Transmission 10th March Rose Butler presents Kyp Kyprianu and Simon Hollington

(a) Rose is looking relaxed and calm like an athlete. Like Sigourney Weaver in Alien. X and M have met and quietly speak Portuguese together. This brings a warm feeling of friendship until they speak over the announcements and I get embarrassed. With a friend, Rose tells us, something is shared over and above your practice. Can someone transcribe this? Fear, until someone in the front row volunteers. Collaborative artwork and how they met. Chelsea bun became Bugger, mutual friends, media representations, para fictions, sci-fi, government reports and P.R.

A double performance, I wonder if they planned who’d say what when? Their collaboration was borne out of friendship, of conversations and ideas formed in the pub. They say that they couldn’t remember who’d said what, who’d had what idea so they decided to collaborate, in effect, they became one person. There are no images yet and someone is coughing. I think it is good to start with an image on the screen. The squeaky turnstile was the starting point for a piece of work. It was interactive and audio; we see a video of the delighted reactions of the audience. Is the video part of the work or documentation? Amongst the fetishisation of digital, they perversely used analogue. The thing is called MacGuffin. (We were just talking about this today, I told N that the still life motif in her work was a macguffin, an excuse to continue with exploring process. A plot device). Big Stupid Ideas. Once you start, you have to see it through. Technology produces uncanny sensations. They make a glass of wine move around the table. It needing to be looked at, does it convolute the work? The speakers are anecdotal, chatty and conferring. Using narrative was a taboo at art school, so they decided to explore it. Obsession with an idea and spending ages playing with it. British psychological sci-fi. John Wyndham. Invisible force fields, they mention the opening sequence from the film version of the village of the damned. It is great. They liked the idea… On a residency it is ok to not know what to do, they go ahead in order to find out what they should do. (Susan hiller said that somewhere). The weblog was important. It was all lies. Lie might be the wrong way to think about it. It was a piece of art. It looks like fun working like that. Playing make-believe with lab coats and beards and equipment that looks like its doing important jobs. The gravitational anomaly reminds me of The Stone Tapes by Nigel Neale…there is an eerie presence in the abandoned laboratory, perhaps they unleashed a supernatural force? The presentation is wonderfully made, nicely edited; it is like a short film. The nuclear PowerStation in Shoreditch, spoof, parody, fear, childhood. Redemption and anxiety. Optimism. Imagining it will all turn out ok, well, it might! The year 2034 was the collapse of capitalism. How did it collapse? Is the auction ironic? Rose, what a question! Weight and seriousness! Slapstick or horror (the bomb under the table). Cheer up, ridiculous and humor are not used enough. The q+a focuses on funding. I wish I’d thanked them before asking my (void filling) question. Art and artifice go hand in hand, there is, ultimately, nothing stupid or dishonest about what they do. It is sensitive and dark, don’t be deceived by a lightness of touch or by the fact they enjoyed making it and you enjoyed looking at it. They should be made to feel more appreciated than this.

(b) Kyprianu and Hollington gave an engaging presentation of their collaborative practice. The main focus was on residential work and they gave an interesting insight into their methods for dealing with creative production in these situations. They showed how their influences of cinema and, in particular, early British sci-fi had shaped the landscape of their thinking. As a result the work is wry, subtle and ironic. It was obvious that the work had been made under the conditions of friendship and play, they enjoyed making the work and ultimately the work is pleasurable to experience. This is the pleasure of anxiety that is redeemed though childhood fantasy and an (optimistic) exploration of those fears.

Transmission 25th January 2010 Julie Westerman presents Kate Davies

(b) Julie Westerman worked with her guest, Kate Davies, to produce a video gift to the transmission audience. Combining footage of Sheffield’s Lady’s bridge with a live reading of a text piece made on a previous residency, on another bridge, host and guest sublimated years of chance meetings near water to create an alternative presentation. While the artists acknowledged that the piece was unfinished it was unable to function under such strenuous circumstances, both video and text needed a lot of editing. Opinion on the presentation was mixed. Some found it brave, revealing and inspiring, while others thought it was self indulgent and utterly exhausting. The introduction by JW along with the Q&A afterwards provided the insight and enthusiasm that the central performance lacked.

Transmission 25th January 2010 Julie Westerman presents Kate Davis

(a) First Trans. Back. ‘I’m ………….. delighted’.(J) Painted bronze. Water, bridges, crossings, Venice. All of these connections and meetings between them. (I feel included in a distant kind of way, having swam with J at the Lido myself). A boat house, the interior painted gold- a fire burning. J paints this beautiful picture, so full of love I almost cry. A bare chested man, glistening and taught (I am back at the Lido, watching the sea from my deck chair..I’m faidng away if front of the golden boy).

In the spirit of the host and friendship a gift is presented. The Lady’d bridge. I love that they’ve made a film together for the presentation. A laboratory of only 2 days. A space to evolve, thinking also about the chap book. J mentions the richness of their discussion. Text piece. The bridge. A bridge. Any bridge.

Not to be confused with my own friend Katie Davis.

It begins, the lights go out and KD is reading her piece. I think about voice as a medium. How is it functioning beyond poetry, not yet performance. Spoken work. Live reading. Blake, the poet and image maker. Dreams..cross over into them. Night becomes dawn and day anticipates dusk. The other side. On the way one is neither here nor there. I like the paradox. Busses and coughing are distracting. This is a long piece, which is fine but the people behind me are talking which doesn’t make it easier to endure. They talk through the questions too. How long?the video is unedited, so is the spoken piece. It was a text to be read not listened to, it should have been edited to serve this new purpose. For it to work here and now. In this regard it seems rather self indulgent. The length, (of the bridge), is a bit of a conceit.

How do you read this kind of thing? How do you make the voice sound. K is doing a bit of a newsreader thing, that tone..not too bland some intonation, but with a rythym that bears little resemblance to ordinary speech. She isn’t acting. Compare this to Slam Jam at Bloc last night…the first 5 mins would have gone down a storm and created some awe I imagine.

The intersection in the middle of a bridge is a kind of crossroads. River and bridge, (a Carrefour. In celtic belief rivers were a portal to the underworld. I read recently about a former archbishop throwing valuable religious relics into the river near Durham cathedral. He wasn’t supposed to do it. I love him for it.)

We find out how she’d made a proposal (for the original). It was interesting how she responded, how her circumstances changed,  and changed her reaction. It changed even further (though not enough for my liking) with this performance today. The kids behind talked through that bit too. Idiots! The dicussion is like a crit given the nature of the presentation.

Crossing..to-ing and fro-ing. Those stories, were they dreams. Im disappointed when she intimated they might be true events. They’ve been turned into dreams through her repetition. You are just like your mother, go away etc.. an internal bridge. Being a child is like being a bridge..between worlds, between your parents. Some one asks why the presentation was this way, I wonder if they felt cheated. I become aware how difficult it is to communicate with students of this age, How is it possible to share a common ground? There’ll be one person who’ll be totally obsessed with avoiding clichés from now on. KD didn’t mean to humiliate her but she did. LS is the only tutor in the front row. The talk was so long and boring that I sense an air of lawlessness. The works relation to psychoanalysis. ‘I pick at it like I pick at materials’ she says. Repetition, the events . Acting outside what has happened to them. Relentless.

