Two parts

My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. (Letter to Ludwig Ficker of circa September-October 1919, tr. McGuinness and Furtmüller)

Normal paranormal: Susan Hiller @ Tate Britain

I am not the kind of person who would sleep in the fairy rings when sober. I would also not seek aliens or ghost voices. I do not believe in full moon or the twelve signs of Zodiac. I like science and all the nerdy things that come with it.

Susan Hiller's exhibition at Tate has ghosts, dreams and all other otherworldly things: an unusual vehicle for the ideas. If Hiller intended to create a tension with that - she succeeded well for me - I am still struggling trying to consider her dream maps without an irony.

Other than my struggle to deal with the paranormal - the show is beautifully curated: a remarkable feast for eyes, ears and mind. Starting with the burnt paintings (which is what I was going to do with my last year's work), onto the wave postcards, the fire, through to the Freud's cabinet, the auras (yep, I like even those), the bottles. What I loved most, is the pieces where her past as an anthropologist comes through: artefacts collected and documented, arranged and ordered. Now they highlight that,what has always been there, but got lost between the familiar and stagnant meaning associations. She creates imaginary taxonomies - or our desire to make sense of things creates imaginary taxonomies - that otherwise would have not been grouped together. Well - I need to read more about her systems. Fascinating!

This is her older interview.

This major survey exhibition at Tate Britain will provide a timely focus on a selection of her key works, including many of the pioneering mixed-media installations and video projections for which she is best known. It will be the largest presentation of her work to date, providing a unique opportunity to follow her exploration of dreams, memories and supernatural phenomena across a career of almost four decades.

The exhibition is curated by Ann Gallagher, Head of Collections (British Art), Tate, with Sofia Karamani, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue published by Tate Publishing.

Burning books - no11; 1969

1969. Blank.

The number of books in young people's personal libraries increased 60 per cent. (from Illustrated History of the USSR)

So?




I am taking books, that no longer have the society that supports them (uh! I have got a barn full of them!) and I reduce them to an immensely fragile state (firing in the kiln) - so fragile, that they may disintegrate in hands - just like the memory of the times, that they represent.

Burning books - no9; 1974

1974. Kaunas. That was the year when this book got published. Just think - somebody took time and effort to put it together. Somebody thought it was good and bought it. Possibly read it. Underlined words. Thought about it. Made notes.
And it has all become useless now. Discarded. Baby has outgrown the clothes.
The memory of that time and that truth have become faint and fragile. Disintegrating in mind, burning in flames, rotting away in basements.
In my case - sitting in the boxes and blocking the room.


Well - yesterday this first proper book came out of the kiln. There are a number of things I do not like and I will be changing. On the whole, it is heading the right direction. It will certainly be all white (I was considering gold and black) - like a face without blood. The book will certainly be fired on the tablet. There will be no glaze.



I am taking books, that no longer have the society that supports them (uh! I have got a barn full of them!) and I reduce them to an immensely fragile state - so fragile, that they may disintegrate in hands - just like the memory of the times, that they represent.

London Art Fair: Sankeum Hoh pearls up the language.

Sankeum Koh at Hanmi Gallery. There is something about things that look like language, but we cannot read. A possibility of language. Removed language. Empty shapes. Fired books.

Sankeum KOH’s works involve the meticulous assembly of pearl beads or steels balls to create an illusion of blurred texts, sourcing from newspaper columns, books, and poetry. Koh transforms the literary words into fragmented visions. She draws upon the viewer’s frustration of not being able to read the cryptic codes leaving the viewer to question what it is they are actually ‘reading’. Her works aim to challenge the validity of such texts in newspapers and question the dogmatic approach of its readers.

Deficit: loss of language, loss of identity, loss of memory

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"Neurology's favorite word is "deficit", denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of identity, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity and a myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions or faculties." (from Oliver Sacks "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat")

Meltdown:drawing grub all day.

I went into a meltdown yesterday, spending the whole day drawing.

This the my original grub in the pages of the book. A while ago I was photocopying in the library something about Pestival, when I came across this old photo, somebody had left in the magazine. So I photocopied it into the article. As a result, the meaning of the image and the article changed, extended, metamorphosed. The title: Fig.7. Grub in the pages of the book expanded: now it was referring to the underdressed woman, to the photo, to the idea of the pest and the book.
"Things become complicated in arts context" (John Baldessari) - yes, indeed.













