bw: So why the sudden collagiste urge?
The C: Boredom. Lassitude. Frustration. Incompetence.
bw: Seriously?
The C: A constellation of events: Aida Kazarian’s one night show; the afternoon spent upstairs in Posada; discovering Luc Fierens’ work (and thereby a whole network of Belgian mailart-Fluxus-DIY exponents and conspirators); the ‘Artists Write’ exhibition in Ixelles we went to see some Saturdays ago. Then getting Rodfer’s Call It Thought just before Christmas and seeing texts such as Oriflamme Day for the first time ...
... a poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition, every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation ...
(Rodefer, ‘Preface’)
... teaching Blake and looking at his prints thinking what method he might seize on today, now, in the XXIst Century, what would home DIY technology allow?
Enough? Or too much?
bw: The devil is in the detail! One at a time please.
The C: Aida Kazarian. I love the work although it veers – at times – a little too much towards ‘beaux livreism’. I’d prefer a grittier approach. The tomes she works in are perhaps too handsome. That said, I like her mark making – a literal impress of finger and thumb. A tactile language bypassing grammar and rational syntax. Also, her inventiveness – a seemingly narrow range of options and yet an astonishing variety. Her ‘annotations’ to a copy of Dante were wonderful: finger prints suggestive of sun, moon and planets waxing and waning. Love it! Besides the books being laid out in the room. A space to open, peruse, touch, inhale ... it reinvigorated what I thought a book could be, could do ... a new way of looking (just when everyone seems to think that the Book is Dead). Deadwood for Kindling TM?
bw: Posada? Luc Fierens?
The C: In amongst the more MOMA bookshop deluxe productions my eye alighted upon Luc F.’s tiny stapled books – this was what I was looking for! Evidently spur-of-the-moment productions, offerings to the god Xerox, found materials, a garbage aesthetic. Recycled art. Clumsy in places – perhaps deliberately so. Refuse any glossy finish to cut through the stifling weight of Artist Monographs stacked to the ceiling. Thames & Hudson respectability. Taschen lip 'n gloss. Each of Luc's books said: DO IT YOURSELF. A goad to transform your life. Engage! Make! Get off your arse! Cut it out!
bw: The Ixelles exhibition?
The C: Some surprising work: Victor Hugo watercolours, cartoons by Rimbaud, above all a Schwitters (postcard size) which eclipsed everything else. That you can work on such a format and produce something so beautifully judged and composed - and with so little. What an example! Essentially the exhibition suggested to me that it was possible to work with both hands at once. Why separate the activities? Oddly enough the Burroughs piece seemed low voltage – lacking the nasty paranoiac quality of Journal pages I’ve seen before.
bw: Enough bio-bibliography. Where now?
The C: Looking at them and seeing what they suggest. Alan Halsey – I think – has said that the images and the poems speak to each other in ways he discovers afterwards. I’m interested in how the scraps now juxtaposed start to resonate in different ways. Alphabet forms blend into 3-D space or flatten to the surface and fragment. Then to ‘write off’ the images creating a visual-poetic economy of sorts. Avoiding, I hope, one being illustrational of the other.
bw: And the method?
The C: Like blackberry picking, beachcombing, vagrant behaviour. I rip off torn and fragmented bits of posters I find in the streets – mostly on the way to, from, or at the University Mediatheque. Concert ads, night clubs, For Sale signs, etc.. Whatever is ripe for picking. Stuff them in my pocket and then wait for the moment to start working. Often it’s in the evening, everyone else upstairs, the radio on. A little space in the day. It’s a half-(arsed?) articulated aesthetics of street and scavenger art, parodying recycling in the name of moral well-meaning civic responsibility. And it’s good to have your palette dictated by what you’ve found. It focuses the mind and hand wonderfully.
bw: And then?
The C: Work in series – 3s, 4s, 6s – and simultaneously. If one fragment won’t fit one card then it might work with another where something invites it. Glue and paste. What’s lovely is where the poster has a transparent film which has become stained or taken on impressions from previous billings. Also – a little ‘discovery’ – using sellotape to do rip-offs: the adhesive takes some lettering and you end up with a transferrable strip. The show through is great – just enough. Also, images and colours which are too bright can be quickly muted and degraded. Dubstep meets poetry?
“Burial instinctively knew that dubbing is about veiling the song, about reducing it to a tantalising tissue of traces, a virtual object all the more beguiling because of its partial desubstantialisation. The drizzly crackle that has become one of his sonic signatures is part of the veiling process ...”
(‘Downcast Angel’, Burial in The Wire, December 2007)
And I’d trace similar tendencies through the kind of ‘extended translation’ being done by Tim Atkins in his Horace – palimpsestic writing, layered transparencies, the ancient of dailiness, breaking news coming from the past.
bw: Finally?
The C: Standing in the doorknob shop a couple of weekends ago I was looking at the display racks with slim volumes in different formats which were (disappointingly) simply trade brochures. Imagine, though, a bookshop like that: chapbooks, one-offs, sleeves containing cards, books that open to unfold tip-ins, tracing paper layerings. Ta biblia.
It's always been difficult for me to make tunes. i'd just sit or walk waiting for night to fall hoping i'd make something i liked ... The tunes just lulled me, and you need a vocal to do that, and a certain type of sound to echo and circle and sway into a pattern. The moodiness made the tunes, not me. Now when I listen to them, they're ramshackle, DIY and rolling but I know there is a thing trapped in them so that when I look back on them, even if its dry, I know when it was made, I know what was going on that day, it’s like stapling real life to the side of the tune.
(Burial, interview)
___
(or: when all else fails, talk to yourself ...)
bw: The devil is in the detail! One at a time please.
The C: Aida Kazarian. I love the work although it veers – at times – a little too much towards ‘beaux livreism’. I’d prefer a grittier approach. The tomes she works in are perhaps too handsome. That said, I like her mark making – a literal impress of finger and thumb. A tactile language bypassing grammar and rational syntax. Also, her inventiveness – a seemingly narrow range of options and yet an astonishing variety. Her ‘annotations’ to a copy of Dante were wonderful: finger prints suggestive of sun, moon and planets waxing and waning. Love it! Besides the books being laid out in the room. A space to open, peruse, touch, inhale ... it reinvigorated what I thought a book could be, could do ... a new way of looking (just when everyone seems to think that the Book is Dead). Deadwood for Kindling TM?
bw: Posada? Luc Fierens?
The C: In amongst the more MOMA bookshop deluxe productions my eye alighted upon Luc F.’s tiny stapled books – this was what I was looking for! Evidently spur-of-the-moment productions, offerings to the god Xerox, found materials, a garbage aesthetic. Recycled art. Clumsy in places – perhaps deliberately so. Refuse any glossy finish to cut through the stifling weight of Artist Monographs stacked to the ceiling. Thames & Hudson respectability. Taschen lip 'n gloss. Each of Luc's books said: DO IT YOURSELF. A goad to transform your life. Engage! Make! Get off your arse! Cut it out!
bw: The Ixelles exhibition?
The C: Some surprising work: Victor Hugo watercolours, cartoons by Rimbaud, above all a Schwitters (postcard size) which eclipsed everything else. That you can work on such a format and produce something so beautifully judged and composed - and with so little. What an example! Essentially the exhibition suggested to me that it was possible to work with both hands at once. Why separate the activities? Oddly enough the Burroughs piece seemed low voltage – lacking the nasty paranoiac quality of Journal pages I’ve seen before.
bw: Enough bio-bibliography. Where now?
The C: Looking at them and seeing what they suggest. Alan Halsey – I think – has said that the images and the poems speak to each other in ways he discovers afterwards. I’m interested in how the scraps now juxtaposed start to resonate in different ways. Alphabet forms blend into 3-D space or flatten to the surface and fragment. Then to ‘write off’ the images creating a visual-poetic economy of sorts. Avoiding, I hope, one being illustrational of the other.
bw: And the method?
The C: Like blackberry picking, beachcombing, vagrant behaviour. I rip off torn and fragmented bits of posters I find in the streets – mostly on the way to, from, or at the University Mediatheque. Concert ads, night clubs, For Sale signs, etc.. Whatever is ripe for picking. Stuff them in my pocket and then wait for the moment to start working. Often it’s in the evening, everyone else upstairs, the radio on. A little space in the day. It’s a half-(arsed?) articulated aesthetics of street and scavenger art, parodying recycling in the name of moral well-meaning civic responsibility. And it’s good to have your palette dictated by what you’ve found. It focuses the mind and hand wonderfully.
bw: And then?
The C: Work in series – 3s, 4s, 6s – and simultaneously. If one fragment won’t fit one card then it might work with another where something invites it. Glue and paste. What’s lovely is where the poster has a transparent film which has become stained or taken on impressions from previous billings. Also – a little ‘discovery’ – using sellotape to do rip-offs: the adhesive takes some lettering and you end up with a transferrable strip. The show through is great – just enough. Also, images and colours which are too bright can be quickly muted and degraded. Dubstep meets poetry?
“Burial instinctively knew that dubbing is about veiling the song, about reducing it to a tantalising tissue of traces, a virtual object all the more beguiling because of its partial desubstantialisation. The drizzly crackle that has become one of his sonic signatures is part of the veiling process ...”
(‘Downcast Angel’, Burial in The Wire, December 2007)
And I’d trace similar tendencies through the kind of ‘extended translation’ being done by Tim Atkins in his Horace – palimpsestic writing, layered transparencies, the ancient of dailiness, breaking news coming from the past.
bw: Finally?
The C: Standing in the doorknob shop a couple of weekends ago I was looking at the display racks with slim volumes in different formats which were (disappointingly) simply trade brochures. Imagine, though, a bookshop like that: chapbooks, one-offs, sleeves containing cards, books that open to unfold tip-ins, tracing paper layerings. Ta biblia.
It's always been difficult for me to make tunes. i'd just sit or walk waiting for night to fall hoping i'd make something i liked ... The tunes just lulled me, and you need a vocal to do that, and a certain type of sound to echo and circle and sway into a pattern. The moodiness made the tunes, not me. Now when I listen to them, they're ramshackle, DIY and rolling but I know there is a thing trapped in them so that when I look back on them, even if its dry, I know when it was made, I know what was going on that day, it’s like stapling real life to the side of the tune.
(Burial, interview)
___
(or: when all else fails, talk to yourself ...)
3 comments:
Brilliant post. A Dialogue of Self and Soul. Well done both of you.
It needs mulling & I need my bed, so will not respond at length, other than to say I was reminded of the Beckett/Duthuit 3 Dialogues... (That reminds me, there's a beautiful edition of Beckett's letters out just now.)
Also, I think the blog format lends itself v. well to these art posts -- the poem-art in progress ...
And, as ever, your enthusiasm is infectious...
Walrus
Mucho thanks!
Yes, the Beckett Dialogues were in the back of my mind - and Glenn Gould's self-interviews. My fear would be it'd all sound terribly self-aggrandizing. In fact, it was just a way of trying to focus & rousing myself out of the lethargy generated by school duties.
Once again, the holiday period allows for healthy routines & the Blog benefits accordingly.
Cheers
The C.
P.S. are you a dubstep fan? I'm not as such - but the two Burial CDs are absolutely terrific.
Well, I used to be a big fan of electronica back in the early 90s, but after a while it all began to seem a little samey. I'm intrigued by dubstep, but it seems like a ragbag of styles and it's an awful name for a genre -- makes me think of dancercise. (I love dub, btw, Lee Scratch Perry & the Upsetters, Black Ark, King Tubby, etc.)
So, is dubstep really a new sound? When drum 'n' bass came along I was genuinely blown away -- yet it sounds rather quaint now. 'This is truly the music of the future!' I remember thinking. They thought the same of the syncopated rhythms of the 20s, of course. But really exciting drum 'n' bass requires real skill -- not just predictable riffs for the dancefloor, which is what happened. I'm excited about the resurgence of a more creative, less dance-based drum 'n' bass -- but look at me sounding like an expert. This I all glean from a piece in the Independent, which persuaded me to order 2 albums: Commix's Call to Mind and Mistabishi's Drop...
We shall see...
W.
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