Transmission: Kate Davies

My damp skirt slaps against my legs. Her my, my me. Her highly personalised me. Her… ‘Voice’ over filmic new media. She presents from the stage. Centre. Left. Stood, stark ~ but not. Dark jeans and ‘T’, face in shadow half-light picks up the contours. Cups her peaks her trunk and thighs. Liminal. Half lit. Lectern. The affect of a ghostlike part presence. The narrative reading clearly emanates from the surround-sound-speaker-system around the walls than from, herself. Presence self negated the effect is a very close thing to be able to pick up on. She becomes not here. I would rather have ‘said’ not all there, but I cannot. Superego. Speaks to us from somewhere else. On, or around the bridge. Unseen. ‘A ghost in the machine’. A liminal being. Betwixt. Between. Present…~ation. Assist affect. The style. Materiality of present~ Of words. The  gaps – between… Posit. This idea [art]. Of the bridge. As spine. From. The solid, undeniable and objective, ‘concrete’ bridge ~ to ~ the body. Flesh. ‘Drift’. Fluid. Feel. Change. Unknown workings. Tacit knowledge. The supposed and philosophical space of duality. ‘From head. Down. To hole – below. The spine. The bridge.

The centre of the middle. Journeys are for ‘others’. Bridge is place. Bridge is host. Bridge transmits, from head to whole. My damp skirt slaps, against my legs. Feel. Evening. Turning, into. Night. Dusk, mid~point, liminal, dangerous. Limen. Threshold. Diapason. Busses as they gear away. Middle distance. Away. Away the end. Journeys are for others. Upon the bridge. Time. Dérive. The draw of water, through. Drift. Green tints. Brown clouds blow. Half light early a.m sky, lens of ora street lamps glow. Night comes damp to morn/ day slow. Black dark river, forces, through, below. Damp skirt slaps my [my not your ~ become, your ] legs. PISS, CUM, SPIT. Startled cack-laugh pan-mouth clacks. Cityscape lifeform. Mind. Separate. From. Body. Though still the same. Bridge – conduit – spine. From head, down, to hole below. Dérive. Body. Host. Open. Hole. Open body. Open share. Private[s]. Intimate[d]. Her mental space. This place. This host. This hole. Separate. Same. Shared. Both hers and yours. Damp skirt slaps against my legs. Again… again, yet not against. Analepsis.. The bridge was the last place I saw him. The bridge connects. Back. Leading down, from head to hole. The bridge. One side… the other. Camera. Pan. Scan. Across. Slow. Surveil. Scan. Time and time. Night to-day and back again. Abridged from here. Foreshort. Her non~place. Fort. Host. Bridge and omphalos. ‘ The now’ Bridge. Back to the city. Where he is? One leg through the first railing. [..] They brought me drinks. Talk, swallow, cry, piss. I swore if I ever walked again. Invalid. Rash. Rash.. Rush, water, head. From head. Down. To hole. Headwater, brush brow, trunk now, past bough, down to, dark, wet, open holes below. Dérive. Flow. Water. Through. Pull. Dérive…My damp skirt slaps against my legs. CUNT – SWEET CUM and VOMIT. The centre of the middle, in~between. Joins one. Joins ‘other’. Separate. Same. Now.

Anon.

Juan Cruz, Transmission.

Sharon Kivland presents Juan Cruz

A voice experience, an inner experience. The voice as a medium of text.

To translate is obviously a complex mechanism. How to place his own voice in the voice of an author. What difficulties and what pleasure does one feel in learning.

Translating. Learning in creative purpose. Juan Cruz explores this theme in a kind of filmed mise en scene. He staged his body, carried by his voice and translates a text in an empty room.

One can wonder about this  kind of exhibitionism. Visitors are startled, they ignore the translation in live. Sometimes his voice is white, he cannot go forward, he stops. He combines his voice with the voice of the author by mixing his own words, deliberately betrayed. It is a re-creation but also, inevitably, a betrayal.

These are short texts, a chapter or two. Chosen at random as he says. There is a kind of humility in the reception of a text of others, but also a kind of assertiveness.

Staging is taking a risk. Don Quixotte is not a protagonist, he becomes a partner whom he reappropriates the voice, the text, the spirit. The creative intensity is Juan’s because He can play its full. The original is forgotten for a while.

