How W. H Auden spends the night in a friend’s house
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The whole show, as a show. Why describe it? It’s not there, you’re not going to look at it. What came out of it? Does it matter? It was something to do. There are plenty of things to do that lead to despair. Better to do something that goes somewhere. I still looked at the whole show as a show. It was different people. Everyone was in a separate space, one work to a room, and one using the hall. There’s no looking from one thing to something else in the same field of vision. I think that’s a good idea.
I don’t know how it got to look like a show, as opposed to a bunch of things. You go into a room, spend some time with the work. Or spend some time with the room as a part of the work. I guess you’re only in one place at a time, doing one thing. And then there’s the build up of memories and unconscious associations. Perhaps not so much to do with the connection between an idea in one room and the idea in another as the movements, being in a room or with a room, following it to the next room. The act of making the work by making sense out of it, getting a feeling, being read by an event in a room.
Why should you think when you can feel, is there a difference. Are our thoughts complexes of feelings? There’s an arrangement of things and names and spaces that we define for ourselves and are defined for us. The work that you see in part when you walk in through the hall isn’t a self-contained conscious thing that is different but stands in relation to the work in the back of the last room. They aren’t the same thing, but differences can be defined as much by space as by anything else, such as the name of object or artist.
In the hall the walls are this blue colour from another time. We made it that way, they’re not rooms. There are two halls. There are these pillows. There’s a pillow, and there’s a hall, and there’s another pillow and another hall. It’s on the blue from another time wall and it’s like a ghost of the pillow on the opposite side of the wall, which is also ghosting the pillow on this side. The wall doesn’t disappear though. You still have to go around to the other side of the wall in the next-door hallway. The connection between the pillows, talking out in quiet thoughts that I see people moving their ears close, to try to listen to, isn’t a straight line, and it isn’t a flip. There might be a mirroring, but you can’t flip yourself between the halls, you walk around. You can only be in one place at a time, and the movement from one to its other, and the doubling up of the pillow you see and the other pillow you remember, make the single pillow out of both pillows. The one and the dream of the one, dreaming itself in your memory.
When I walk into a room from the hall, the hall slips off. Or it doesn’t even do that because I’m in a room now. How does that separation make things work as a whole?
Designed to not exist but to be alive anyway, and in spite of being a series of inanimate objects, they set themselves up as a structure of viewing. Not as a series of objects but as about 30 or 40 minutes, probably less in practice. For those of us not waiting for something further, there was this space of time, or at least of memory - time being more of an idea than something with it’s own properties.
Time to watch things that really aren’t there arise out of a series of apparently unconnected encounters, except by their associations of placement - or at least by their proximity as a series of events that make no attempt to establish a conceptual whole, but do so in being about 30 or 40 minutes.
Try! Try!
In a short Henry Miller book, this guy who comes round to stay has been pushing his pain around Europe during the early forties in a satchel. He keeps thinking it’s something precious. You keep pushing this mess of misery in the hope that it will get you somewhere, that there is somewhere to go, and you employ whatever means you need to get there. At some point, you will stop moving, come to rest and be content. In the meantime, there are these materials of the construction of your path there. Words are meaningless things that you can throw together to turn them into something and articulate something else. Words themselves fall off without their bearings, and take on the same properties of any other construction material. We’re looking at the materials of construction. Everything you use to make something, an idea or a house, uses this stuff that has it’s own life. You hope the construction doesn’t take over the finished thing.
The construction materials kind of have these properties that you don’t use in your idea, but are a part of it anyway. You’ve gotta use all this stuff to make your thing, whatever it is. You might be oblivious to it, but it’s got a life of its own that can come out and turn your construction into what it wants to be. I guess it’s not so much the emperor’s new clothes as the emperor’s clothes, with or without the emperor. Who is secondary, irrelevant or useless.
I walk into something from my memory and then it’s different to how it should be and now this distance between the thing and its presence in the now makes these plays that can be the whole life of it, it makes following something a lot more interesting than a single encounter. When there is a single encounter, there’s always the pulling together of other things, finding a place for the new thing, making it old. If it isn’t careful, an entirely new object can become swamped by its associations with existing ideas in a few seconds.
You walk out of one dream into another dream. Even though the two dreams are different in every way, they both are dreams and have the idea of dream and that feeling when you say I had a dream. But more than that they stand in relation to your idea of dream and how they run away from it, or walk around it, changing your idea of what dreams are. And then there’s all that information you have on dreams, giving names to dogs under your carpet, telling the future, dreaming someone else’s dream, going through things you don’t even want to talk about, Jung and all his symbols to piss away the time a little better, you hope. And here we are, with shifting ideas of where we are, and we can’t do side-by-side comparisons of some things in a room. We’re just walking between spaces and our idea of what kind of space we’re in, casually forgetting contradictions that haunt the serious.
There’s a video on this flat screen tv, with a long title that feels more like the work than the video - which points to the thought in the title. And there is a lot of insects in the video walking around the screen and some flowers up close, which are important, and some mountains, which are important. At some point mountains stopped being sublime and became nice pictures, I’m told, but I can’t even see mountains any more. Whenever I’ve climbed to the top of one of these, people around me were talking about the experience, or the beauty, I can’t remember. It seemed like a good place to take a piss. I was always only slightly bored, doing it because it’s what I’m doing, going along, because it’s what you do. Other people getting you to do it in case you might like it. The houses in the middle that are of almost no consequence - don’t seem to mind much. I’m not sure that they’re about looking so much. Someone wrote to me from a house like that. I went there. They were waiting in the bedroom, playing some game. We got very drunk and when we came back, it was extremely cold. I woke up about 9. I waited around by myself until the early afternoon because of waking up so early. I think it’s the most bored I’ve been. There’s really nothing to do. When you wake up in the mountains, you can always look at the scenery, no matter how ugly it is.
The title and the video have started to compete with each other. One becomes central and turns the other into something superfluous until it too starts to make demands. It feels like the title is the work, and it’s made from the video of flowers, mountains and buildings in the middle. But then in the video, the houses in the un-interesting middle bit get more interesting. And now this other thing is made out of the title because we noticed the buildings more. And this kind of thing goes on with the title and the video saying something new out of what the other said each time. Maybe it’s messier than that, but there’s the responsive interaction. And some of it is saying maybe not. The boring stuff gets really interesting.
I had a few words with the walls here once, but they’re different now. It doesn’t seem odd, and it shouldn’t.
I’m another room now. It’s a room. It’s a work. A room is a work. A show is a work. The audience makes the work. If there’s no audience, there’s no work. This painting’s letting itself be made by the room. Like the light is right across from it and turns the doubled line of grey wool into a shadow of the line of coloured wool. And the angles have been made by the angled wall, which when you look at it from the doorway, this angled wall, it’s directly facing you and comes out flat and straight. Everything’s straightened out or bent around something. Come on, tell me something more. Well if there’s another thing about this show I’ve found in this room, it’s that it all goes unsaid. Maybe that’s just the way I’m looking. Maybe all of these works in other spaces, alongside other things, would start to shout out stuff. But right now the stuff that’s coming across isn’t operating on any language.
Campbell’s trying on jeans that are too small and the effort is serious. I just couldn’t keep it up, the seriousness. I’d give up because I couldn’t get the jeans on. I’d be trying on jeans that fit after the first too-tight pair. Sometimes I come in at a point where he’s got his own jeans on and I think they’re the shop jeans and he’s done it. But he keeps trying to get the really small jeans on and he’s looking really serious about it and earnestly tries every time.
It’s really serious. Think about Nauman’s negative spaces, and the jeans as moulds for legs. And trying to fit into someone else’s mould. That’s really smart. Now I’ve lost myself. But the video still looks smart, I mean I think he knows what he’s doing, in a way that I don’t when I make work. He’s always looking very serious, the camera’s on the floor looking up and the video is projected high on the wall, so you’re looking up at the same kind of angle and he’s taking off his jeans and putting on jeans, and his cock in his underpants sticks out of the fly like a green muppet nose. But there’s not that direct sexual interface, the visionís there, but we’re watching flat video. And it’s still being smart and serious. It is really funny though. He’s trying on these tight jeans really fast and filming himself doing it and the person working in the shop is asking how those jeans are going and someone’s trying to push the door open and what’s he going to say in his poker face with the jeans too tight to fit over his underpants and videoing the whole thing. Then there’s no punch line and some of the jeans fit, except that pair has fake fades. It’s moved somewhere else, lost it’s humour, become serious. There’s so little there. There’s a lot. There’s one changing room with no store music, coming through like an argument down a pipe and played on a cell phone, which has a phantom chair. It looks like a whole different kind of shop. He keeps his composure. Nothing is said.
I have to talk about myself from the outside now. Okay. When we’re moving forward, doing, there’s nothing to move into. It has to be made or done. We’re constantly making it up, all the time.
When I write, my mistake is to write meaning.
An object is also an event. You might add that it is a series of events, but I’m not making a map. I’m talking about something as it does. So I’m looking for a way foward, which is not a way out of or into anything. The idea of beauty becomes ridiculous because it’s just there and doesn’t do anything. Things can strike, but that’s an action. So I’m making these things and something happens. It turns into an event somehow. It can’t sit there by itself. It’s not going to bother if there’s nothing going on. And then these events sit around in groups, thinking up stuff, being something.
Understanding can be more open to break-downs than one might at first think. Anyway it’s boring. Misunderstandings give this space to move in. I can’ tell what I’m going to make of the next moment. I don’t know who I’m going to be. Sometimes I come out of the past and run away with whoever I was becoming. The actions I take in order to survive just don’t care about meaning. They’re only interested in the movement of language.
By Tahi Moore (June 2007)
