The warmth of ideas

When the cold winds blow, and I huddle in my studio over the winter, I move around making assemblage works rather than more stationary occupation of painting. Bitumen paint doesn’t 'work' in the cold, so I collect, re-arrange, dream, hammer, stick, and write.

It is a performance of possibility. Deleuze’s notion of ’becoming’, is a process of change, flight, or movement. One that in this case I use to keep warm…

I use this notion in-process with each assemblage, accounting for relationships between the "discrete" elements of the assemblage, creating possibility in the dialogues between elements. And then add text.

Making, imagining, dreaming, relating…’ the process of "becoming" is ……….generative of a new way of being’  ( ASSEMBLAGE & Deleuzehttp://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html ) Some Objets-Textes that kept me warm this winter:Morceux (Crumbs),Castigat vivendo mores, L'escalier des arbres,

….

use of this blog

Ok, today I start using the blog to collect together bits of research, as well as somewhere to put writing-ideas.  I am making more objets-textes assemblages, making space in my hallway. Strange as I have many ‘writing on objects’ planned, yet the appeal and enjoyment in the process of combination,

objets-textes at Kestle
summer 2013

objets-textes at Kestle
summer 2013

is greater. I teach for long hours now, so fragmented and fractured time components become very much part of them – part of the process of making:

On a table I collect together a series of objects that seem related, connected, or aesthetically bound, and loosely throw them together in groups. These are the beginnings of 5-8 new works. They sit, and in passing I play, re-arranging them, swopping items. I think, read, research about what they might mean. I keep a sketchbook, sketching different juxtapositions and jotting down words, poems, stories, imagining materials to add, and how I might arrange the text and in what medium. Each objets-textes becomes a little world, in which ideas are played with and re-arranged until they settled in some way. They are never quite finished. Often I re-visit, re-arrange and add – though not without up-dating my sketchbook. Because I forget.

Inter-text and Objets-textes

Recent reading on intertextuality in terms of my project on writing on 3-dimensional surfaces, (and I have to add, the arrangement of text that is not on paper – as some of the objects, for example driftwood, are 2-dimensional – flat), has me thinking of how the intentional intersection of textual surfaces has a ‘double voice’. In multidimensional space, one adds to the existing multitudinous possibilities for combination and thus meaning. Thus the additional intersection of textual surfaces, adds to the polyphonic potential of the text. In the first instance, many of the texts cannot be easily ‘read’ or deciphered as the writing is not clear or ordered. The invitation is for ‘active’ readers, readers who are invited to interact physically by the work, as they move around it, in order to read. In short I consider words as no longer ‘a two sided act’, they become multidimensional, as the reciprocal relationship suggested by Barthes (‘each word expresses ‘one’ in relation to the ‘other’…a word is a bridge thrown between myself and another’ (Allen, G., 2000, Intertextuality, p. 20. ), is at once given (in the case of objects which are used to bring to mind a symbolic or analgous connection) then removed by changing subject positions (revealed in poetic narratives in which the personal pronouns vary), and also possibly linked to word play (that also scatters meaning) and to déjà ecrit – ideas stolen from other textual and theoretical sources. This intentional textual weaving hopes to create a transposition: a passage from one sign system to another, to form new positions (Worton & Still quoted in Allen, G., 2000, Intertextuality, p. 47). I am working with the idea to dislodge universal positions, scattering subject positions, hoping to stumble upon the creation of a double consciousness, as I appropriate ‘things’ as media for a female identity, whilst the assemblage style, as reflected upon many times, is problematic, in its connection to time, place and 20th century art histories. May be that is why I have started to write differently on single objects -or collections of the same e.g. old saws speak (truth). There is still ambivalence, and potential for dialogue but it is of a different kind. So I experiement with WRITING ON THINGS and wonder if it is the same project or another. Still, playing with unleashing the disruptive playful forces of writing DIALOGUE, PARTICIPATION AND EXCHANGE.

Objets-Textes at Helston Folk Museum

Objet-textes will be at Helston Folk Museum Gallery, from Saturday 9th - 21st February 2013, opening hours 10am-1pm SOME MORE WRITING...... Word-play: January 2013 ............Well it is 2013 and I am still making assemblages. The collection of objects has slowed as space diminishes but the desire ‘to connect’, which is the desire to ‘work with other possibilities’ and to ‘enunciate’ (both ideas from Deleuze, Dialogues II) are as strong as ever. ............Helston museum is an appropriate site in which to place all of the objet-textes that I have made over the last few years as though many of the objects are far less interesting than those on display in the museum, what makes them different is the juxtaposition, scale and their additional personal and poetic texts. I explored all the objects in the museum’s collection that have been ‘written’ on. Most writing on things takes the form of names, ownership or advertising, (mugs, plates, boxes,). Sometimes the date it was made, or instructions (kitchen equipment), or information marking an event make these objects memorabilia (coins, and medals). Brand names or place and date names, give information about a specific time and event were not of specific interest as I went looking for personal, or poetic messages, and found only one large jug that bears a humorous Cornish phrase. It is extremely rare to have differentiated personal messages on things. Often the thing itself remains THE message, yet my project in adding personal and poetic texts, is to explore what can be communicated by the objects in juxtaposition to the text, often creating many paradoxes. ............I still ponder the differences between how we ‘read’ and understand text on a 2-D plane, and text on a 3-D plane, and have started ‘writing on other things’…but it is the process of thought possibilities with the potential to enunciate differently, in an aesthetic that gives me pleasure, that draws me back to objet-textes assemblage work. The re-identification of objects, their indeterminacy, leads to experimentation from which other connections may emerge, which whilst seemingly simple create disjunctions, parables, and representation is the illusion of mimetic link between entities – clear ideas and their instantiations (objects). ...........I play with narrative fantasies that combine and recombine human activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation, like ‘poetry in which the knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the worlds’. Italo Calvino (on Lucretius, ‘on the nature of things’), ..........And how does one exist in a contradictory world, where there is a clattering of view points and a profusion of voice? Well, you play with it, then leave it up to the audience to/reader to put reality back in order…. In the theatre of the Absurd, there are no beginnings, or endings, and what occurs often makes no sense. Herbert Blau (using Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase), made the comparison that theatre of this kind is constructed as an assemblage. To twist this back, I like the premise that in some way Objets-textes are theatre, perhaps ‘an assembly of thought that an audience must wade though in order to create sense (and rectify their world view),’ (Bennett, M.,J., 2011, p.19). Objets-textes are like a stage and curtain opens with action that often contradicts what is being said. There is no apparent syntax to hold it together. I use Derrida’s ‘play in language’ ((Bennett, M.,J., 2011, p. 18) simple truths stemming from the same words…French word play is notorious. The French love homonyms that sound the same but have contradictory meanings. This creates a dis-order, a heterotopia (from Borges) in which the subversive playful worlds of language create Foucault’s, ..........‘Orderly disorder…. a place of opportunity, a site of interactive disorder generating new ones, and of order transforming to regenerate disorder’(Bennett, M.J., 2011, pp.16-17). ..............Making meaning helps us to deal with the philosophical incongruity of life with its ambiguous endings. ‘the important thing therefore, is not as yet to go to the root of things, but the world being what it is, to know how to live in it’. Camus (Bennett, M.,J., 2011, p. 20) ...........Words can be as concrete as the objects that they are placed upon. The work of playing with the stuff of life (things, objects, and their meaning) do the job of ‘dissolving meaning’; Objets-textes are intended to play with permanent and immutable substance, and space, and then project new spaces between the things and between the meanings that the writing creates. more information and book text available at www.delphahudson.co.uk

Ionesco's Imperative & Abeille Mere

Pas chose faites :Poetry, Barthes, Bakhtin and Whitehead’s ‘object’ theory

‘Whitehead’s ‘object’ theory emerged from a desire for a philosophy of perception and cognition that engaged with materiality in a way that didn’t relegate sensual and psychological experience as mere “psychic additions” to an external, concrete reality. Whitehead was interested in a philosophy that took the realness of perceptive, cognitive, imaginative and creative experiences as stuff of the world, as objects of sensual engagement and conscious inquiry. Whitehead’s focus was process, convergence, encounter, flux, extension, simultaneity, regeneration and transformation. For Whitehead, ‘objects’ are “ingredients of events,” and events are the processes of all experience, all nature, all perception, cognition and creation….I take this literally – objects as ‘things’, and things become an entity of experience.
http://www.pushandpull.com.au/2009/06/09/objects-of-experience-stein-meets-whitehead-meets-olson-meets-kaprow-you-me/ (27/2/12)
Many poets have ‘performed’ the object, and writing as if an object is a subject. Sylvia Plath does this, and certainly to read one of Gertrude Stein’s intentions in her poems is ‘to feel the glyphs as they move in patterns on the page, to feel the sounds as they’re made imaginatively in the reading-mind’…..Reading text, and objects simultaneously comes through lived experience, and invites the reader to experience themselves. Poetry is an act of engaged thinking and observing, a way of being attentive to the intimacies of being in itself.
Concrete poems transform words into objects. Writing on objects, there is interplay between differentiated lived experience. Feeling the glyphs’, exploring, aligning and intervening with them, and their arrangement on a three-dimensional plane, they behave as indexes: each object might refer to any other thing or event. Each word may or not ‘play’ and perform and create dialogue with the objects in combination. The words and the objects both attain ‘objecthood’ through active engagement and movement. (Michel Serres). They are taken-up, as in play, creating performance and event.The ‘performed’ event is fragmented. ‘Fragments more truthfully represent history than falsely complete narratives of human progress’ (Barthes’ lovers discourse;fragments, p.127)Instead of fracturing meaning, fragments allow multiple interpretations through juxtaposition and play.
Text is as ‘a braid woven in an extremely twisted and devious fashion between the symbolic field of language and the image repertoire, back and forth between the imaginary and the symbolic’. (Barthes, from Purves). Objects introduce an extra strand of visual, and textual symbolism. Playfully displacing subject, and object through a patient weaving and unweaving, and disappropriation of text, the idea of coalescence forms. A semi-legible surface of words on objects acts a contrario, like Bahktin’s ‘profane illumination’, ‘bring[ing] to deadened objects new and revitalized constellation’. Objects come alive when put into new constellations, they are never fixed and past, closed nor dead. We may wrest new answers from them and ‘new insights into its meanings and even wrest from it new words of its own’.( Bakhtin, from Beasley-Smith).

Words and objects, are like music, notes, letters, things arranged and re-arranged, physically negotiated by the reader. In objets-textes, text flows over and around, and the reader is at once negotiating the territory of the object, the text, the self and the author. The journey of ‘I’ over the non-page is different, drunken and weaving relationships between spatial and temporal text:object;subject:object .Objects become a metaphor of the body, and a form of jouissance, the experiencing body feels the performance of things, in relationship to the substance of the words.

Notes on process

My selection of objects in based on my encounter with them. Duchamp called this encounter ‘ a kind of rendez-vous’, a meeting between the artist and the object. Often there are acausal connecting principles including: personal relevance, symbolic or narrative value. Scale is also significant as they must be small enough to be collected together on a board no bigger than roughly 60x60cm.
A list of found objects that I am drawn to besides driftwood pieces, include:
Bees or insects (dead already!), dummies, ceramic shards, combs, bottles, pots or containers, twisted metal pieces, wool, thread, gloves, dice, dolls, sewing materials including hooks, money, keys, pipes, and small animal figures, to name a few.
Writing is made with bitumen, white ink, graphite, type writer, old dictionaries cut and pasted, and on labels, material or paint.
The overall aesthetic of the combinages refers to original assemblage and collage works by artists involved in international art movements from DaDA, to Surrealism. Using old bleached woods, varnish, worn out and disused objects generally with muted colours, with some bold exceptions, this could be described as ‘interwar’. Although the objects used are raw and unrefined and made through a process where although compositions may look arbitrary, and many textually deal with the notion of chance (l’hazard - like the Surrealist ‘chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine’), there is a process in which I subjectively play with compositions which can take a few days to a few weeks to arrange and re-arrange. I often work on a group simultaneously which has sometimes created a sub-set of pieces (e.g. I went through a phase of wrapping and tying wool and string around them Hesse style!)
As things are combined and a ‘stage’ built, a drama ensues through the interplay of elements and text is added:
• personal narratives emerge (last year these were often about escaping!)
• strategies of arranging the text to be actively read (e.g. top to bottom, round and round, as well as right to left )
• etymological meanings explored through one word or motif,
and the conjunction of all these with various poetic and theoretical frameworks from a range of writers: including Cixous, Irigaray, Paul Valery, Violette Morin, Walter Benjamin, and others.
A word or phrase combined and explored in combination with ‘things’ is a kind of becoming, it is never one thing it is always multiple.