Other images unfold in a sort of halo inconsistent. A sound of violin, an image of his daughter, a voice behind the image. Juan learning how to build a wall. Both translating, building a wall or learning to play violin are an investment, an exploration.

I remain fixed on the investment of the voice and its own in the language of another. It is a challenge. Juan Cruz no doubt takes pleasure in this praxis.

A text carried by the voice of a character becomes another text. It changes. He who speaks becomes the owner, to enforce. Expose himself as he does and translate in live is a risk. He betrays on behalf of creation.

Images: Don Quixotte by Picasso and Dali

Listening to Sharon…

Supplement

They Wore Glasses *

…the value of that erased drawing. Rauschenberg rubs out de Kooning and presents the page that isn’t empty. A fondness? The erasure is a challenge to its value.

Memoirs of the Blind, by Jacques Derrida (which I haven’t read). Drawings Selected from the Louvre collection. An apocrypha of drawing. The Trace. Thematised looking, blindness or lack of sight, touch (Berger said close your eyes and move around the room). A Picture to a Blind Man. School of Guernico – sculpture yes, painting no. (1591-1660)

Literary figures who went blind, Milton, Borges… Pepys

Writing and drawing produce a trace of things. Significance or meaning can become material in art.

The draftsman cannot see, the act is blinding. There is always a blind spot – when making you are obscuring. You can never get close enough to see the moment. You can never pin down one punctual moment. That is now. Which is impossible to grasp or even conceive.

Trace – time – phenomenology – Capturing a moment. A material relationship performed by the entire body. It has the fantasy that it is the present. (An odd status.) The trace is literalised, it provokes the desire to know or see every moment – erects/creates this kind of Quasi – transcendentalism.

Its rules. Its essence

Its definition.

Drawing. The trace is seductive, it makes one desire that it tells you, this is the condition of drawing. It doesn’t give you what it promises, not fully.

Myths of the origin of drawing. De Butade- (She traced around the shadow of her lover departing for war). The story is ambiguous and confused.  No date of origin

The Feast of Balthazar by Rembrandt. The theological value of the written sign. God’s hand is finite- infinite- immortal etc…(the text itself is sacred).

Drawing is the paradigmatic image of sight. Looking honestly- objectively. It can be the visual form of the performance or gesture of making art. Critique, stepping back- stepping out. Escape problems or dead-ends.

There might not need to be a split if I am into aesthetic engagement.

We look at Rebecca Horn. Her pencils set into cloth (tied around her face, mask-like). They mark the wall. This creates distance, a lack of control – made problematic – out of control. Embodied gesture- strange intermediary of the face that draws- the bit of the body that thinks, that does the sensing. What is the relationship with this to Blindness?  (Bona asks)

Julio Paolini – To the Extent of My Vision, charts the periphery of his visual field – lung-like shape- (Blind spots) The relationship between eye- arm- surface. (He wears glasses! – rarely mentioned).

All are doing distance. Production of the mark is production – the erasure of itself as a single moment – the point becomes a line. The visible structured by the invisible.

Expectations of drawings – distance. Roman Opalka 1 to Infinity – (detail,1965) Absurd promethean. Conceptually structured subject – takes – material form. (Dark canvas  – white paint) ‘til the brush runs out and fades – the charging of the brush. The visible system of traces creates a visual rhythm. It will stop at his death – the horizon of his own death. (He signed a pact with death) D. Human being= (Heidegger)- in essence a temporality – an unfolding of time – a certain dissection – we don’t get younger, only older then we die – A concern for our future- hurtling towards our finite end – we know and we care–Temporal passage. The task is… the thing that might provoke you into thinking how best you might live- do/be the best. Perversity=defined as being towards death- the rest of your life is a count up. Opalka counts down. One number closer but one number more alive. His death makes him want to live…

* (Based upon notes made during a Writing Art lecture, presented by Andy Fisher, 26^th November 2009)

Andrew Fisher’ last shot