Anyway, by the end of yesterday my grub underwent metamorphosis and here is a very extended vision of what a grub is and what it does.

Top picture: Grub in the book flies to the moon. He takes the GHOST along. For company. The GHOST hates the trip but stays polite in front of the press.
Bottom picture: This is not my grub. She came here by herself. To pause for a minute.

Grubs don't go chasing waterfalls. Especially not the ones from the books.

Not profound at all - but I had fun!

ESSAY. Yeppee! and the problem of borders (book arts)

Essay submitted, done and dusted!

That essay research was certainly hugely beneficial for me: it answered a few important questions. Unfortunately, it has also revealed a few problems. For example, it is not helpful to come to this area of books from linguistics, having had focused on language and meaning structure  all those years (a bit like arriving to the wrong religion school: god is the same, but perspective is different). While it might be exploratory to question where the book/text/page/etc. starts and where it ends, I see those things distorted by the cognitive linguistics. Aristotelian classification does not work. Mental categories have prototype structure and fuzzy edges (uh. clever me.). Therefore, my category of books can extend right into periphery without questions about borders: no starts, no ends.

Well, this looking for borders is what I  find frustrating. Once they are established, some things become "in" and others - "out". For example, Johanna Drucker offers an alarmingly narrow view of what a book is. All of the stuff of my previous pages about the burnt books would be "out". Alternatively, it could be called "periphery".

Instead of trying to build the walls, to keep the wrong kind of books "out", it might be more productive to establish prototypes for the categories, so the rest of the group could locate itself somewhere around it. Just a thought.

Sure - it is not as simple as that. I was reading Stephen Davies recently. He mentioned "disjunctive definition". It sounds very Wittgensteinian, but - certainly more to the point (from my point of view).

ESSAY. Helen Lessick. Metaphor.

Linguistic signifier of the metaphor stands as a metaphor for the sign itself.
That is one very confusing thought, I've just had.

Anyway - very clever, Helen Lessick. Very clever.




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Vito Drago, Chris Kenny and Alberto Duman at England&Co

The lower gallery at England&Co has got the recent work of Vito Drago, Chris Kenny and Alberto Duman.


1. Chris Kenny produces those collages held together in the air by pins. They look extremely delicate and I bet they take absolutely ages to pin down. That man must have some patience!

This time, at England&Co he has got written language pinned down. I love that it looks like a coherent text - expecially the shadow of the lines in the background.

I remember seeing Chris Kenny's work at Fred gallery last year the collage exhibition. He had maps there, doing the same thing that he did at England&Co with language: taking a fragment out of the context, alienating it from it's previous habitat, planting it into a new artificial system, where the fragment acquires new neighbors and a new meaning.





2. Vito Drago had some "mixed media on page".

He has always stressed that the books he uses and manipulates in his work are ‘non-specific’, saying that ‘it is not the message of a particular book that interests me… there is no element of interpretation’. Drago takes the perception of books being representative of ‘knowledge’ and subverts and questions the certainty of that concept through deletion and obliteration – the content is irrelevant. He asks: ‘what do we really know?’

I thought his work was beautiful - there was kind of sensitivity to it. Something to contemplate about.






3. On the whole, I prefer Alberto Duman's work that was not in that gallery. And the reason for that is this: I don't like seeing the pixelation of the slated lines on the prints. I heard they are screenprints, but I assume they had been prepared on the computer and the pixels are visible. I am such an ass, but I felt cheated.
I would have preferred if the prints were letterpressed.

Disseminated letters

This was just lying on the floor in the studio. A bit like thoughts scattered around in a effort to compose themselves together into something meaningful.

Tony Trehy, Text Festival & other stuff.

When looking for some Art and Text reviews, I came across Tony Trehy's blog. Tony Trehy is a poet and a curator. He is also a founder of the Text Festival.

which brings together contemporary linguistically innovative poetry with conceptual art practices in a remarkable, internationally recognised, space of dialogue, sharing and experimentation in the field of creative language art.

Really enjoyed the blog! Very interesting, at times personal. Among many things I found on his blog, is the mention of Writing on the Wall, which is what I am reading now.

What Waldemar Januszczak said about text art.

Tower of babble: Jenny Holzer's text art.

This an article from March, but I keep returning to it.

"Text art gives me problems. Obviously, it is not an ism that speeds the pulse. You cannot imagine anyone adoring it with a crazy passion, can you? “What’s your favourite art?” “Text art. It shakes my kidneys!” That isn’t going to happen. If text art gives pleasure, it does so in a mild, thoughtful, dry and passionless way.

As a writer, I also have powerful conceptual difficulties accepting its basic premise. If someone has put some writing in a gallery, surely it needs to be judged first as a piece of writing, not as a piece of art?"

Why is it, that text art seems so passionless as compared to... hm... non-text art? Generally, purely text art gives me a kind of intellectual pleasure that a good thought does. However, it never really grips my heart. Visual, less language based art, on the other hand, can stop the breath. Is it because of the hemispheres or is it just me?

88 Constellations for Wittgenstein

Witgenstein has been extremely well written about and painted about. As a result, it is hard to come across something fresh. Especially, because a lot of the visual artists seem to have a very bleak grasp of Wittgensteins ideas (or any other language matters, in fact). I will get back to this subject later.

Anyway, here's what I have found and I thought it was really good and really well made.

“88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand)” is an interactive artwork by David Clark. The piece is a sprawling, non-linear contemplation of the life and work of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein consisting of 88 interactive flash animations each corresponding with one of the 88 constellations in the night sky. The viewer is invited to navigate through a maze of interconnecting narratives – moving from association to association – in a way that brings Wittgenstein’s work into conversation with our contemporary digital culture. As a nod to Wittgenstein’s concert pianist brother Paul who lost his right arm in World War One but continued to perform work for the left hand, the piece invites the viewer to ‘play’ with the collages using the left hand on the computer keyboard.

At the centre of piece is the number 88. It is both the number of keys on the conventional piano and the number of constellations in the night sky (as determined by contemporary science). Music and the night sky both seem to me to stir up the limits of our understanding of existence. The constellations also provided me with a structure. The work is like a ‘connect the dots’ portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have drawn the facts of his life together and numbered them but it is up to you to connect the dots.

Pteronarcophobia - fear of flies.

Musca domestica.

Flies are gross.
Every year they flock into the very highest corner of our white bedroom ceiling (on the farm) and form a black lump and hibernate there. Others hide in the walls, under the roof, in the window frames.
Then, in spring, as the weather warms up, they come out. Hundreds! Thousands of them! Millions and gazillions! They are sleepy. They drop on the floor and buzz there annoyingly. All surfaces get covered with them. I kept the hoover next to my bed for three nights. Aghhh!!




When the flies are awake and gone, these other ones start waking up. They are far less repulsive and less noisy. However, they do come out in hundreds, thousands, millions and gazillions as well. They flutter flutter at night: around your face, get trapped in your hair, drop on your pillow! Aghhh!!!
Unfortunately, I do not know what those insects are. I like knowing the names of the things, that share my space: birds, trees, reptiles, etc. This friend of mine said, they call them "fėjos" (fairies). What a beautiful name, I thought. Faea domestica?

As a result of this beautiful name, I went through a stage of fascination with them. The insects look wonderfully translucent and ephemeral. When alive, their colours range from diaphanous pink and lilac, to lime greens and yellows.

Last year I made a few plates (as testers) with the "fairies" (I was working with "cosy musty grandma's home" imagery). This year, I will be trying to do something more interesting. Possibly involving the play of words.





Work in progress.



P.S.: 2001.05.04

I have finally found their name: Chrysopa. Lacewing. Like a flemish curtain or a crochet tablecloth. Or a veil covering the face of a bride or a widow. Auksaakė in Lithuanian. "Golden eyes". Something fairy tale. King's daughter under a spell. To fight a dragon.

Lacewings usually have bright green bodies, prominent, golden, metallic eyes and green veins on delicate, transparent wings. However some species are browner in colour.

There are 14 species of lacewing in the UK, although they are less common in Scotland. Both the adults and larvae are carnivorous and often feast on aphids. The larvae suck the aphids’ juices and may even use the drained bodies to hide under.

PPS Now this blog is related to Lepidopterophobia - fear of butterflies and Cluster Thoughts.