Slider, Installation view
Concrete space, Hayward Gallery, January – March 2012
April 7, 2012
April 6, 2012
November 27, 2011
November 25, 2011
November 24, 2011
November 23, 2011
Untitled, Installation view
Ollerplex Un-Plex, Oriel Sycharth Gallery, Glyndwr University
http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/en/AboutGlyndwrUniversity/Whatson/OrielSycharthGallery/
July 13, 2011
“The documents relating to the course [...] comprise four bundles of around eight hundred little notecards altogether, containing the bibliographic indications, some summaries, notes, and projects on abandoned ‘figures’, the whole accompanied by several commentaries; a series of cassettes and computer disks (around twenty) on which are recorded the quasi-totality of the twenty-six hours of oral presentation; and finally, of course, the manuscript of the course properly speaking, which takes up 180 pages written in blue ink on sheets of 21 x 29.7cm. The writing, regular and legible, is dense. It takes almost all the page, which nevertheless includes a larger left-hand margin that Barthes uses to indicate the references to the texts he cites (name of author, page of the book), to underscore the key term of the page or paragraph or to indicate in one word the point of his argument. These marginalia, like those he used in ‘A Lover’s Discourse’, guide the reading of the main text, in an exercise of clarity and orientation, but they attest well to Barthes’ involvement in an aesthetic use of the layout of the page.”
Extract from Thomas Clerc’s preface for The Neutral, Columbia University Press, 2005
July 10, 2011
The Neutral, artist’s book – edition of 3
For The Piracy Project, AND Publishing, Byam Shaw School of Art
Fragments from Roland Barthes’ lectures on The Neutral (College de France 1977-8), selected and arranged. Includes original preface essay by Thomas Clerc, and an additional ‘epilogue’ essay written by myself.
http://www.andpublishing.org/
http://www.andpublishing.org/projects/blog/
July 9, 2011
Epilogue
I came across The Neutral quite serendipitously, the winter before last, listening to a talk by writer Brian Dillon on the photographic artist Uta Barth, and since then it’s been an ongoing source of reference and inspiration. Some sections I’ve read over and over again, noting them down and copying them out. I still have the numerous scanned digital files, and pages of photocopies, that I used to make a series of slides and prints from one particular extract. “A kind of proxemy”, screen-printed onto a pale grey paper, hangs in the room that I work in at home. Sometimes I almost prefer the un-framed, plain xerox version, which occasionally I put up too, blu-tacked on the opposite wall. But in any case, both seem to have had an ongoing applicability and relation to the other bits and pieces that I have put up periodically in the space. Other sections of the book I’ve read only once – on a trip to Prague, sheltering from the February cold over most of a day in a café. And equally, parts of the book I’ve not read at all: those ‘figures’, descriptions or digressions – indicated on the page by headings or marginalia – which on first glance didn’t seem of particular interest or relevance. Very early on in the text, though, in his description of the “skimming” view via which ‘nuance’ can be found, Barthes makes this selective approach to reading quite permissible, even preferable. (“I want to live according to nuance”, he writes.) I like this idea of reading something, assimilating it in the way that feels appropriate at the time. Assembling together little suggestions of the text, or “fragments”, in a logic that’s both thematic (implied and projected), and individual (nuances which differ from person to person). Locating them within our own interior frame of reference, with all its concomitant associations, structures and “intervals”…
Thomas Clerc, in his Preface to the edition, notes that Barthes would often remark on his unfamiliarity with a text, or body of work, from which he was drawing a point of parallel. Clerc also notes – in parentheses – that whilst Barthes was intimately familiar with the work of Marcel Proust, in a similar form of “secondhand erudition” all his references to him in The Neutral come via the 1959 literary biography, by George Duncan Painter. Re-reading the essay again, this inclusion particularly struck me. There is much about ‘biography’ that can be aligned with the numerous forms of preliminary text – preface, prologue etc. Both provide introduction and commentary, and a sense of the essential character of a work, without compulsory requirement to engage with the original. (Beautifully and cogently written, and very informative, there is an accessibility about Clerc’s essay that is appropriate to Barthes’ lyrical yet engagingly personal style). But likewise, both also facilitate an extrapolation outwards – to function as a related, but independent, interpretive layer. Just like Barthes’ citations of Proust ‘by Painter’, Clerc’s preface is in itself a kind of filter: articulating, reflecting – and transforming – some of the functions of the actual text.
Similarly, many of the methods and rituals that were integral to Barthes’ preparation of the manuscript are maintained within in the production – some faithfully transcribed, others adapted or reconfigured in a slightly different, printed, form: The even density of the text on the right, for instance, next to the wide but delicately demarcated space of the left-hand margin – punctuated by names of authors, references or ‘encapsulating’ words in rounded sans-serif. The punctuation symbols and marks: brackets, colons, numberings, arrows – aesthetic as well as functional linguistic devices. Paper quality and page format: light to medium weight, with pages slightly more square than standard, and text oriented to the upper right… All of these visual “directions” are just like any other lens through which we read, assimilate or create meaning. And Clerc’s essay, in articulating and exploring some of these features, reminds me that what I love about The Neutral (as text, edition, and ‘production’) is to do with, as much as its content, its overall approach. For me, it’s a book that articulates and takes pleasure in a kind of transference – of ideas, language and material. This transposition is a process: one that is temporal, personal, physical, and even – in its concern with placement, surface and register – ‘superficial’. It’s an action or gesture, done at a particular time via a particular medium or perspective. It relates to the “angle”, at any one moment, “of the subject’s gaze”.
May 27, 2011
May 25, 2011
The following is an extract from the paper which I wrote for FLOW - A Conference in Two Parts, Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University:
(Modern Interiors Research Centre http://fada.kingston.ac.uk/research/mir/mir.php)
Variations of more ‘static’ structural and decorative form are always coupled with, and affected by, the continuous modulations of changing light – over the course of a day, and from season to season. On an overcast day in winter, the portico might appear as a greyed-out, absorbent corridor, in which the coldness and quickness of a reticent sun might dapple the wall for just a moment. Or I can imagine the languor of late summer, afternoon, light in August – lengthening shadows taking their time to chart their elliptical course under the arches. Such is the intensity of perception in the porticoes that etches these little moments on the retina. Indeed, the light that is evoked in a Morandi painting is quite often, on closer inspection, not an exact, faithfully recounted, light – rather, perhaps, a “remembered” light from a particular moment observed in the city.1
This observing and reflecting on the features of one’s ‘own’ side of the street, in proximate and saturated detail, is prompted by, as much as the visual interest inherent to the features themselves, the absence of a typical frontal view of the city ahead. Instead, in its place, there is only the continuation of the portico – often as far as the eye can see, to where it curves away, or where it finishes with a small, bright, arc-shaped lens as the corridor breaks to meet an open space. But this obscuring of a frontal view also sets up a shift in perspective to the side, an “oblique” view, as architecture historian Naomi Miller describes it, over to the other side of the street. With it, comes the possibility to project upon the relative nature of the opposite corridor – its features, character and light – and imagine one’s own place and experience inside of it.
Sometimes the other side of the street might be far away: separated perhaps by a dense volume of rising midsummer dawn air, or alternatively by a space that whilst not that wide, in its sounds, movements and gestures, completely unrelated in character. At other times, whether in physical real-space, or imagined perceived-space, the other side of the street is much closer. It isn’t just a visual experience under the porticoes, then, it’s a profoundly sensory and physical one too – where one is made acutely aware of space, one’s conception of it, and one’s placement within it. Morandi’s works correlate to these choreographies perfectly: sometimes objects are spaced apart, contained in their own atmosphere; at other times, in British painter Michael Craig-Martin’s words, they are pushed up against one another “as if the air had been sucked out between”.2 Often, their relationship is uncertain, they are almost, but not quite, touching – appearing at once to be both quietly repelling one another and nudging gently towards.
In as much as setting up this particular oblique ‘view’ the shift in perspective prompted by the porticoes also necessitates a sideways movement. The supports of the arches act like markers; I am aware of my movement in one direction by their intervals. And so too, I am aware of their equivalents on the other side of the street: these two sets of verticals are constantly interacting – closing up quickly so as one in front of the other, then a moment later equidistant. One side might seem to slip past slightly quicker, or sometimes it might appear to slide past, slowly, in the opposite direction. Closer to the city centre, where the large civic buildings dominate, and where the streets are comparatively narrow, this feeling is particularly tangible. There’s a sense of it sometimes in Morandi’s paintings – quite different to the quickness of movement suggested in others – in which scale is subverted, and lumbering architectonic forms, creaking and sliding from an internal inertia, meet and pass in the midst of a chalky temporal landscape.
