Susan Howe
King Philip
Carl Andre

Carl Andre
King Philip
Susan Howe

Susan Howe
Carl Andre
King Philip

Carl Andre
Susan Howe
King Philip

3. Lichtenberg says that very few people have ever seen pure white. So do most people use the word wrong, then? And how did he learn the correct use? – He constructed an ideal use from the ordinary one. And that is not to say a better one, but one that has been refined along certain lines and in the process something has been carried to extremes.

4. And of course such a construct may in turn teach us something about the way we in fact use the word.

5. If I say a piece of paper is pure white, and if snow were placed next to it and it then appeared grey, in its normal surroundings I would still be right in calling it white and not light grey. It could be that I use a more refined concept of white in, say, a laboratory (where, for example, I also use a more refined concept of precise determination of time).

8. People might have the concept of intermediary colours or mixed colours even if they never produced colours by mixing (in whatever sense). Their language-games might only have to do with looking for or selecting already existing intermediary or blended colours.

9. Even if green is not an intermediary colour between yellow and blue, couldn’t there be people for whom there is a bluish-yellow, reddish-green? I.e. people whose colour concepts deviate from ours – because, after all, the colour concepts of colour-blind  people too deviate from those of normal people, and not every deviation from the norm must be a blindness, a defect.

13. Imagine a tribe of colour-blind people, and there could easily be one. They would not have the same colour concepts as we do. For even assuming they speak, e.g. English, and thus have all the English colour words, they would still use them differently than we do and would learn their use differently. Or if they have a foreign language, it would be difficult for us to translate their colour words into ours.

14. Bit even if there were also people for whom it was natural to use the expressions “reddish-green” or “yellowish-blue” in a consistent manner and who perhaps also exhibit abilities which we lack, we would still not be forced to recognize that they see colours which we do not see.  There is, after all, no commonly accepted criterion for what is a colour, unless it is one of our colours.

15. In every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem. We must always be prepared to learn something totally new.

22. We  do not want to establish a theory of colour (neither a physiological one nor a psychological one), but rather the logic of colour concepts. And this accomplishes what people have often unjustly expected of a theory.

33. We speak of the ‘colour of gold’ and do not mean yellow. “Gold- coloured” is the property of a surface that shins or glitters.

34. There is the glow of red-hot and of white-hot: but what would brown-hot and grey-hot look like? Why can’t we conceive of these as a lower degree of white-hot?

40. For the fact that we cannot conceive of something ‘glowing grey’ belongs neither to the physics or the psychology of colour.

54. It is easy to see that not all colour concepts are logically of the same sort, e.g. the difference between the concepts ‘colour of gold’ or ‘colour of silver” and ‘yellow’ or ‘grey.”

58. Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying: “The walls in my room should be painted this colour.”

62. The fact that I can say this place in my visual field is grey-green does not mean that I know what should be called an exact reproduction of this shade of colour.

63. I see in a photograph (not a colour photograph) a man with dark hair and a boy with slicked-back blond hair standing in front of a kind of lathe, which is made in part of castings painted black, and in part of smooth axles, gears, etc., and next to it a grating made of light galvanized wire. I see the finished iron surfaces as iron- coloured, the boy’s hair as blond, the grating as zinc- coloured, despite the fact that everything is depicted in lighter and darker tones of the photographic paper.

67. Look at your room late in the evening when you can hardly distinguish between colours any longer – and now turn on the light and paint what you saw earlier in the semi-darkness.

68. When we’re asked “What do the words ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘black’, ‘white’ mean?” we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours, –but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further! For the rest, we have either no idea at all of their use, or a very rough and to some extent false one.

85. But can I believe that I see and be blind, or believe that I’m blind and see?

II.

11. In philosophy we must always ask: “How must we look at this problem in order for it to become solvable?”

12. For here (when I consider colours, for example) there is merely an inability to bring the concepts into some kind of order.  We stand there like the ox in front of the newly –painted stall door.

III.

16. I assume that certain chemical compounds e.g the salts of a given acid, have saturated colours and could be recognized by them.

17. Or you could tell where certain flowers come from by their saturated colours, e.g. you could say, “That must be an alpine flower because its colour is so intense.”

20. (The wrong picture confuses, the right picture helps).

30. Ask this questions: Do you know what “reddish” means? And how do you show that you know it?

Language-games: “Point to a reddish yellow (white, blue, brown) – “Point to an even more reddish one” – “A less reddish one” etc.

Now that you’ve mastered this game you will be told “Point to a somewhat reddish green” Assume there are two cases: Either you do point to a colour (and always the same one), perhaps to an olive green – or you say, “I don’t know what that means,” or “There’s no such thing.”

We might be inclined to say that the one person had a different colour concept from the other; or a different concept of “…ish.”

43. In philosophy it is not enough to learn in every case what is to be said about a subject, but also how one must speak about it. We are always having to begin by learning the method of tackling it.

