Eleanor, thanks for the report on the Shane Cullen's
'Fragmens sur les Institutions Republicaines IV'.
I've seen photos of these paintings and got printed
page versions, but not actually stood in front of
them in a gallery space. Curious to hear, as you say,
that people are standing in front of them for so long
trying to read them. My guess would be that he achieves
that, invokes such attention, by dint of the subject
matter which has historical as well as ethnographic
(not participant observation but observation of
participation) writings. These paintings are part of
a larger series that include painstaking transciptions
of more numbing material (?) such as mid - 1950s
Irish Labour Legislation. So there is a broader context.

The 48 paintings on display here now recreate prisoner's
'comms' from the 1981 hunger strike. Hence potential
viewer prurience.

The issue this raises for me though is one of the
'look' of text in a gallery situation. Stating the
obvious  -  a gallery wall is not simply a big page.
Blocks of text (i'm thinking of someone like Fiona
Banner with her 'Hunt for Red October'  -  the script for
that movie written in long lines to form one rectangle
of handwriting on one large scroll. The pleasure in
simply seeing that block of handwriting with all of its
controls and intimacies and attention details and performance
fatigues and bull-headed fussiness and quirky obsession.
The realisation on going closer and beginning to read of
what it was, immediately losing interest in reading. Then,
because of its scale beginning to let my eye wander across
the text and reading my own writing there. The pleasure in not
being told something but in being presented with material
that invited a simple pleasure of the text. The intertextualities
of transcribing a movie script back into a static image in a gallery.
The movements of the eye across that plain and so on. I couldn't
help but remember the movie and Sean Connery as a defecting Soviet
submarine commander as i stood there. All of that.) can be
engaging to look at, they need not be engaging to 'read'.

If i look at public signage  -  partly broken neon, billboard
ads with torn facias, the uses of broken text or overlayed text
in advertising generally  -  i can enjoy the fact that text has
also begun to re-integrate with 'image'. We are moving gently,
partly through this very medium, into an age of the 'new
illuminated manuscripts'. Time, as Steve McCaffery recently
urged, for us to think of such interrelationships as part
of grammatology and not to try to retain the seperations
of response.

love and love
cris

btw  -  anyone wanting more info, or to get the book of Shane
Cullen's work the people to write to are:
Locus +   Room 17, 3rd Floor Wards Building. 31-39 High Bridge.
Newcastle upon Tyne. NE1 1EW UK




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%