(rough viewing copy, tidy to follow...)
--
Pale smooth forms are dropped in formation. They have become a fractured terrain, arrested in the slightest dissolve of erosion, with thinning strands pulling backwards to points held steadily in the cadastre. It is impossible to infer any duration from here, but simply to say that a significant amount of time must have elapsed since…
Bones begin soft, form first as flat membraneous layers of connective tissue fed with a sober flow of blood. Cells slip, form an array between the layers and reinscribe themselves as bone-formers that siphon calcium from the blood and pack it slowly amongst the waiting matrix of cartilage. As they are packed around the cartilage the bones take form, spin into intricate honeycomb, become spongy, then compact. They billow into arcs and planes that punctuate straps of dark red muscle with ossified white.
Wait.
Once, a memory of walking through a museum, pausing to watch maps made of white bones with spines flexed and pinned in smooth arcs, straining against the black wire fastening them. Watching onyx beads glued meticulously beneath eyelids that reflect perimeter lines of the cases precisely - holding strip lights bowing on each steep meniscus.
Standing still, and not speaking of much, perhaps pointing, it was uncertain whether there was a straining towards interrupted signs of permanence or impermanence, in the frozen displays of each sealed-in taxonomy. They hang without displaying the temporal marks of decay.
When these things are left to decay in place the eyes are always the first things to disappear completely. The bones are the last.
--
A decline in temperature must have the beginning for which there is no direct or discernible image – it is impossible to tell. Slumping evenly towards a plateau, and then on into half-lives of progressive cooling, it is the most useful single indicator of time elapsed. But there is immediately a small but widening fissure inside which form the errors in over-estimating or under-estimating the interval.
The interval.
Sheared off at the edges. An estimation, or a portrait, can be roughly approximated, but should be correlated with all other phenomena and close observations utilizeable in establishing the limits of an elusive probability, narrowing backwards towards the brink...
--
The room appears to be sealed, locked from the inside. The temperature is fixed by the constant circulation of cooled air that still travels through hidden ducts, and emerges as a steady exhale through the parallel lines of a metal grill mounted in the ceiling. This is good. The rate must at least be relatively steady.
--
A dark dried tide has seeped across the carpet towards the edge of the room and halted against the wooden panelling that stretches out behind the crests of ruffled bleached bed linen, mounded towards one side, to leave intimate channel. The tide beneath is marking the edges of the furniture, darkened towards the centre in subtle banding, as the heavier particles have been deposited closer to the remains. A rapid substitution of form on form must since have eased in pace to a slow shrivel, leaving faint traces of the incremental movements, divided by the weeks observed between each brief contraction of the flesh. Slipping tatters cling to the disbanding reef as the fluid has spread outwards in its concentric rings, inspissated, and hardened into a penumbra cast by the gasps of collapsing architectures.
The prodigious interval is confirmed by the over-yellowed peel of the edges of the wallpaper, away from vertical lines where the pattern does not quite meet itself, away from the radial cuts around wall lamps, the incisions around power points and switches marked with the cumulative hatchings of fingerprints. The light switch by the door is flicked down, but there is no light on. A piece of the long-blown out filament in the fizzed out incandescent bulb, perhaps left on, has dropped from the slim antennae that held it, and rests in the bottom of the clear glass droplet above the lettering.
Perhaps days have passed since the structure caved in on itself, as the gases that distended it into a plump limbed black tadpole blew through the blubbery flanks. The organs are all simmered burst plums, and spit pips.
--
Several weeks must have passed. Rough-wristed gloves, dipped and showing signs of drying, mimic the shape of an emptied hand, loosened at the knuckle. Five ridged yellowed shells remain attached at the tip of each beneath the snarled back arch of the cuticle. A roughly woven and monochrome tapestry of fibres have also sloughed from follicles into the proximate glop, dressing the edges of the head.
It is far too late to be close to certain. The tongue is surged trapped language between the crests of loosening teeth. The eyes are shrivelled shadows lolling into the bony hollows behind swollen slits.
--
It is apparent that in anticipation of eyelessness hundreds of convex lenses have thrived on the surface. The curve of each lens contains a muted fulvous liquid behind the haze of a cloudy cataract that blinds it. They range in diameter from two centimetres to twenty, blankly attempting to cover all the possible lines of sight inside the room, blankly observing the erratic drift of the final particles of kicked up dust in the air currents attempting to settle on the unmade bed, the undisturbed furniture, the half-opened suitcase. They attempt to watch also from oblique angles each instant of the soft undulating seethe of the organs beneath the thinly stretched epidermis. Several appear to have burst open like bladder wracks. There are wet tracks following the curves downwards to swelling drops, collecting and containing the reflection of fractured perspectives. The room has multiplied in miniature. It has become a fractal labyrinth. The surface visible through the breached empty lenses is boiled into a candy pink shine that has begun to dry in patches into an empty vellum. A few weeks must have elapsed.
The abdomen is a raw dim globe, bloomed into rapid topography whose sheets that display faintly etched territories are held in a peeling into slim scrolls, dropped over the edge.
--
The surface glistens, duskily, in tact. It can't be certain but it seems that around two weeks have passed. The surface is marmoreal. Slim rivers of mineral serpentine trace diffused and sinuous curves away from the broad welled delta formed in the cavity of the abdomen. Soon afterwards the surface is burnished Shagreen, the chest, the limbs, the face, greenish-yellow, greenish-blue, greenish-black.
The mineral impurities that settle as layers in limestone are mobilized and recrystalised in place, under the intense heat and pressure of metamorphism. They form the characteristic swirls that meander through the rock, cut from quarries and polished into grand panels and wide banisters held up by bulging balusters in the sweeping staircases of grand old buildings that smack of the shrivel of empires.
Arborescent lines meander pressed against the surface and form the characteristic swirls of tributaries that swarm into arteries, sable brown, in the shoulders, the chest, the limbs, the face. The skin is carnelian, pressing down against the buttery foam of subcutaneous fat.
--
Just two days must have elapsed. Seized wide open, fine geometric flecks dot the two cloudy hemispheres with steadily blackening constellations of points, visible from both sides. Each terse translucent globe of the static planetarium has begun to buckle slightly. If the images of galaxies become locked in position by a failure of the mechanism, with the bulb searing through the same pin-points into the vast curve of the domed ceiling, the projection becomes incapable of moving through simulated seasons or aeons, and hangs as universes ground to a halt, or moving backwards against the narrow point of the present.
Within 24 hours the straight lines that can be postulated between the flecks have slackened and re-drawn, slackened again. The lines crumple and shift into woozy arcs as the domes empty, as the humors leech, and begin their gradual collapse.
--
Now the upper surfaces of the skin are palest, apportioned into the faintest of contour bands towards the summit. These are archaeological strata. Wrecked pumps and flaccid sluices have allowed blood cells to trickle downwards through the serum and pool behind the skin, forming a low dark lake traced against the edges. It probably began 15 minutes after… it was apparent 20 or 30 minutes after…
The flat edge of the tapering foot of the table leg, the spiral of the flex attached to the base of the telephone receiver pressed against the knee, the knuckles pressed against the carpeted floor. Compressed against each plane of the backdrop, the lake is held stable above a light seam that traces the contact between the surfaces. Dark crescents have formed inside the earlobes, behind the fingernails. The bottoms of the organs have engorged and tiny ruptures have scattered soot into the surrounding tissues. This duration is too variable to serve as a useful indicator.
--
Within three hours, within four, the eyelids have hardened, the lower jaw fastened invisibly. There is a puckering of plucked gooseflesh into shallow foothills. Next the small joints have fastened in a perfect replica of the , advancing asymmetrically, and then against the leg of the bedside table, the crown of the head locked against the bed base, the whole thing is a whitening caryatid, chiselled limestone, briefly buttressing the geometry of the objects.
It will relax, slacken, smooth itself out in roughly the same order as it formed.
--
When a foreign body enters the flesh, the epithelial cells form an enclosing sac which secretes a crystalline substance that accumulates in layers. Inside the mantle, the bony rim of the eye-socket, a soft moist tongue rasps around the sediment and licks a fresh word into place.
A few moments have passed.
A slim film has formed on the surface of the eyes, wide open, which softens the forms cast back in them. At first, barely perceptibly, edges will have diffused, colours become shallow.
Next positions of objects will have become indistinct, and the space inside the room will have erased into depthlessness. The image is swallowed serenely in a nacreous bloom that takes its place.
The image is the nacreous sheen of the eye.
5.7.10
Soda-Brücke edit
24.6.10
19.6.10
18.6.10
31.5.10
Bibliomancy
...perhaps offers the most absurdly obvious solution.
p.12 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Fragments, Vintage London, 2002
29.5.10
9.9 seconds
A piece of the blown out filament in an incandescent bulb has dropped from the slim antennae that held it and rests in the bottom of the clear glass droplet above the lettering.
22.5.10
20.5.10
One thing leads to another - Everything is connected
Art on the Underground exhibition 14.05.10 - 10.06.10, City Hall, London
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/15457.aspx
15.5.10
12.5.10
9.5.10
> He says it was part of Hitler's Germania-Utopia called
> Güteraußenring (GAR).. Trains did roll over it, but only
> for a short time. Finally, with the construction of the
> wall, large areas of train tracks were taken away (to have
> free grounds for seeing and shooting potential escapees).
> But the bridge ruin remained, being used as
> a climbing-object (indicated by climbing hooks "made
> in USSR")
> There is another fragment nearby-
> which was not part of the GAR, but for a line transporting
> goods to the Schönefeld airport fabrication.
7.5.10
5.5.10
3.5.10
2.5.10
Minutes.
There is no direct image for a change in temperature but this begins immediately.
A few minutes must have elapsed.
A slim film has formed on the surface of the eyes, which softens the forms cast back in them.
At first, barely perceptibly, edges diffuse, colours become shallow.
Next positions of objects become indistinct, and space is erased into depthlessness.
The image is swallowed serenely in a nacreous bloom that takes its place.
The image is the nacreous sheen of the eye.
When a foreign body invades the flesh, the epithelial cells form an enclosing sac which secretes a crystalline substance that builds in layers. A soft tongue rasps around sediment and licks a fresh word into place.
Bones start soft, form first as flat membraneous layers of connective tissue fed with a sober flow of blood. Connective tissue cells slip, form an array between the layers and reinscribe themselves as bone-forming cells that siphon calcium from the blood and pack it slowly amongst the matrix of cartilage. Packed around the cartilage the bones take form, become spongy, then compact. They billow into arcs and planes that punctuate straps of dark red muscle with ossified white.
We had walked through the museum, pausing to watch maps of white bones strain against black wire, to watch onyx beads, meticulously glued beneath eyelids, reflect perimeter lines precisely
and hold striplights bowing on each steep meniscus.
Standing still, and not speaking, it was uncertain whether we were straining for signs of permanence or impermanence.
1.5.10
29.4.10
Hans Haacke
Die Freiheit wird jetzt einfach gesponsort - aus der Portokasse
Freedom is now simply going to be sponsored - out of petty cash
Hans Haacke, 1990
26.4.10
CSH proper, improper
Julius Shulman, Tremaine House, Santa Barbara, Richard Neutra Architect, 1950
I am reading Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet.
22.4.10
15.4.10
Uriel Orlow, 'Remnants of the Future' @ Laure Genillard
16th January – 10th April 2010
Remnants of the Future is a multi-part installation comprising video, photography and drawing. Taking as its starting point a number of sites in Northern Armenia near the Georgian and Turkish borders, in this new body of work Orlow continues his investigation of the spatial and pictorial conditions of history and memory.
Orlow’s video focuses on Mush, a housing project just outside of the north Armenian town of Gyumri. Mush is named after the once flourishing Armenian town in Eastern Anatolia, which in 1915, during the Armenian genocide, became the site of massacres and deportations. Construction of the 'new' Mush began a few months after the major Spitak earthquake of 1988 destroyed many of Gyumri's housing blocks and made thousands of people homeless. Promised by M. Gorbachev to be completed within two years, construction of the new Soviet-style suburb eventually came to an abrupt halt as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Russian construction workers were recalled by Moscow. The newly independent Armenian state did not have the means to finish this ambitious housing project and it has since remained in a ghostly state of incompletion and near desertion, inhabited by inhabited by migrating birds and gleaners who eek out an existence by slowly dismantling the Soviet style housing blocks.. The video is accompanied by a sound-scape by Mikhail Karikis using the radio waves emitted by dying stars (pulsars), which still reach us after the star has died and which were first mistaken for intelligent life messages from outer space.