45. One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.

59. In everyday life we are virtually surrounded by impure colours. All the more remarkable that we have formed a concept of pure colours.

61. We must always bear in mind the question: How do people learn the meaning of colour names?

65. “Brown light.” Suppose someone were to suggest that a traffic light be brown.

68. Let us imagine that someone were to paint something from nature and in its natural colours. Every bit of the surface of such a painting has a definite colour. What colour? How do I determine its name? Should we, e.g. use the name which the pigment applied to it is sold? But mightn’t such a pigment look completely different in its special surrounding than on the palette?

69. So perhaps we would then start to give special names to small coloured patches on a black background (for example). What I really want to show here is that it is not at all clear a priori which are the simple colour concepts.

71. I treat colour concepts like the concepts of sensations.

72. The colour concepts are to be treated like the concepts of sensations.

73.  There is no such thing as the pure colour concept.

79. There is gold paint, but Rembrandt didn’t use it to paint a golden helmet.

89. A colour which would be ‘dirty’ if it were the colour of a wall, needn’t be so in a painting.

100. Golden is a surface colour.

101. We have prejudices with respect to the use of words.

104. ‘Dark’ and ‘blackish’ are not the same concept.

152. Mightn’t shiny black and matt black have different colour-names?

240. If we taught a child the colour concepts by pointing to coloured flames, or colour transparent bodies, the peculiarity of white, grey, and black would show up more clearly.

241. It is easy to see that not all colour concepts are logically of the same kind. It is easy to see the difference between the concepts: ‘the colour of gold’ or ‘the colour of silver’ and ‘yellow’ or ‘grey.” But it is hard to see that there is a somewhat related difference between ‘white’ and ‘red.”

245. Whether I see something as grey or as white can depend upon how I see the things around me illumined. To me in one context the colour is white in poor light, in another it is grey in good light.

251. The difficulties which we encounter when we reflect about the nature of colours (those difficulties which Goethe wanted to deal with through his theory of colour) are contained in the fact that we have not one but several related concepts of the sameness of colours.

255. Our colour concepts sometimes relate to substances (Snow is white), sometimes to surfaces (this table is brown), sometimes to the illumination (in the reddish evening light), sometimes to transparent bodies. And isn’t there also an application to a place in the visual field, logically independent of a spatial context?

Can’t I say “there I see white” (and paint it, for example) even if I can’t in any way give a three-dimensional interpretation of the visual image? (Spots of colour). (I am thinking of pointillist painting).

256. To be able generally to name a colour, is not the same as being able to copy is exactly. I can perhaps say, “There I see a reddish place” and yet I can’t mix a colour that I recognize as being exactly the same.

257. Try, for example, to pain what you see when you close your eyes! And yet you can roughly describe it.

271. Do I actually see the boy’s hair blond in the photograph?! –  Do I see it grey? Do I only infer that whatever looks this way in the picture, must in reality be blond? In one sense I see it blond, in another I see it lighter or darker grey.

277. If I were called upon to describe the photograph, I’d do it in these words.

294. When blind people speak, as they like to do, of blue sky and other specifically visual phenomena, the sighted person often says, “Who knows what he imagines that to mean” – But why doesn’t he say this about other sighted people? It is, of course, a wrong expression to begin with.

295. That which I am writing about so tediously, may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit.

299. ‘We cannot help but be constantly surprised by these people.”

303. The rule-governed nature of our languages permeates our life.

315. The question is clearly: How do we compare physical objects – how do we compare experiences?

326. To observe is not the same thing as to look at or to view.

“Look at this colour and say what it reminds you of.” If the colour changes you are no longer looking at the one I meant.

One observes in order to see what one would not see if one did not observe.

327. We say, for example, “Look at this colour for a certain length of time.” But we don’t do that in order to see more than we had seen at first glance.

330. We might want to say: If there were no humans, then we wouldn’t have the concept of seeing.—But couldn’t Martians say something like this? Somehow, by chance, the first humans they met were all blind.

333. If we say, “there are humans who see,” the questions follows, “And what is ‘seeing’?” And how should we answer it? By teaching the questioner the use of the word “see”?

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE SEE THE FOLLOWING> ADVENTURES

]]> http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/the-symbol-of-the-archaic-by-guy-davenport/feed/ 0 impossibleobjects wasteland of a program Sarlat Petra Palmyra OmphalosDelphi vldordognelascaux1 Geography of the Imagination http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/ian-hamilton-finlay-a-selction-of-printed-works/ http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/ian-hamilton-finlay-a-selction-of-printed-works/#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:11:44 +0000 impossibleobjects http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/?p=465 ]]>

Currently installed at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery is an exhibition of printed works by Scottish poet and visual artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay.  The process of organizing this show began through collaboration with poet and critic Stephen Scobie, who generously loaned many of the works on view.  In conjunction with the physical exhibition of Finlay’s works, we published a small book of selected writings on Finlay’s printed works.  These writings come from some of the most interesting voices on poetry, visual art, and the avant-garde:

Alec Finlay

Anne Moeglin-Delcroix

Michael Charlesworth

Marjorie Perloff

Kenneth Goldsmith

Molly Schwartzburg

and

Stephen Scobie

To create this book we collaborated with visual artist and editor of Veneer Magazine, Flint Jamison.  In conversation with this collaborative process, Jamison created an exhibition at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery titled tongue/groove technology keeps safe these nodes, here:

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Printed and bound in Canada by Westcan Printing Group, the book can currently be purchased at the following locations:

Marfa Book Company, Marfa, Texas

Domy Books, Austin, Texas

Dexter Sinister’s Occasional Bookstore, New York, New York

and more locations soon.

