Slide Show

An Interview in the Old Language

Page 256.

"I liked the idea of drawing out the rows of houses, extending them in time, understanding them as more important in their appearances than in the voices and sorrows they contained. It was an interview in the new language.

 Each silent and lovely home a slow memorial to some shrill inner moment unquieted by time"

[Translator] my old language of appropriation, or taking the concrete concepts of others, and using them in place of my own unrefined materials.

I've often intended to (and it wouldn't even be a difficult task, at all) set up a related but separate blog titled something like Taking Pictures from Books, where I would post phone photographs or scans of book pages or parts of them. Just to catalogue properly the numerous times i've literally taken photos of books, images and words. 

Spines and shadows.

 Orphans and Widows.

Of course we do this all of the time to some extent or other, absorbing and incorporating particles of places we've never been, sights never seen, maybe even feelings we've never felt. So too, in my case certainly, we pick out passages, sometimes unintentionally, that seem so relevant to a place or time in our own minds, that we cling to and seek a kind of solace in.

 I understand.

 We understood.

I took these, this week passed. The above while waiting for M in a bookshop, found in a handsome monograph titled Silent Theatre; The Art of Edward Hopper. A book I longed to have inhaled this time last year, immersed in the death rattle of my dissertation. I intend to add more of other people's words and images, and some of my own too. 

Especially on silence, 

which I miss hearing of late.

Back Issue

A very brief examination of motive/motif

As it may be apparent scant visitors, I've been looking back at 'old work' recently, for the practical reasons of cleansing my hard drive (no intended word-play), though as a seasoned procrastinator I haven't erased, condensed or filed a single pixel, apart from those which have ended up here.

Reading through over 10,000 work-related visual bits of my own making, and a time-span of some 5 years, it's an undertaking which understandably swallows evenings at a time. Frustrating when still nothing 'gets done' with them. So perhaps this is what I'm doing here then, some kind of catalogue and additionally something to show for lost hours.

Recurring themes; what predictably had its roots in self-exploration, became self-definition based on those closest to me.

Evolving into direct questioning of those important people, our shared experiences, and the notion of understanding itself.

 It seems now, that when I became comfortable with the ideas of shared understanding, and actually just being comfortable with those closest to me, particularly #2, that the 'work' then came to be more focused on us two, together, as bound objects in space, to put it awfully, lazily, and tiredly. It goes from defining yourself in parallel with those who aren't you, to binding them with you in this skewed search of acceptance. When this happened we then had to turn our attentions to the spaces we physically sought and found ourselves striving to be securely integrated with/in...
It is this place, or non-place, or dream of a place, that we find ourselves to be in now, separately,  individually, insecurely.

Second Best Things

Stockpile those little bits of information you can't quite understand or readily access.

Revisit as often as you can bear.

I read D. H. Lawrence's short stories Second Best, and Things in the bath around dusk today. The latter was particularly brilliant.

                                        

Library, Libre, Liebe.

Unknown Window Project

This was taken impulsively on a lone wet walk up the hill after visiting the 'Our Summer' exhibition, some inglorious December evening. Visitors will surely know by now that I can't unflinchingly walk by a lit window. Those pitiful little jumps won't be helped.

The music is Yann Tiersen's 'L'Etai' from the lovely album Tout Est Calme. It fits not seamlessly, in the way that they were not each made with the other in mind. I didn't shoot to put images to the music and vice versa, rather the sort of sad foreboding feeling seemed appropriate, certainly with those little stringed, almost hopeful lines, somehow.

As with most of the Other things I've forced together, it is not brilliantly or even lucidly thought out, if not only for the fact that it does not need to be.

I'm hoping not to sound self-important, I just don't think there has to be an explanatory guideline to everything ever.

(I am also not overtly technologically capable, patient, or indeed that enthusiastic in these exercises as a whole, they are merely that, an exercise, though I'm not fast to dismiss an occasional lifting of a brow or lip corner, an almost imperceptible nod)

Travel Guide...?

After leafing not 1/2 way through Gerhard Richter's Atlas earlier in a bookshop waiting for insp26 (and infringing countless copyrights by using phone photos of the mans' own stolen and appropriated stills, taken from a book I hadn't paid for), I remembered that 2 weeks ago, alone in a room with some scraps of a 'book' waiting to be assembled, I had taken some less than great quality photographs (indeed using a popular Mac-application!), for the purpose of display here while my scanner taunts me in exile.

Here are some, sincere enough apologies to mention the terrible quality, evidently not sincere enough to prevent me in sharing.

Despite confusing and annoying angles, due in part to reflected light from Mac's display and the slightly landscaped framing of the Photobooth, the idealised final book of a thing will be in portrait format.

At this point we're really looking at the invertebrate's shell.

I regret insisting on appearing so, so facially in the things, but again, not enough to (untidily I fear) crop myself out or re-take.

So that's where it's at. There are more pages of course, but these are the lucky scamps that got to be backlit up here.