On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, Ira Lightman wrote:
>
> Terrific postings: thanks for the tips and the
> thoughts, everybody. I especially enjoyed Fiona's
> detailed posting eg
>
> "One of the basic ways in which the work was able
> to be successful was when it worked towards, not an
> either-or of the disciplines, nor a juxtaposition, but in
> fact a third issue."
>
> I, for one, would really like to hear more in detail
> of the projects you're describing, not least the ones
> with scientists. Would it be not "third issue" enough
> to ask if they were in any sense lab experiments,
> hypotheses, fact-finding etc, or how did they reflect
> on these hopes?
>
I also liked the idea of 'third issue' and wondered if Fiona was intending
'Aufhebung' (cancellation/arising), where the term 'issue' itself has an
interesting resonance.
I could imagine that talking for 10 minutes with an artist at a reception
party and later being presented with 'an issue' is almost like being
presented with an issue one cannot recall having procreated. Except it
does not, in Andrew Duncan's words, 'make a racket'.
I have attempted to collaborate formally with a friend, Miriam, who is a
painter, lives in Amsterdam (work in shorthand: neo-expressionist
figurative, see Palladino or Cucci), and we did breed a lot of hypotheses
on value and speculation and we went also went historical 'fact-finding'
(looked at and read up on 17th & 18th century pedagogical Samplers,
embroidered with houses, domestic animals, trees, symbols such as anchors
and vines and tulips (think:crash), and biblical texts, great collection
of samplers in the Fitzwilliam; as well as the Victorian tradition of
'friendship albums' in which people would write poems and drawings) but we
never made a formal product of it. It was fun though & perhaps not
considering it 'scientifically' (as being ipso facto 'important'?) meant
that we looked at the tradition of text/image products made by women in
the domestic sphere, and the way in which these products had neither
use-value nor commodity exchange value. Probably this is not '70s'
art/music/poetry discourse....
To get back to Fiona:
Rempress is to publish Fiona's "oops the join" on the 16th December, which
are a series of poems written in response to drawings made by Siobhan
Liddell (drawings you could imagine as those Beuys did, faint, suggestive,
make-do, but without using 'extreme' marking materials such as blood;
rather crayons, pencil, white paint).
Each one of the poems 'belongs' to one of drawings, but the 'responses'
are varied, such as representing particular ways of looking (not the same
as 'translating' image into text), or resonating the suggestibility of the
image, or commenting on the material that constitues the image. Of course
the poems lead a life of their own.
Siobhan initally wanted to respond to the book product 'oops the join'
by making actual cuts (with a knife or scissors) in the book, and I
thought this was a interesting idea. (Apart from a witty comment on
'textual editing' and materiality of book, also a witty comment on value
of visual artist's 'original' mark: how can one remove a cut the same
way as galleries do who now sell lithographs Picasso made for book of
sonnets?). But Siobhan decided not to do these 'markings', so here it
floats as another idea deferred.
Maybe Fiona would like to comment, maybe not.
Karlien
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