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From the introduction to The Present Order:

With this book and exhibition, we hope to demonstrate the formal and conceptual diversity of Finlay’s printed works, most of which appeared through Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961.  Although attention to Finlay’s work predominantly concerns his garden, Little Sparta, located in Dunsyre, Scotland, we believe these printed works to be of equal interest.  For the exhibition, we selected works that demonstrate a concern for mobility, materiality and forms of contingency.  Included are examples of printed cards, booklets, prints, books, folding cards, and the international poetry journal he edited, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Finlay’s work is marked by a consistency of vision.  Both Stonypath-Little Sparta and his printed works demonstrate an engagement with political and art historical precedents, as well as his long relationship to collaboration.  In considering Finlay’s work, it is additionally necessary to recognize his interest in the nautical, the pastoral, the militaristic, the domestic, the revolutionary, and above all the transformative potential of all of these concepts through metaphor.  However, it is Finlay’s relationship to paper and publication that directed our thinking when organizing the exhibition and this book.

Finlay explored paper’s materiality—texture, fragility, frame, economy, ubiquity—acknowledging that paper is an object with six sides.  He also specifically addressed the temporal nature of books, which consist of multiple pages turned in time.  Finlay worked with the printed page as a material object in three key ways.  First, through his engagement with concrete poetry, Finlay was among those working to reveal the entirety of the page as an active and decidedly visible space.  Second, a number of Finlay’s printed works invite physical manipulation, often through folding, so that the paper object takes sculptural form to occupy actual space.  Third, Finlay combined the elements of concrete poetry, with the insistence of the materiality of the page and book to create artists’ books that uniquely embodied his relationship to the world.  Also, and importantly, many of these works address mobility, a fact that resonates when we consider how thoroughly the garden work concerns monumentality and place.   It is additionally resonant in relation to a man who suffered agoraphobia and who left the grounds of his house a mere handful of times during the last thirty years of his life.

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All Photographs of the installation courtesy of photographer Aurora Tang.

From Gleason's essay Porticus Pompeiana: a new perspective on the first public park of ancient Rome

Unidentified. Allegorie Dediée au Tiers État. From the Popular Imagery Collection of the Harry Ransom Center.

Classic reference on book terminology, description, and collecting, first published in 1952.

In addition, my partner (Tim Johnson) and I finished the installation of printed works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, currently on view at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery.  In conjunction with the exhibition, we published our first book titled The Present Order : Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Over the next few months I will be posting documentation of the show, the book, and our collaboration with Flint Jamison, designer of the Finlay book. 

In the village of Kapkater, Kenya in the early 1950′s, members of the Kipsigi tribe came across a few 78 records of Jimmie Rodgers music.  Convinced that the sounds could not have come from a human, the voice was attributed to a centaur-like spirit named the Chemirocha. This song is played on a pentonic wishbone lyre with vocals by some Kipsigis women.  More versions of Chemirocha, can be found through the South African Music Archive Project.

Listen: Chemirocha

You work in a variety of media, sound, painting, sculpture, artists’ books, how do you see these media as related or different, particularly in terms of practice?

When I first started exhibiting work, actually even before that, during graduate school, I only painted.  I didn’t make drawings or works on paper,  as I felt like drawings were essentially cheaper paintings to sell.  Unless I could approach paper in a way that was different than the way that I could approach canvas or wood with paint, it just didn’t seem to me rigorous enough.  It’s a ridiculous thing to think now.  I think of an artist like Rodin, where the works he did on paper are more compelling to me in many ways than his sculpture.  Some of my favorite works, period, are paper and also I have always responded to small, delicate somewhat insignificant feeling things, which tend to be things on paper.  For whatever reason I felt like I could only really work on painting.  It was just a form of discipline.  At home, I would work with sound, but for a while I didn’t understand its relationship to my visual work.  I felt like I was a painter who sometimes made music, even though I can’t play an instrument or read music and I was using stones and weird tape recorders.  In a way the music was freer than painting because I didn’t go to school for music.  I had no baggage, my heroes I could never touch so I never felt overwhelmed by them.  With painting, the relationship to history through study and also through a lifetime of looking at things is overwhelming at times.  I’m not concerned with originality but just to feel like you’re at least treading your own water, creating your own small territory within something larger.  I think it’s a delicate balance to be influenced by someone or to be conversing with someone and a lot of my work is about conversing with someone.  I have this 8 mm camera that my parents gave me when I was maybe 11.  My father worked a bit in commercials and was a cameraman around the time I was born.  I wanted to use the camera because he had given it me when I was a child and he’s not alive so I thought, “I want to make a film,” and there was no hesitancy in that, which is hilarious because my relationship to film is very strong, but I didn’t feel like I was competing with a film director and I didn’t even feel like I was competing with someone like Brakhage because I was just a painter with a little super-8 camera.  It kind of became about permission, and  so I made a film.  I kept the camera every day with me for a year.  I shot ten seconds of sunlight or shadow, some kind of natural light phenomenon.  Certainly, there were days that I didn’t film, but the idea was that I would have to think about making work everyday, I would have to make work everyday and I would have to be looking attentively everyday.  These things are so funny to me because it was a ridiculous thing to do in so many ways, but when I finished that film I accepted film as part of my practice, because I committed to it and it offered something that sound and painting couldn’t offer me.  It was time-based but it was silent, it existed on the wall but it wasn’t static and it was abstract but not through anything other than looking.  I was in love with early Bauhaus and Surrealist films, so it certainly took cues from those things.  It’s a quite beautiful a film made up of images of things in the world; but it was also somewhat naïve, and I think it was more of a conversation than a realized work because it was the first I’d done in that medium.  I still think it’s a strong work, but I think it’s more of a question of being particularly aware of film daily, for a year. It was a first step.

Where does your text-based work fit in with these various mediums?

It’s the same kind of thing.  Literature has always been enormous for me and I was not a reader as a kid.  I took a class in art school, I mean we had to take an English class and the teacher was fantastic.  It was Bernard Cooper.  I mean, I didn’t know who Bernard Cooper was; he might have been anyone then, but he made us read and write and I was not much of a writer and I was not much of a reader.  He assigned us Calvino, Kafka, and some other things that I don’t remember liking that much, but he gave us totally wacky writing assignments.  It wasn’t that I didn’t read at all, but I was reading things that were connected to the visual arts.  Discovering Baudelaire through Manet.  Discovering Surrealists through painting I liked.  So I was interested in experimental fiction, but I had no context for it.  The year after that year in school, I did my third year as an undergraduate in Paris and I don’t speak French and I didn’t speak French then and I’m not the most social person in the world.  I’d go to school and work and then I would leave school, go to museums, and listen to music, mostly.  So on day I went to a bookstore and I bought Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin because I had watched the Fassbinder film when I was younger and it was one of the most profound experiences I had probably ever had up to that point with a piece of art.  So I decided to try to read the book and I loved it.  It opened up a whole world to me.  26 years later, I still love a lot of German and Austrian writing from 1880 to 1920, and by the time I got to grad school I was reading mostly that kind of stuff.  Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, Robert Walser and Rilke.  In grad school we were reading Baudrillard and talking about the simulacra and I was still reading for the 400^th time Letters to a Young Poet.  I was doing work based on Rimbaud, the poems about vowels.  And so, as much as my painting interests were Arthur Dove, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and contemporary folks like Brice Marden.  There was really no place for me in an institution that was rigorous about going to Disney Land to mock it as a simulated experience.  So when I had to write a thesis, it was supposed to be academic, researched and heavily critical, which I can be but I wasn’t interested in academic criticism at all.  I decided to write my thesis about the idea of walking and wandering.  There were a couple people who were sympathetic.  I got some Zen things and some John Dewey things and I was completely obsessed with this book of letters between Schoenberg and Kandinsky.  Schoenberg painted, and I think he and Strindberg are the two most underrated Sunday painters of all time.  Kandinsky really loved music and wrote about sound.  They conversed about each other’s mediums a lot.  So my thesis was a piece of fiction about two people coming down from different mountains and passing on this path.  Basically the walking part was Richard Long and the other sources and the conversation that they had was basically from this book of letters.  You know, I got my ass kicked, but that experience got me thinking about possibly trying to write.  Before that, writing had been this one thing that I could never think of approaching because of the writers I admired.  How do you deal with someone like Hesse or Thomas Mann?  But once I got out of grad school in 1989, I had this idea that I should try and write a novel, so I spent an hour every morning writing a novel.  Which was terrible.  But the activity was wonderful.  The discipline was incredible (and eventually led to the idea of making the film once a day for a year).  I also tried to write some poetry based on all the Spanish words I could remember from grammar school as my toolkit.  A couple months ago I found them and I realized that they were the beginning of the writing that I’m doing now. I didn’t have a Spanish dictionary.  I don’t really speak Spanish.  But there were a significant amount of words that I remembered.  So the systems that I now use to generate visual work, really evolved out this early attempt to write.  I had tried making paintings using systems as far back as graduate school, but the entire process was unresolved.  I did a series of paintings in school based on Rimbaud’s Ophelia poem, trying to make a painting for every word. But it didn’t work, and I was forcing things, which made the process and the work feel a bit artificial.  It felt too art-like and I was pretty anti the whole idea of feeling like I was making art.  I wanted to feel like I was making something I needed to make.  And that still carries through.  I was reading Agnes Martin’s writings at that time.  That was another thing in school that I was getting my butt kicked for.  And I was interested in Cage.  And Cage, until he was older never copped to the fact that personal taste was a big part of what he was doing.  And in a lot of ways the chance systems allowed him to work without intellectual discourse, but going through the material and pulling things intuitively.   Some people look at Albers paintings and think it’s just about control, but those paintings clearly come out of a love.  It’s this idea of rules equaling freedom.  If you limit yourself, how can you articulate something within that framework that doesn’t allow you your repetitive comfort zone.

Considering Cage as an influence, was Ouilpo a literary influence?

I didn’t know much about that, but of course it’s in there.  It’s pulling from a lot of different things.  There are a lot of Fluxus scores and works that were influential, more towards the process than the outcome.  There is a lot of conceptual art— the Robert Morris’s blind drawings, Thomas Marioni’s drum brush drawings, these things where a score should yield action, not a poetic result, yet a poetic result is achieved in spite of the action.  That has always been difficult for people to grasp within my own work.  They want the work to relate to that history, yet I’m not making crisp minimal drawings, I’m making seriously wonky painter’s paintings.  Traditionally, this kind of conceptual work is much more connected to object that generate rigidity or sparseness.  There are times when I’d rather make a Tom Marioni drum brush drawing than my own work, but I can’t force the work to be a certain way simply because I feel sympathy with that work.  I’m basically setting up a performance system.  Even with the work I’ve been doing in Marfa, I looked at this text by Judd and I took the vowel structure of that text and I used the vowel structure as a score.  All of the work follows the same pattern but none of the works look the same.  Most of the work that I like from that time period, has a clear connection between what was done, how it was done, and what it looks like.  I have no interest in doing that myself because those works now exist in history the ideas behind them are as important as the objects, but I have no interest what-so-ever in anyone being interested in my ideas at the expense of being interested in the objects I make. Conceptual art’s history places the idea at the top of the ladder, and the object near the bottom, for me it is the opposite. I feel like good ideas are overrated.  I would like people to be able to ignore my ideas, to approach the things I make on their own terms.  I don’t want the work to have to fulfill my intentions. This is why I think someone like Agnes Martin is so interesting, because I want to get to a place where the things that I’m initially dealing with intellectually suddenly go away, so i can really be immersed in what I’m making. If we looked at a painting from four years ago I could have said, “every mark in this painting is connected to this score and I could show you where and how.” Now, I’m less interested in that, and it seems much more of a risk to allow the process of making to include moments when I break away from the score because the conversation should allow me to step into the visual field before me, as well as returning to the score – it should be a conversation more than a set of rules. If you had a metal frame and built a sculpture on top of it, that frame would still be there no matter what you placed upon it.  Even if you couldn’t see the form, it’s still the foundation of the thing that you’ve built.  A lot of people talk about painting as a discipline.  The only other thing people talk about in that way is probably sports or spiritual activity.  In all three, every time you sit down to do something you are trying to learn something new.  You are trying to go to a higher place than you were before.  To certain artists that means doing the same thing every time and still feeling like there is something new in it.  For me, it’s making something that seems unfamiliar and disconnected from the last one.

Do you use process throughout all of your works?

In the early 90′s, I showed a bit with a gallery for maybe six years and then left.   At that time my work was essentially paintings covered with letters.  I took a biography of Goethe and notated the first letter on every page and made a painting that used all of those letters on its surface as an image, and that’s how I was using systems at the time.  It was arbitrary.  It was mostly about taking things out of context.  And after two solo shows it seemed a good moment to leave the gallery even though I didn’t have any where else to go and I knew I wouldn’t have an exhibition for probably three or four years. But people were starting to know me as this guy who paints letters, and i realized that my relationship to my sources were not really deep enough.  I was spending time with them, and I pulled forms them and exploited them in a way, but i was only scratching the surface.  I ended up working on three projects for a year, but I didn’t paint.  One was a sculpture that was 490 objects based on all the known land formations on the moon circa 1900.  To determine the height and materials of each sculpture, I used the vowel structure of each name, taking cues from Rimbaud – if a vowel could equal a color, couldn’t it also equal a material or a measurement?  At the same time I was reading this book by Hesse called “Wandering” which is a series of poems and prose related to his walking through the Alps.  It’s not a great book, but there are about 4 or 5 pages about trees that I think are the best thing ever written about trees.  Earlier in my painting life I painted that entire text on a canvas.  I wanted to go back to it as I had used that text to generate several works.  I ended up buying 26 different green colored pencils, different brands, anything that was a variation so I could have 26.  Each pencil was a stand in for a letter of the alphabet.  I read the text slower than i was ever able to before. For the word “the” I would see the “t” and go through my colored pencils until i found the corresponding “t” pencil, and made a mark in that color on a piece of lined notebook paper. Each drawing follows the letter stream of one page of text.

The other important thing was this book of Swedish poetry by Par Lagerkvist.  I found it in a used bookstore and opened it up only to realize that it was only in Swedish.  I thought for a long time that I would use it for a painting, but  as these other activities were going on I realized that my connection to the object or source material was getting more developed.  On a whim I picked up the book one morning and started reading it out-loud.  I wondered what the Swedish words could be, but of course even though I was able to speak them, I had no idea what they meant. I had read all of Lagerkvist’s novels in English, so I knew the landscape of the work, so I didn’t want to create a dictionary for every word and then end up with non-sense poems.  I actually wanted the book to teach me to write.  So I started to play.  Some words like “valda” sounded like “fallen” and so I could just write that word down.  Some words I could never find a good equivalent for, and if I couldn’t find an intuitive word I would use the spelling of the word and an old dictionary to try and find an English word that started with the same three letters.

You would examine how that felt with the text and how you felt about it?

Yes and I was also trying to look at his rhyming structure.  Those three things are actually the three most significant things I did in terms of altering my entire practice.  In all these I was allowing something else to direct me.  When I had worked with systems before these three pieces, I was directing everything and I was interested in Cage and I was playing with chance, but it wasn’t rigorous enough and it wasn’t going anywhere.  All of these things seemed like seeds.  The writing in way was the most exciting because it was something I didn’t know how to approach.

Do you find it difficult to move through mediums over long periods of time?

I think moving through mediums provides some clarity for me.  I have friends who don’t understand why I spend time on sound; they think I should just be painting.  I know sound artists that think I should just focus on sound.  These practices are not connected on the surface, the drawings don’t look like the paintings, the sculpture doesn’t look the drawings or the paintings, the sound work is much more minimal than the other things I do, but there is a very strong conceptual umbrella over everything.  For me, painting is like the sun and all these other things are the planets that float around it.

So then, would you say that painting is therefore your primary practice?

I would say it’s what I’ve done the longest; it’s what I do consistently.  The funniest thing is that every time I’ve had a great shift in my painting it has come from stepping away from painting and working in another medium.

What is your ideal presentation for your works of translation?

In my dream world they would editioned objects.  That’s why I make CD’s as well.  I design every aspect of them.  To me they are a continuation of artists’ publications.  They come out of that history.  I started making records partially because Dubuffet made records as much as I’m interested in Cage and the whole history of experimental and avant-garde music.  The permission came to me from Dubuffet and people like Kaprow.  A lot of visual artists have made record objects, and that history is of great interest to me.

The poster for your show at the Locker Plant in Marfa, Texas as part of your residency with Chinati Foundation is a photograph of an opening to a notebook of yours.  On the notebook is notational structure that resembles a musical score.  Do you ever display objects like this?

In this instance, this is my work journal.  There are writings in there that I would consider publishing, but not as a facsimile.  I’m leery of pointing back to myself.  I don’t want to be the center.  I want to offer something to people where meaning can be built by their experience.

I would love to do a book of writings that are essentially related to my work.  I write constantly about my work.  Since I came to Marfa I have been writing a lot about the idea of site-specificity.  I’ve been struggling with the idea that in my own work, the video and sound works are the only aspects of my work that I really think about as being site-specific.  I didn’t want to come to Marfa and make paintings that I could have made at home.  When I left Los Angeles I was reading about Robert Irwin and then when I arrived in Marfa I received the Chinati packet with the Judd text.  I wanted to use what they were talking about not towards the final experience, but towards the idea of making.  How can site-specific be a term used towards the process of making something.  I’ve been writing a pretty long text about that.  Those things I hope I would get an opportunity to publish. When I write about the work, there is not only the ability to organize thoughts, but to have a kind of freedom to write things that would be more difficult to speak – and I can talk about the work in a more esoteric way.

What do you think is the ideal display for your work?   I’m sure this changes based on medium, but are there any general features of display that are very important to you?

My shows have become more complex in regards to medium.  Now a body of work could include paintings, sculpture, drawings, a sound work and maybe a film or video component.  My dealer in LA just moved to a new space with two huge rooms, where her last space was four smaller rooms.  The three shows I had in that space, were as follows: paintings were in the center room, drawings were in the back room, sculpture and sound were in different rooms. When my last show as reviewed, the writer was positive about the work, but did not like the arrangements of the work.  She thought I had done a disservice to the work by separating the pieces by medium.  I have always tried to protect the paintings.   If there is sound in the room with the paintings, the paintings become part of a soundtrack, etc.   A few months later I did an interview with the same reviewer and we talked for a long time about the installation of the work. Through the conversation I realized that I’d been stubborn about the display, and that the works could converse with each other towards something quite exciting.  So, the ideal presentation might be all of these things co-existing.  But, it depends on how much individuality the works need.  I would not want to compromise a single work’s voice just to make the whole arrangement of works more exciting.

Can you discuss some of the work that you’ve completed during your stay in Marfa?

What I’ve finished are some paintings, some drawings, some sculpture and a little sound piece.  With the paintings I used something visual in the Locker Plant to generate a large part of the overall composition.  For the sculpture I used wood that the last artist in residence had left behind, and gave to me.  There are five pieces of wood.  I was already going to use the vowel structure of Judd’s text when i realized the second longest piece of wood was already painted black.  The second largest amount of letters in the text is “A” corresponds to black in Rimbaud’s vowel color system, so I had to use it.  The drawings feel like I am working on experiments, willing to go wherever they take me.  Some of them I would frame and hang in my house and some of them I would be reluctant to show to anyone.  I’m going to hang them all in the space.  I think it’s important to be able to embrace as well as deviate from the source.

What do you mean by source?  The material?  Referential material?

It depends.  Usually whatever the system is built from.  The paintings are built from this Judd text, but that doesn’t mean there is an image of his sculpture in the center of the painting.  A number of things came together to determine the visual form and its process of making.  The ceiling is a grid, which is where a lot of the imagery came from, but  I didn’t sit down and think, “I want to make some geometric grid paintings and I will use this Judd text to generate them.”  It’s more like, you start to converse with this thing and suggests a building process and you try to let the source somehow influence your decisions and actions, as well as the forms that are being made.

When I got to Marfa I really wanted to think about the site, it’s history, the conversation around it.  I wanted all of these things to come into play.  Otherwise I could have just continues what I was working on at home.  This work is the next step.  There have been two major shifts in my work up to this point.  One of them was that time when I stopped painting for a year.  This clearly feels like the third big shift.  My last show was the most exciting body of work I’ve ever made, but a year and a half later, I see that show as the culmination of something that I worked on for eight or nine years and over the past year I’ve been trying to find a way to step into new territory.  My whole practice is built around denying myself any kind of comfort zone so that when something becomes familiar or routine, I pull the rug out from under myself. My time in Marfa has been an unbelievably important first step towards whatever the next step will be.

A VERY SMALL SELECTION OF IMAGES:

(all text about the work by Steve Roden)

the paintings were made using small sections of a 12 page classical music score. the letter equivalents of the musical notes determined numbers which then became a score for actions, images, marks, etc.

when rain is like sun and sun is like rain…
72″ x 72 “, oil and acrylic on linen, 2008

_______________________________________

fallen/spoken

2000- present

an “intuitive translation” of valda dikter by par lagerkvist

______________________________

For more information on Roden’s work please see his excellent website:

http://www.inbetweennoise.com/

Roden also keeps a blog called Airform Archives:

http://inbetweennoise.blogspot.com/

(some of my favorites are Roden’s posts on concrete poetry)

]]> http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/interview-steve-roden/feed/ 0 impossibleobjects sunlikerain fallenspoken1 http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/some-forms-of-availability-by-simon-cutts/ http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/some-forms-of-availability-by-simon-cutts/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:37:19 +0000 impossibleobjects http://impossibleobjects.wordpress.com/?p=418 ]]>

Before opening the book itself, the cover of some forms of availability provides the reader with information about what they should expect from the book.  Some of this information is straightforward, while other parts are my guesses or suppositions:

That this publication will include “Critical passages on The Book and Publication”
That these passages have been created by Simon Cutts
That this book will involve putting things into perspective.  Opening up things that appear closed.  Acknowledging different shades or hues of work, in a metaphorical way of speaking.

The sections of some forms of availability are generally arranged as follows:

1. Some Forms of Availability
2. Taraque, The Trent Bookshop/Coracle, workfortheeyetodo
3. The Process of the Book
4. Critical Publication
5. The Artist Publisher
6. Dislocated Paragraphs
7. Some Coracle Ephemera
8. Homage to Seurat
9. Polemical Postcards
10. A Partial Bibliography
11. Beyond Reading

To begin, I’d like to explore the last section “Beyond Reading” first and then return to the first section “Some Forms of Availability.”

“Beyond Reading”

“Beyond Reading” opens with an initially unattributed quotation that reads:

The pure work implies the elocutory disappearance of the poet, who abandons the initiative to words mobilized by the shock of their inequality; they light one another up with mutual reflections like a virtual trail of fire upon precious stones, replacing the breathing perceptible in the old lyrical blast of the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase.

The reader learns in a note at the end of the section that this is Stéphane Mallarmé from his essay Crise de Vers.

We then read Cutt’s argument:

(What follows is the transcribed text, below is a scan of the page spreads as they appear in the book.  Click on image for a larger view.  The structure of these words on the page is undoubtedly of importance to Cutts).

The unit of the work cannot be the sentence

or the phrase

or the line

the linear syntax structure causes

the line

the phrase

the sentence

to be systematic, sequential

the unit of the work is the

word

Following this tract, is a section called “notes.”  This short prose explanation by Cutts reiterates the thoughts described above and Mallarme’s sentiment in the opening quotation.  Cutts writes:

The work is its own continuous accumulative impression, varying and differing not only for each reader, but each time it is read.  For this continuous structure to be effective, it must to be the antithesis of a sequential reading…to have read the work in sequence is only one of several possibilities, as the supposed sequence exists in a condition of simultaneity.

What follows is an examination of the text through two categories that I feel are pertinent to this essay:

the unit

possibility

the unit

After much reading and thinking and re-reading and re-thinking I return to the thought that the “unit of work” can be reduced to a further degree.  Why not push further?  Why can’t the discussion extend to the letter as the unit?

It is in fact Mallarme who wrote in “Le livre, instrument sprituel” (1895) that letters are “gifted with infinity” and that “Everything [the totality of earthly existence] is caught up in their endless variations” (please see Gerald L. Brauns Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language for more information both on this topic and Mallarme’s relationship to Language in general).

I return to Mallarme’s thoughts here because his presence is very much felt throughout Beyond Reading, not only in beginning quotation, but also in Cutts’ gestures through typography and in his explanatory notes section.

While I do not share Mallarme’s mystical appreciation of the letter, I see tremendous beauty and interest in the “endless variations” that are at all times present in the combination of letters to make words, phrases, and sentences.

possibility

Returning generally to Cutts’ “Notes” section and specifically to the above-mentioned passage I want to reiterate the following passage:

to have read the work in sequence is only one of several possibilities, as the supposed sequence exists in a condition of simultaneity

While several possibilities of readings of any work involving multiple words exist, when thinking about an essay or a book of essays, the opportunity for exponentially more than just several possible readings exist.  If a reader were able to disregard linearity, sequential reading, learned reading, and traditional reading the possibilities would become as infinite as the amount of possible combinations of words in the text.  This argument is perhaps a side note. However what interests me here is the idea of possibilities.  I am struck by the potential relationship between possibilities and chance.

In thinking about chance I was recently struck by the short exploration of chance and the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce’s thoughts in relationship to the work of artist Donald Judd in Richard Shiff’s essay, “Donald Judd: Fast Thinking.”  As Shiff writes:

‘Everything which happens is infinitely improbable.’ This is one of Peirce’s characteristically odd statements…It’s validity lies in the realization that ‘everything which happens’ has an infinite number of opportunities to happen otherwise—in principle, not to happen at all.  Something of this sort may be what Judd was thinking when he wrote, ‘Things that exist exist and everything is on their side…Everything is equal, just existing, and the values and interests they have are only adventitious.’  By existing, the things that exist have already beaten the odds.

What I’m attempting to get at here is not an intensely philosophical position on the nature of chance, but instead to highlight the excitement of the fact that each thing that exists could have been otherwise and beyond that each thing that exists, be it a poem or an artwork, can be thought of and “read” in such multifarious ways that the possibilities for “reading” in all of its connotations are infinite.  One should not lose excitement when facing this multiplicity.

“Some Forms of Availability”

“Some Forms of Availability” does a number of things very succinctly.  I will try to be even more succinct without losing Cutt’s meaning, by bullet pointing what I think are some of his key points, in some instances using Cutt’s exact words, sometimes using my own:

1. The book is the most available of formats (this writing is from October 2006).
2. “The potentiality of publication as a form is inexhaustible.”
3. Making books is an action, akin to gardening and cooking, where one can learn many things about the abstract and natural, material world.
4. “The poem’s ideal manifestation is the book itself.”

From this writing, it seems that Cutt’s came to these conclusions through personal experience.  He describes encounters in his life that led him to form his own press, Coracle.  He also describes his reading interests throughout the 60s, beginning with Joyce’s Ulysses and continuing on with writing by Mallarme, Apollinaire, Pound, Eliot, and concrete poets.

One thing of interest to me is his insistence on describing his physical, active encounter with the materials used to create a book or printed publication.

He says:

…..we taught ourselves…the economics of formatting, about paper, sheet sizes and weights, the use of off-cuts, print, ink, and not least of all printers and the means of handling them.

Cutt’s begins this writing with a Rimbaud quotation from Momento d’expression anglais, which reads:

Do you please, as soon as possible

send to me in my box all things

which remain in the room again

This quotation strikes me as quite beautiful in relationship to language and the book.  In Rimbaud’s poem there is a box, a room, and all the things that can go in both the box and room.  Think about the box as a metaphor for a book, and language as a metaphor for all that which can be both put in the box and also remain in the room.  Therefore, language can exist simultaneously inside a book, but also outside of a book.  From this metaphor, I came to one possible and for me, quite beautiful interpretation of the poem:  that language is inexhaustible.

In thinking of Cutt’s statement, “The poem’s ideal manifestation is the book,” I am left with a sense of ambivalence.  This ambivalence has led to the following questions: