Following your words

 

Studio open to the publick - He and she in the space - text - 2014

 

// Following your words

His narrow fingers tease the plastic surface of the phone. He notices the dance of her fingers as
they elegantly tap across the keyboard.

“what are you typing? You produce far to many words, are you intending to use all those words?”
- he says. (She speaks to much, he thinks this of her but then true the story he will fall in love with
words too)

“that got to be at least a thousand words've written just this morning alone. Do you intent to
speak a full thousands of them too?” - this persistent need of yours to use words is getting out of
hand. Yes. It's all mounting up I warn you. Before I know it you will be printing stuff out. As if your
trying to use up every word possible. It is like trying to drink up the ocean, it is not possible so
why are your trying?

Every sheet of paper infested with tiny black morphemes, spawning sentences in the most
uncontrollable manner. Words combine and produce volume (you know) and they're growing in
to some grossly uncomfortable excess of textual representation … it is obscene.
He slumps in to his chair and takes up a listening position, a boney elbow digging in to the
armrest and his chin balanced on his palm.... he sighs “ go on then”.

She looks up from the keyboard, at a ring of lines extending from their pursed extrusion,
surrounded by the neatly clipped thatch of his beard, and the warm puff of air blown out across
her cheeks as he turns his face towards her. The opening in the lower part of the human face,
surrounded by the lips, through which food is taken in and from which speech and other sounds
are emitted. The mouth is the beginning, or if you prefer, the prow, of animals. In the most
characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying to neighbouring
animals. The violent significance of the mouth is conserved in a latent state: and the voice
suddenly regains the advantage with a literary cannibalistic expression.

In her head is a clear calm voice: once weight down by conventions and the oppressive need for
understanding, it was committed to the programming of words (of education and conformed to
internationally recognised standards) an excellence to be in their own right, free much like bricks
are not, to be used without support. It's fulfilment of all statutory quotas of ethic, the gendered
and the otherwise socially different. Creativity and spontaneity were encouraged, materials
(letters and words) was manipulated, and so on and so forth in a manner that now is understood
to have inevitable led to its catastrophic decline. Under new management steered by
enlightened intellectuals it (texts) got overhauled with structures and insightful knowledge, and
instituted in a born as from start – post graduate regime established and maintained by cutting
edge ideas of radical thought. - now strive towards a translucent ideal with the clear purpose of
stripping away (form) representation and expression. A spatio-temporal and visual indulgence
can not be sustained.

I am writing a space to make in.

Words are objects deploying elaborate scenarios, narratives and characterisations. They can
destabilise what is known and what is belied in.

All these thoughts are opening themselves up when a second thought arrives.

– is it possible to utilise narrative spaces to problematise object-hood, storytelling, the act
of production and the sensuous engagement with ideas?

Increasingly distracted by the desire to touch another person she is driven to imagine that
person and that touch in the fictional space of writing. In the fabrication by words. Worked in to
and through the explicitness and ambiguities of words she constructs him.

The words relation to each other seems as imaginary as the scenario they create. Intense physical
experiences are created.

The moulded plastic chair is shifted to align with the centre of the desk. (and the studio
space is now sufficiently organised to be open to the public)
she begins or rather resumes to write. Introducing a character. He will be used as a cipher to
animate the story away from it's intellectual zenith and the basest, most solid point of its
banality. He is the one sitting in the soft brown leather armchair.

Deeply irritated by this persistent intrusion of the expectations of creating and materiality, what
has been and will be made. What is read and written including how and why must be condensed
(into precisly eight hundred words or two sides of A4 paper. And abstract in line with the rest of
your work).

To write an abstract would be an inherently paradoxical undertaking. The consumption
must not exceed, and the composition must not expand, but rather present itself as a reduction.
And within that deflated text, was the project (both sculpture and writing) to be presented in a
non-representational way.

She speaks but he isn't listening.

The object/objective would be a document consisting of exclusions. About to dismiss the text
for its perverse negativity she suddenly recalls Maurice Blanchot's claim that: `because nothing is
made present, the only thing writing manifests is writing representing the un-presentable.´
and she decides (that this task is no more paradoxical than any other) the text can only find itself
in its own negation. Somewhere between the writing and the abstracting – eight hundred words
will be composed. An A4 sized space will be inhabited and a thing will be created. And hence the
problem is solved; text (made of words) is becoming material. The pathos of the act will have a
material result; the object generally refereed to as text (or abstract in this case). The contrary
nature of this object means it has to be approached from an oblique angle.

He sits back and attempts to take a deep calming breath. It turns out to be a shallow breath that
catches in his throat and the more he thinks about his inability to breath deeply, the more
rapidly he gasps at the air.

She leans forward attempting to write faster. To catch all the words and it turns out to be more
shallow words out of line. And they catches in her fingers and the more she thinks about her
inability to speak of the words the more rapidly the end of the page seems to approach.