Our good friend Alice has gone off to London to the Royal College to do an Ma in Contemporary curation. She is writing about a project we all worked on together in the Summer in Gainsborough and asking us questions and also introducing some theory and unpicking and contextualizing some of the work.
Ian Waites who is working with us on the project has suggested we look at agonism so I looked it up on Wikipedia - I'd done this before but as with so many words that you look up but don't get to use I had forgotten what it meant - or perhaps invented my own shorthand for it. To be helpful to Alice and maybe to push the conversation a bit further I was reminded of two texts that our friend Tim Niel and Richard Steadman Jones wrote about us (Thats me and Kate) in 2012. So I put them here to pull them into the present.
COLLABORATORS
I.
‘I once spent three weeks in the flat without going
outside.’ This is Stan describing a personal low. ‘The furniture was taunting
me.’
I think of the table in Stan’s kitchen, the radio, the
mug-tree, the unmatched chairs pushed up against the wall. Surely he hadn’t
heard them speaking? ‘Through their familiarity,’ he says, tuning into my
puzzlement, looking at me earnestly. ‘“Still here?” they asked, “Back here with
us? Back here with us, big shot?” Every detail of the bloody place burned into
my mind like a brand on a cow’s arse.’
He smiles and I feel anxious. I look at my hands. If I were
Stan, I might recoil from the same old sights – the scar on my thumb, the spot
of pigment at the base of my index finger, the scratches in the ring that
belonged to my grandfather. I sense how, for him, the habitual might have
become a source of danger.
II.
The man in the cafe on Wilkinson Street had two stacks of
postcards, each held together with a rubber band. He asked for tea and I saw
that Sylvia knew him, certainly as well as she knew me. His postcards were no
novelty to her.
There was evidently a method. One card to be drawn from each
stack. The two to be placed side by side on the table and contemplated. The
time to be measured in sips of tea – six or eight to each pairing, fewer
unacceptable, more to be avoided, a sign perhaps of self-indulgence? An entry
to be made in a notebook, clearly written in the centre of the page. The cards
to return to their respective decks. The whole to pass through five or six
iterations.
This is something to try, I thought. What is there to lose?
III.
When Stan met Esme, the bonds of familiarity broke – or at
least they frayed. She teased him but not with the cruelty that the chairs and
the mug-tree had shown. There was a springy quality to their interactions, as
when a green branch is pulled out of position and whips back on release,
trembling a little until it reaches equilibrium. She did not seem perturbed by
his characterising the fridge as a giant gob with the vulgar habit of opening
to reveal what it had eaten. She even appeared to enjoy the image and sometimes
used it herself, though she never let it put her off her breakfast. He enjoyed
how she remade the world through the subtle play of her perceptions against his
own.
IV.
Sylvia knew little about the man with the cards, nothing
that wasn’t obvious. She saw him as ‘practical’ – surprising, given the
esoteric nature of what she confirmed to be his daily ritual. I had interpreted
the practice as a species of divination, like casting the runes or reading the
hexagrams. I would have been embarrassed to reveal it to the workmen who were
using the cafe while they widened the pavements in Garrison Street or to Sylvia’s
daughter, who routinely expressed her contempt for the customers in a kind of
floor-show of hostility that was widely admired in the area. He, though, did
not seem at all embarrassed.
I began to collect postcards without knowing what they were
for, picking up a few when I saw some and shuffling them into the growing
stack, unsure of the correct way to do it.
V.
She was angry in a way that that Stan had never seen before.
His mother had fought against her rage, powerless but ashamed to let it take
her. In the midst of the verbal gunfire she would wail with a grief that arose
from nothing so much as the horror of what was happening to her, the loss of
what she felt was her ‘normal’ placidity. But this new kind of anger was clean
and icy, hard and luminous. It was Esme, not something from outside her.
He heard a few home truths that morning and had to admit that, unlike some of
the utterances that go by that name, they did, in fact, contain a lot of truth.
When she had gone, he stood before the mirror and felt himself caught between
the sick familiarity of his face and the possibility of some new arrangement.
The quiet sounds of the day beginning. She’d be back in the evening and now was
the time to put pen to paper.
VI.
Pairs arising. Four views of Cromer + Viriginia
Woolf. Whitby harbour + a naked rugby team. York Minster + the docks at
Grimsby. Stanage Edge + a vintage ad for Oxo. Wild
deer + Groucho Marx. The Golden Gate Bridge + a Henry Moore.
Tower Bridge + the front at Bournemouth. Las Vegas by night + Bristol from the
air. Stevenage New Town + Capri in the 50s. The prom at Llandudno + Angkor Wat.
A nuclear power station + a recipe for Scouse. A bang + a whimper. A rock + a
hard place. A wing + a prayer. A gasp + applause. A belt + braces. A son + a lover.
A man + the people. The devil + the deep blue sea.
VII.
Stan sat by the window and counted his breaths. I need
tricks not methods. I have taken myself too seriously. A little trickiness is
long overdue. The workmen were finishing up, loading the temporary signs onto a
truck. A trick and a truck. Trick truck. Trick truck. (The sound of a little
horse on a stony road.)
‘No cards today?’ A stranger stood beside him. For a moment
Stan was bewildered. No cards?
‘Uh, no!’ he said at last. ‘No cards today.’ The stranger
nodded.
‘Is that a permanent development?’ This irritated Stan a
little.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’ A pause filled with
sunlight and the chuntering of a fridge in need of repair.
‘I’ve been trying it myself,’ said the stranger, dropping
into a chair, his voice becoming urgent. ‘For a month now,’ he added. ‘I’ve
filled a notebook with pairings.’
Stan let some silence into the space between them. Such as?’
he said at last.
‘The Blackpool lights,’ said the stranger, ‘and Simone de Beauvoir.’
‘Good one,’ said Stan. It was a good one. His
interest was stirring. ‘Go on,’ he nodded.
‘Sunset in Cleethorpes,’ said the stranger, ‘and...’, his
voice dropping to a whisper, ‘an eighteenth-century Noh mask.’ He seemed
appalled by the strangeness of the coupling.
‘Beginner’s luck,’ said Stan. Sylvia, back behind the
counter, began to butter bread.
‘But what do I do with them?’ asked the stranger. ‘What are
they for? How do I use them?’ He seemed desperate, pleading, begging for
instruction. ‘What do you do with them?’ he asked again, crowding in
closer. ‘Just what is it that you do with them?’
The terrible noise of the fridge again.
The little horse on the stony road.
A departure from the crushing familiarity of the ambient
day.
Stan gave the stranger a long and level look – amazed,
amused, incredulous at what he heard. He ran a hand over his head and laid it
palm down on the table. He sat back in his chair and furrowed his brow with the
genuine consternation of one who meets a visitor from an unknown star. An eon
passed.
...
‘But don’t you know?’ he said at last.
VIII.
Disclaimer: Stan, Esme and the I of the narrative are not
composite characters developed through the process of randomly pairing
postcards. Neither are they to be identified with any real persons, living or
dead.
Richard Steadman-Jones
October 2012
You’re having trouble describing what you do!
Tim Neal
You’re having trouble describing
what you do because what you do is troubling. There was a
time, almost a golden age, when it was for others to describe and you to do
(for them) but today, an age of auto praxis, of the ascendant self, your
trouble is you have to do it all yourself. You also think you are doing something whereas you are
perhaps being done. In the context of an art regime you decry, your trouble is
how to avoid repetition. You can’t
go all Duchamp or whoever because they already did yet therein lays trouble: it
is only by repetition that you can escape.
The totality of art is all its
expressions, flowers and faeces, and in the face of that you can stop being
artists yet even then the trouble is that you are still artists precisely because
you are caught in repetition (of not being artists). Repeating (répéter) in
French has the sense of practicing, doing something again to get it right. So you can only find yourselves by
being what you don’t want to be.
You can only swim in water; trouble arises when you swim on land.
Firefighters before a blaze in
the Sardinian scrub. The fire is
there, the old pump action cylinders on their backs are faulty, the water flow
limited and the flames moving.
They take a heavy flap of rubber to damp the flames. Is there trouble describing what they
do? There is a problem controlling the fire. Taken this way the trouble emerges
as one of fulfilling an aim (extinguish the fire) not fanning it and for you is
it your aim that is not clear?
To me your aim is
collaboration. Neither of you are
happy just to make something, to draw or display. You are collaborative artists and as is quoted in the
provocation there is a
consummate otherness of thought which the collaborative partner brings.
Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson
(Artist newsletter)
In other words the issue is one of
the other, the absolute other including those who you don’t even know are
others. Your trouble is how to
protect that other (share concerns, be inclusive, celebrate difference); that
we, ever-reflexive beings, see ourselves as already
that other, in principal unknown yet in a time of genetic mapping and
biotechnology increasingly difficult to hide from view. The trouble is how to stay hidden
whilst revealing ourselves, collaborating.
There is a particularity in your
concern with art and your desires, your propositional doings. Everything is set in oppositions as if
things or desires or outcomes were anything other than bits of something that
include their failure. This makes
me reflect the obvious that it is your practice that is more significant than
whether you know what you are doing or not.
Maybe you are both doing a Kate-but-Middleton. You have your bodies, your privacy but
when you enter a public domain you lose control and you are troubled about
being seen to be doing. For her
the invasion, the trouble, was the secret camera for you it is the job you
do. She returns (from browning her
body) to the law to uphold her sense of self, you return from your farm and
family to yourselves as private individuals, angst ridden artists no less, always
questioning what you are doing: a law of integrity. That is where your trouble
can be seen as a problem of laundry (removing the stains) or agriculture
(caught in a global market), compromise or collaboration?
Ruskin is quite a choice. One that was purely pragmatic,
something to hang a project around
and something to be strangled by at the same time – there is an inherent
conservatism in Ruskin in this context (a pragmatic appeal to ‘what might
work’) and you overcome that by making of Ruskin a quasi-biblical reference kit,
upon which whatsoever is desired can be hanged including a set of propositional
drawings or actions. The bid was
itself a propositional act and everything becomes a propositional
statement. My sister is berating
me for reductio ad absurdum and the
prefix propositional would be a fine example. It becomes a way of avoiding responsibility for proposition
itself. Collaborative work where consummate
otherness flourishes is perhaps caught in this – there can be no
proposition (this means this, that means that) because there is always only an
interior dialogue more or less well articulated making everything
propositional.
Perhaps the emphasis is better
placed elsewhere: having trouble describing what you do as rather you having
trouble with how others might describe what you do. This locates the trouble in the field of ideology, a fertile
one as it is always already a crop so to speak. By ideology I mean that set of organising principles which
regulate what we can do and what meaning is emergent, not the set of principles
by which people regulate their lives or express their intentions but rather the
implicit sets of relations which regulate such regulation. You are not sure what ideology is doing
and it is this confusion (am I fighting fire with fire or with water) that is
troubling.
I’ve been writing or am always
about to be writing about integration.
My current stock reply to any questions is that the Jews died in Germany
not because they weren’t integrated but precisely because they were
integrated. Integration is a
question of what is it into which you are integrated. Everyone is integrated even if into something that excludes
them.
How does this reply to your provocation?
Your work as artists is doing something, is included in sets of relations you
distrust and wish to confound and your trouble is in seeing where you sit in
this trauma. So you resolve it by
becoming theoreticians, propositionally drawing out the shapes of a problem
expressed by taking part.
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