A series of photographs explore the afterlife of a nearby textile factory, which had at one point produced over 50% of the Soviet Union's textiles and was destroyed during the earth-quake. Reaching even further back into history is a series of twenty drawings of death masks – including Lenin, Tolstoy, Eisenstein and Mayakovsky – made by Sergey Merkurov, a Gyumri-born sculptor who became famous for his monumental sculptures throughout the Soviet Union. A floating cover of Francis Fukuyama's seminal post-cold-war book 'The End of History - The Last Man' and a hand copy of a UK government document on Armenia operate as lose footnotes to the rest of the work.
Orlow's practice tackles the impossibility of narrating or representing the past and engages with different documentary forms. Spanning little known locations in Africa, the Arctic, Eastern Europe and Switzerland, Orlow's work explores blind-spots of representation and knowledge through a careful act of framing and re-arranging what he finds in a place. His modular, multi-media installations bring varying image-regimes and archival research into correspondence following associative, conceptual and formal threads.
‘Orlow’s challenge to our desire for continuity is radical: the truth of this peripheral space is not one, he suggests, that can be told narratively. […] Orlow’s work asks us how we can read the past in a way which does not involve a simple hierarchy with the present. More than this: he wants to know what history is and how it binds itself to an institution, a thing, a space, a face. The fragility of the whole project is its fidelity to its subject’s fractured nature […].’(Mike Sperlinger)
14.4.10
lines extruded from walls
I spent another afternoon at the Southwark Fire Training Ground, investigating the red line with the generous hospitality of the London Fire Brigade. The BA (Breathing Apparatus) Space is a dark blue chamber through which a slim red rope guide line is tied by a team of two men.
In the darkness the back of the hand is used to sweep the wall for obstructions and tie-off points on which to knot the line to keep it between shoulder and waist height. If the back of the hand is cut, through heavy gloves, the hand will still function.
Lights out. Gripping the shoulders of the man in front, gripped at the waist by the man behind, an eyeless theatrical horse, there was a slow conga through the tingling monochrome of zero visibility, tracing the line.
Two small cords hang at intervals, a longer one in front means that you are heading into the structure, and when a shorter cord knotted twice is in front it means you are heading back out towards the point the line enters the building.
It is impossible to see, to photograph the line as a continuum.
PAROLE is the unfolding in time of a set of possibilities given in space, that set of possibilities being what Saussure calls LANGUE.
*[diagram taken from Roman Jakobson, Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics]
8.4.10
Body Architecture
Whitechapel, in association with Lux, screened:
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Stan Brakhage (1971) 16mm, 32 min
Stan Brakhage has often described his films as documentaries, referring to his investigations of how we see, whether in experiments with cinema's unique capacities to view the world or attempts to replicate "closed-eye" vision. In 1971, Brakhage was allowed to photograph an autopsy, a word which comes from the Greek, meaning "the act of seeing with one's own eyes." In the resulting difficult, intensely disturbing work, Brakhage attempts to understand death. In seeking the ultimate mystery-in asking why-he encounters the physical, anonymous human body, and in the process "sees" the limits of knowing through observation.' Kathy Geritz
The film is part of Brakhage's "Pittsburgh trilogy", a trio of 'documentary' films Brakhage made about the city's various institutions in 1971; the other two are 'Eyes', about the city police, and 'Deus Ex', filmed in a hospital.
Calmly I have seen the scalp chiseled from underneath with a slim blade, and flipped over the face, so dead lips kiss the crown of their own heads. I have seen bone smoke, the way limbs shift, weighted, the way organs quiver as they are liberated, lifted like infants from the hollowing. Subcutaneous fat is a buttery foam, which spreads like curds away from the dark red straps of muscle, punctuated with calcium white. The big toe supports the final words not cast in Latin.
6.4.10
AA lectures
http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1208
Marcel Odenbach
Artist Talk
http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1133
Jean Louis Cohen
Architecture Drafted: Designing for World War II
