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