Through Making Ingold talks about some of the concepts from his recent book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture
He says we should have a world of loose ends. We should have meshwork, rather than network, a tangle.
Thinking on from Fischli & Weiss’s can of worms or Hannah Arendt’s pandora’s box, the convoluted tunnels of the philosophers stone or the crest of Huberman’s wave…is there a necessary messiness to the anticipatory, curiosity driven Noticer; a Messwork ?
This reminds me, we must post something on our thoughts around editing…
‘I presume few would argue that the experience of art thrives at the top of the bell curve in a place of speculation (and not consensus), hypotheses (and not conclusions) and belief (and not knowledge). To stay at the top of the bell curve, as Buergel and Noack might say, the best art must make us not understand, which corresponds to a state of sustained curiosity that provokes us to change something about ourselves in an effort to understand. To stay at the top of the bell curve, as our diagram clearly shows us, requires stopping information.
Now more so than ever: the efficiency, quantity and immediacy of information and information-systems has placed art and the artistic gesture at risk of being identified, categorised, digested, cannibalised and made into information before it has a chance to begin being art. Curiosity is being castrated by information’.
We found this through Lizzie the Huberman pusher at Tate. In the context of art school I wonder if it can help us and our students to handle the demand for information and knowledge with care, so as to ensure we’re all surfing at the top of the curve and making great art as a consequence?
In Summer School we are also attempting to stay at the top of the bell curve – yes? If so, how do we maintain curiosity and avoid ‘understanding’? And how do we justify this? How do we avoid a great big fat belly full of information?
Saint Jerome in His Study, Antonello da Messina, c. 1475,
My desk had been cleared. It’s a small, light-colored office model with a chipboard top and steel legs, and it blended nicely with its surroundings. Beside the glass with the sawdust in it, there is an elongated piece of wood with holes at one end, rounded edges, and slanting grooves of varying width–a so-called hand fondler, carved years ago by my son (more or less as a school exercise), blackened from handling, but still smelling of fresh wood, just as the brown, fist-sized, hardened lump of clay beside it, whenever I pick it up, takes on the smell of the damp gully from which it was taken years ago….
All these objects might be termed my “callers to order,” because, by pleasantly diverting me now and again, they save me from losing myself entirely in my work.
My friend Simon gave me Across by Peter Handke a while ago now and this passage about the writer’s desk stayed with me. I think I’m attuned to words about objects. Around the same time I read Thoughts of Sorts by Georges Perec. In it he describes the objects on his desk and the place in which he thinks.
Callers to order, philosopher’a stones, desks and writing cases; all are brought together in Brian Dillon’s text for Frieze:
As the novelist Georges Perec – who later composed an essay on the objects on his desk – points out in Species of Spaces (1974), the study is itself a piece of furniture: Jerome inhabits his desk as though it is the cockpit of an interplanetary vehicle, adrift in theological space and time.
We talked about Fischli & Weiss’s work and the way they question the world. My student Joe reminded me of this in his research report where he quoted Bice Curiger, the editor of one of my favourite catalogues Flowers & Questions:
‘When you start asking things, you initiate an endless process, you open up a can of worms, which is what the two artists are desperately trying to tell us’
Isn’t this what we want Noticer to do?
To open up a can of worms?
I’m on really delayed train so here’s my first post on my iPhone – if I can make it work!
We talked about the magnet as a metaphor for noticing: the current of noticing, being equivalent to magnetism. We were thinking of a Noticing Tool that might pull relevant information towards it. And whilst we were talking outside paddington station, we watched people sucked in by the gravitational pull of the municipal planters / seating. Lucy sent me this link once. We must look at it:
