2003-11-04

My plan was to explain, at least a little, about the work you saw here last week. Unfortunately, some of the files I needed to upload are missing… and perhaps were never put into digital format. Let me explain. Day one was a list of quasi-aphorisms I dubbed “blaphorisms’. Since I’m writing from work etc etc. these are a personal filter on Kurt Schwitter’s “Banalities from the Chinese”. I have actually translated Schwitter’s aphorisms for my own amusement and don’t even know if they are available in English (never having read Schwitters in English). I was going to publish them here but I couldn’t find them on my HD this morning and suspect I never went beyond the pen on paper stage. If I remember, I’ll put them up tonight… The other jottings from day one were sheer madcap and I have no idea what I was doing. The rest of the week you saw my “non-events”. What is a “non-event”? (prepare for my circuitous answer) Sol Le Witt became well known for his instructional art that, as I understand, he also combined with the mail art form so that works could be created without him ever being present. Whether or not the recipients knew that he was going to send them a set of instructions is beside the point. A non-event concerns itself with the space between the instruction and the enactment of it. Simply explained, I write an instruction, which is a kind of event, but then there is the actual ‘implementation’ of the instruction: another event. Once on the screen or page, these are ‘non-events’. The non-events of last week were simple and deliberately laconic, following the theme of the week. They can become quite complex, and I think quite informative about the receptive environment of the reader. As the week progressed, I played around with these two ideas to write instructions that really weren't instructins at all. Sometimes I allowed them to veer more to the abstract, others I wanted to read like comic orders (e.g. Inhale / Expire). The major exception is Friday's fact finder about the president of the usa. In fact, I improperly called this a non-event, when it is really something else.

No comments: