top of page

A lie for a sculpture... Part I

Weportal, V&A Museum, London, 2017

A lie for a sculpture...Part II

The kink in the arc, M_HKA, Antwerp, 2017

A lie for a sculpture... Part III

Monomatic, Rhubaba, Edinburgh, 2017

A lie for a sculpture...Part IV

Gh0stspace, London, 2018

A lie for a sculpture...

Part I

This is a lie, but then you knew that right? You with your snotty overview, you always knew I would write this or I wouldn't have sent it blind carbon copy on the day of your English Literature exam. Yes, this is a lie, it's a fake,its an affect, its a stolen trait, a collected personality. A hiatus of sorts. In the land just beyond these words but before the reality they describe, there are large and bulbous forms which everybody ignores because they will not adhere. They grow, the more they are ignored. I am lying, I can't be trusted, I change my mind, this thing means different things on different days, to different people, with different explanations. I am between spaces and my language is paused, shelved for now whilst I lie into this lens and it collects my thoughts, stripping them into some font, like Miller or Didot. I was describing a thing, sorry...wait that sounds too….I'll try again.

I was describing a repetitive, breathless moment which I have, where it feels like a small balloon, perhaps a water balloon, has been inflated in my larynx just above the space my voice seems to inhabit. It immediately deflates just as it reaches full-ish, and it feels like it's in the shape of a comma. This causes a derelict wasteland, which I cannot describe, to open up in my mind. It only happens as I am trying to talk to a person. But you knew all this already didn't you, about this object and that explanation, that time and the meaning of this time, laid out in Times New Roman. But when you begin to type your thesis on this object you imagine you are performing the crescendo of a piece of Schubert Lieder, in the body of a virtuosic pianist, at somewhere like Wigmore or Cadogen Hall, don't you? That is a thing I know in the bulbous space in my throat, the bit that feels like unchartered territory.

The lie grows and spreads, like bullet points at the mercy of a single finger with nothing to say. I'm listening to the Georgia font, trying to understand the serifed decoration of letters, as a form of communication in its own right, trying not to look at the disgusting object. Finding pleasure in the little flicks and ligatures, ascenders and descenders added, designed for online readability. I am lying when I say that I can read a secret message in the serif of say Miller or even maybe Garamond. Today I opened a can of butter beans and I cut my finger on the ridged rim of the can. The serrated body, gouged my typing finger, just on the tattoo I have there of a single letter E. When I returned to my laptop keyboard to carry on lying to you about this, the E key was missing too. You probably imagine the hole in my finger where the E used to be and then the hole in the keyboard, the cap of the key gone perhaps, to reveal an intricate polyurethane mechanism. But the key for E, had disappeared altogether, as though it had never existed. I found a deletion machine, a way to alter glyphs by removing them from my fingers. Objects do not shape stories it is the other way round.

So I am looking over his shoulder as he types, he uses one finger on one hand and makes a counter-clockwise circular movement with that finger between finding individual keys and letters to make up the words he wishes to write. But he looks to be typing only long pages of bullet points, with no content. Like a duck on a drum machine, perhaps a TR-707 with that hand clap, his typing style is other worldly, musical and without the formal qualities needed to communicate his rounded thoughts. Having had enough of watching him, I walk away, leaving the situation growing ever smaller in the white vastness of this lie to you. Like a team of red ants trying to understand a tuba, or like an entire street of Rhododendrons listening for the first time to that song by Roxy Music. Or like a semi-colon smelling of wheat. A levitating 3d bullet point. Then comes a sweeping jib-arm shot of a fecked studio audience, desperate to ask questions, all with their hands up, “Thats aaaaaaaalllllll we have time for folks...”, as the house band comes in, all playing typewriters instead of their usual instruments. Click-clacking to the tune of the Question Time end credits….

I am opening up my suitcase in this hotel and I have brought with me 26 individual items of clothing, all labelled with the letters of a dead alphabet, still trying to describe the viscera. An A-Z clothing exercise. You understand when I spell understand wrong, you still understand right? Yes. Bullet point.

• S

It won't let me just have the bullet point on it's own, just isn't programmed that way, can't have the object without the text, it will only let me have a bullet point if I have a letter, so I had to type the letter S, it was closest to my broken and splinted finger, lucky I didn't accidentally type two letters, like a wrong note on a piano or harpsichord. My two fingers strapped together, trying to write out two opposing thoughts simultaneously, in two windows of Microsoft word open side by side, one good, one bad.

Back to normal.

Fig 2.b.

I decide the narrative, which, if I am careful enough in delivering to you, I cannot fail. If I can harness the story, then away with reality, sidelined, paused...

'The circumstances leading up to the Bank of England’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1931 have been detailed by letters between the Bank and the government from the period […] minutes from the Banks court, detailed how foreign exchange reserves were being drained to such an extent that the gold standard had to be abandoned.'.

 

So the bind in the narrative, to a thing, with texture, with a type of reality, like the soles of your shoes, patched with small stones and hardened gum, has gone. Leaving me to flutter freely, not too quickly away from the ground, leaving all those dirty objects behind;

• Like a 747 tentatively imagining it's own lift off.

• OR like a child beginning to cook a lie.

• OR like an acceptable angle.

• OR like a gross wedge, driven in by the mallet of a fool.

• OR like when you try and comment and you don't get close to bursting the facade.

Sorry.

So I have folded another corner over my shoulder, leaving a rough patch just below the depression that leads up to my collar bone, it has turned grey, like stone. I've just pushed another couple of corners round my midriff, as I turn into monolith. Standing stone////exclamation point. Lump////comma.

 

I am quoting here;

“An exclamation point looks like an index finger raised in warning; a question mark looks like a flashing light or the

blink of an eye. A colon, says Karl Kraus, opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who does not fill it with something nourishing. Visually, the semicolon looks like a drooping moustache; I am even more aware of its gamey taste. With self-satisfied peasant cunning, German quotation marks (<<> >) lick their lips.”.

Back to one.

I am a carved bone, a deletion machine

I am a division machine.

I am bone, maybe.

Or certainly ivory, anyway.

I have an intricately carved head, which is just slightly obscured because the grain of my material had to be followed, dictating to a certain extent my shape. But you get the idea...

I am a bone, I have an extra elongated body, a tusk, or femur, or humerus, tib or fib, as they say in those off green gowns, in front of the red phone, as an emergency blues through the streets in yellow and green fluorescence. Tibia and Fibula, but I have this feeling I am a clavicle….of a large mammal, just a hunch. A small pre-historic bone tool, carved in the shape of a sabre-toothed. The clavicle, arched in shape, has lent itself well to the function I

must perform, and I am carved for distinction, filled with language. I have a small nipple on my upper-side.

I am a division machine, a distinction device, I am a distinguishing feature on the brow of millennia. A mole. You are the mole, there is a mole, I have a mole. Its got bigger, this problem.

I have a small nipple, which looks to be of some function. My tail wraps around the raw not carved end of my material trying to eschew the recognition that I am only material, nothing more. Like I said a division machine.

{ I awoke after my operation to find that the wound on my hip, had not been properly stitched…...up.}

I awoke after the operation (second operation) to find that the wound had been left open, gaping like a wry smile, all lips and a little bit of darker red at the centre to suggest a deeper recess, the head of the femur, all gristle and scar stones from the first one. So I imagined for a second ... my femur, inside my leg, all carved and sculpted so as to make a distinguishing machine, that’s my one, that’s your one, you know, like name tags all over your property, so you don’t come home with someone else’s identical uniform, or in this case … bone tool.

...on looking at my hip all open and yawning, skin creasing like when they salt the pork skin to make good crackling. My first thought was, that looks like an egg would fit in there, because I could see the articulated end of my femur, that gristly hip bit, and it looked like a duck egg, my duck egg, how was I to know my bones are duck egg blue? When still surrounded by my very red flesh…. It would not have made a very good spear throwing machine, really... then a flash to this… My carved bone held, fresh out of the ground as the striations on its upper half are discussed with a group, disgust. Discussed by a man in his forties in khakis who skilfully attributes an incredible force of impact on my shattered femur and its subsequent tennis ball size, over-compensatory, ball of bone growth that ensured I spent the rest of my life upright, if a little arthritic. The group discuss medicine at the time and that the marks and scrapes on the hip end might be down to operations, but it is not what they seek. They are a group searching for early hunting tools of the primitive Lower-Triassic. My Femur is of no interest, even though the carvings may suggest a deletion machine at work. “There are holes in my bone and surrounding flesh where the screws went!”, I proclaim in agony as a masked man adjusts a light and begins to use a 12V DeWalt impact driver to unscrew the titanium rod. But it was just a dream...I funnel the information given to me and navigate the field of my own body, sensing where the hole is. And I awake to find a pallid version of my own hand covering my mouth so that the sick cannot escape, that much blood and sick mixed together seem like a combination that may spell the end, as I become of archaeological interest. The sheet below me has spread what seemed like a small amount of blood and used it efficiently like blotting paper can spread a small amount of ink. But this was about a pint, maybe more of blood. Now a growing Rorschach blot, waiting to be butterflied and interpreted by the archaeologists. The sick swallowed, I thought about how to get out of there with my gaping leg, I looked over to check it and the sick came out there instead, all crimson. The mouth of my wound was articulated by my attempts to move in such a way that it became lucid and started to mouth words and then  talk to the bed next to me, to the man who spoke only to ask for salt on his porridge.

The open wound said;

“I’m hiding a precious object, dying man. The object I hold will one day be exhibited, as an attempt to explain and understand our relationship with early humans. The precious object is made of bone you soporific flump. It’s destined for the British Museum, yeh. It was used for throwing spears, it has a little nipple which produced a very clever mechanism which extended the throwing range of the user by 5-10 times. It’s an important object i’ve got hidden beneath this oozy red as I speak to you from this body. As I speak to you it’s very own brass museum plaque is being etched with a titanium tipped Dremmel. Explaining its significance as one of the first tools. Explaining also that it became an essential piece of equipment for survival, this carved femur throwing stick. BUT...thats not the most interesting or important part. The most interesting bit is that this is not a purely functional object, there is a certain amount of customisation which has gone on, in fact only the nipple is functional, the carved body of the rest of this bone, in here, in this flesh, which I hide, is a pure flight of fancy, a sculpture, an object of distinguished taste, a sabre-toothed delight. In fact it was whittled in order to be personally distinguishable from the next, due to the ever growing proximity of early human living conditions, leading to a need for personal identification and character which we now take for granted and have sold to us every day….so in a way this is the first identity machine -----the first distinguishing machine, the ------ first naming -------device-------you didn’t-----mmmm-----yes-----"

This time, as I awoke I immediately ran my pinked hand along my hip where the opening had been, I felt a multitude of staples and the puckered flesh of my hip forming a ridged lip, or a lipped ridge, a bit like the zip on the original Levi 501’s. The bone gone, to stay packed away all carved, never to be discussed until Tony digs it up. The mouth shut, stapled up, never speak of this. The museum object still in my leg, missing from the display, out on

 loan…..

 

 

A lie for a sculpture...

Part II

This is a lie, I am lying to you, but you knew that didn't you, you with your snotty overview. Yes, this is a lie, it's a fake, its an affect, its a stolen trait, a collected personality. Don't take this as a brain machine, a deletion machine, a bone machine or a thing rounded, sawn off, spraying its pellets, blunderbuss. Its a breeze on your face, the roof has come off and your world has descended into a tired cliché of an acid trip, as you try to catalogue the objects you have just found. You find yourself moving them around, using the dry splints of two pieces of bone lined up perpendicular to a long shard of medieval ceramic in order to make a letter F. The F is burned onto your retina now, you don't know why, and you realise, suddenly, what you are doing, you mutter, not supposed to make these things spell anything. This research has no body it is hollow, empty in the middle, heartless, there is a bulbous form which appears on the horizon as you look up, but don't listen to me, I am killing time here, lying to you. Your overview allows you to take all this in, but you've no idea of the feeling of writing this. There is a smash and a crack as I cave a hole in the side of your head with a primitive blunt object which I dug up in the fleshy ground somewhere in Patagonia last year, probably an early pestle for grinding food, but who knows. The hole becomes big enough and we all crawl in.

I push and squeegee a hard stomach, not indigestion, not due to the slow composting of the rich contents of my supermarket stomach, but because of a cold stone, granite maybe, no, maybe sandstone. All pock marked by the functions of my stomach acid, which has done it's best to break down the stone but has only served to cast the very patina of its own inadequacy and ultimate failure. Anyway my other organs push this stone out through my abdomen like a pro curling team on specially frozen ice, precisely hitting the target etched on to my torso. Two columns of magma, thickly jet from my eyes, detailed and perfectly separate but saying the same thing, the focus of the two streams failing to produce an image, so nothing flows down my burning optic nerve apart from white flashes of noise which should not be there. I'm not lying to you about the columns, they are distinct. The jets don't stop and, as I fall to my knees, this only assists in my transition, as I push yet another lump of stone around under the rough skin on the point of my elbow. Feeling like a scrotum used to house a precious stone collection, this lump seems to slot into place next to the one which was ejected from my stomach. I don't feel ill but I look like a national park. You wouldn't recognise me. And as the two columns of magma begin to slow and solidify, their glowing, steaming, iridescence fading, you begin to see distinct marks on each jet, as they become ever more defined and the general body of the columns becomes white in its cooled state, you see the marks on the white surface, first as black dots….. then as dashes ------ then as these exact words written here, which I read to you. Flick back to the start and realise that these words are coming directly from the eyes on my face which has now turned almost entirely to stone and you see me, for the first time, as an object, pulled from an archive. This guy standing over me with a new macbook air, writing a sentence on me, a 50 word description for a small cabinet, a 250 word synopsis of me, for an online archive, a 5000 word essay for an academic journal, with a 1000 word addendum which he wrote in order to pass off the over confidence of his early assertions. He likes the cloud, excuse me whilst I just explore this guy a bit more, maybe he is interesting. He likes clouds, he likes THE cloud, likes to imagine information as floating above us, and knowledge like ground water which will eventually become rain. He's a bit precious and last night at the pub he was talking about information as a gaseous form which surrounds us, little does he know that in a past life he was a small laminated oak trinket box with mother of pearly inlay from 16th century France, just a box. Ok he wasn't that interesting so ill take you back to where we were before, drumming a hole in this guys head, we made it big enough to step through and his point of view comes towards you now as two, initially distinct ovals of light, which blur slowly into a field of vision and reveal this new voice, new commentary. I am a division machine, I am a bone machine, I have notches along my length, maybe I was a counting aid, an early abacus. But you already know all this, you listening over their, you knew I would say this didn't you with your unfocused gaze and shoes like lost languages. I am a deletion machine.

I awoke on top of a crate, the umbrella symbol covered in my drool, the stencilled letters must have been wet when I lay down, they now adorn my body, I read IRON MOUNTAIN SECURE ARCHIVE SOLUTIONS. The building I am in is very dark, as I walk past crate after crate, I realise there is no indication of any order on the surface, the barcodes and QR codes mean things are stored and ordered in accordance with the best use of space. Then a giant question mark falls from the ceiling, I narrowly avoid its heavy sharp edge, as it bounces and clangs next to me, I am distracted but unaffected.

This is a question machine. Time falls flat again and I sleep all lumpen like I am turning to stone. I dream of the question mark, or it dreams of me, whichever. I convince myself that I will only sleep well if I enter myself in to the Dewey Decimal Classification system, I will not rest unless I am classified. I awake to find this guy with an iPad scanning a box next to me, my legs all hard and rounded like igneous columns. He scans and moves on and I realise I am in Switzerland from the flag on show through the window above me. I read the words Hauser and Wirth and as my eyes gently focus I can see something hanging inside one of the crates which is cling-wrapped and open on one side. I move closer and read the name Louise Bourgeois. This is the bulbous form on the horizon from yesterday, or the beginning of this lie to you. I slip on a pool of liquid, possibly my own piss and as I land I see a guy with a macbook air begin writing an essay on the importance of the Louise `Bourgeois work in the crate, however the sculpture itself, it turns out will not leave this storage facility just outside St Gallen for another 7 years. I am a piece of paper, a calculator, I have 5 distinct symbols in different colours and I relate to a storage object, an object with drawers or a shelving unit. I have been folded in half so many times that I split into two. I have been sewn back together and before that I was stuck back together with the remaining sticky bit along the edge of an empty book of stamps. I allow access to something, make it legible, I get around the whacking disappointment of books packed tightly on a shelf, their storage their downfall, each book stopping the next from opening up and shedding its load.

There is a club, called the serif , its all seat shaped like letters and the drinks are all named after serif fonts. I order a Miller and the guy next to me frowns as he sips his Times New Roman, whilst the barman constructs another elaborate looking Georgia, all tall and orange.

This isn't for this object, it doesn't fit here, you talk to me about green grocers apostrophes and how it makes you laugh when people say pacific instead of specific, but I don't care and it is hard to get excited about the object again as you try to whip me from my long starving concentration on form. No it is not this object, no it is not this object, you roll over like a low dog, don't you, don't act like this is real or the truth, you roll over like a low dog and admit as you stare at my shins that it is not this object but as you do, you notice the strange patina of my ankles, like igneous rock, varicose veins, you ask me, are you turning to stone and I reply, no I am lying. This bulbous thing falls from the sky, in a way which feels familiar, like I knew it was coming, but it was still a complete surprise, the thing narrowly misses me, but my rock legs would never have moved anyway. My feet have disappeared, underground, all bits of grass are growing that makes my lower leg look like it has been there for centuries. Bedded in. You ask me if I  know that standing stones are as much underground as the are above, and mention that the hard bit was digging the hole, that's the real feet. Thats my real feet, I reply and I imagine the roots of a tree as the crippling uncertainty which narrowly missed me, lays there, a sculpture, a monument, this is a monument, to my disdain for monuments, this is an object. It does not fit, it is not real, this is a lie, I am lying to you, but you know that already. In the serif, I sip my Miller, I went for an italicised and it was very expensive, I tell you that my first sexual experience was at a cattle market, I was attracted to a pig and enjoyed imagining I was turning into a pig for weeks after, and since then I have just been chasing that erotic ecstasy with diminishing returns. You tell me this is depressing, as you roll a small piece of what looks like white tack between your thumb and index finger, making spheres and sausages, spheres and sausages, spheres and then sausages, you finish on a sort of cone which you push in the table and imagine you putting on instagram with the hashtags, sphere, sausage, cone, squashed cone, the life of a sculpture. I ask if you are distracted and you quickly hide the tack, thinking I have not noticed. I explain to you that I have had an unerring feeling of being followed for a while now, and that things seem to keep falling from the sky but miss me as they fall and then land too far away for me to make out.

I am a long forgotten can, I am underground, I am found, by a metal detector hobbyist, I am an object, a low dog, I have rolled over, I am put back in the ground, repeat.

This isn't here.

The cracking sound, like a skull being opened or a lobster being broken apart, the sound of a hollow space being opened up. The igneous texture has reached my knees now, but as it does, it reaches the last ice age and then a seam of porous sedimentary takes over, where there used to be a stream of piss running down my leg as shook wondering where the next object would fall and what it would do, what it might mean, if it would finally get me. All of this stuff is like that cracking skull, the skeletal protection for the soft tissue, words with flesh expand to become objects, filling space and time as well as my mouth in this contradiction, this is a contradiction, I will contradict myself, I will mean different things on different days, you say as the letter expands to become bulbous form, a round blob, on your finger, a mole, a mole, a mole on your finger, we need to look at that, get that looked at, you are turning into an object, your blood stream is now circulating

pebbles and you chew and cough one up into the little pool in your palm. You know I wasn't even thinking of that object when this was happening, it’s an affectation, a ruse, a wily subterfuge, a distraction whilst I take this and make that.

I suck the last bits of liquid from between the ice cubes, which I notice are an alphabet of miller font, as I remove the ice letters one by one, laying them next to each other, they come out in exactly the right order, melting on to the table, their language disappearing in the heat, but they clearly spell the word catechism. I try to think just as a sharp object splits my head in two, I awake in the archive, in the dark, the shelves are empty, on the floor in front of me is the object which ended me. Above me I can hear footsteps and muffled voices, the sound of metal detectors and I am this object meaning that thing, ready again, but closed for now. Now I write with two pens in one hand, one pen writing the exact opposite of the other, simultaneously. The earth around me is all loose.

 

 

A lie for a sculpture...

Part III

This is total transparency as well as near constant performance, yes I am reading this to you and it is about the object. The object which provides a facade of continuity and which you are hoping I will smooth over with my silicone, or smooth over with my filla, plaster the gaps, you want that tape they use to achieve a near invisible seem between two sheets of plasterboard. But I am not real, not a real bone, not a real artefact. I present to you the coherence. So transparent and yet such a performance, so how do we really know a person? You have your front-stage the performance and your backstage the anxiety, and so does the object. The anxiety is found at the centre of the object. It dreams its own hue, this bone, this pinky ceramic.

So the skins rotate and the meat is always the same, the object stays still at the centre, it is a camera trick, as the backgrounds shift by and fool your eye, into thinking we are falling. There are six possible readings of this thing, and I will read out all six, one after the other in the same monotone, so there will be no distinguishing the truth from my intonation. This is front stage but backstage I am thinking, there is no truthful version, so this will be easy, just a shifting set of possibilities. The skin shifts and the meat remains, a lump pulsating slightly. When I was a kid I thought that a leopard's spots or a zebra's stripes went right to the bone, through the meat. Since then I have lived a perpetual confusion over the surface and the depth of things, in comparison to the formation of our solid, surface-less minds, whose stripes do follow, through the meat. Anyway there was this anger which spread through the group as they peered over the hoax. They had been duped, years of training and yet they had still been convinced. This is not the link, but maybe it is, we have the verifier here, but maybe he will change his mind.

I tried to push my eyes right to the bottom of their sockets so as I lay prone and half out of the sand, I could stare down just over my chin, parallel with and along my chest, leading to the left and right protrusions of my knees and beyond that the occasional toe bone sticking out. The foreshortening was about right, I was a body, at least. I was thinking as I looked, I must be believable in some way, even though I am a hoax. I must be something, because I am thinking this. I was placed, I am not real, I am a lie, so I blink and before me are a team of palaeoanthropologists, talking about Piltdown and missing links. The mood is not good, they seem to be beginning to handle parts of me with a disdain that exposes their hoax theory. I start to become a group of placed objects, like this one, instead of a coherent and meaningful form. I blink again, though I am only bone, this time as I open my eyes again, I have become flesh and I can hear the sea, the waves lapping at my feet, still prone I expect to see yet more archaeologists or anthropologists, peering into look at my half submerged body. This time a small hand digs a blue, injection molded plastic, miniature spade hard along my femur, now fleshed as my thigh. As the blade of the spade threatens to tear my skin, I hear a voice shouting, quick quick dig him out and a giggle of laughter follows as a hoard of hands carrying ice creams and buckets and spades, proceeds to dig me out. I have become, but not become.

I am bone with flesh, meat, raw meat.

The raw meat of an object uncooked, an object whose juices have not yet caramelised over an open fire and become digestible.

I have been worried for a while, about this object. The object is indescribable, impossible and it worries me. I have commissioned texts, from the go-to guys, you know the ones, they do the rounds and are usually able to find some context or framework, for even the most outré of objects, as long as they are paid, and of course I would do no less than pay them fairly.

This object worries me because I've gone through three different writers, each one broken by the task. So far, one tried to talk about the Lamborghini Diablo as an object of desire, positioning my object on the bedroom walls of teenage boys in the late 80's early 90's, but he fell linguistically, when he began to follow that up with talk of pearlescent paint and iridescence, the whole thing became too contrite and frankly spunky. Another attempted to clarify the sonic attributes of the object, she used the now infamous story of the house on Beck Road in London which was home to Throbbing Gristle. Comparing my object to a sonic grenade. The story goes that in order to encourage their unwanted neighbours to move on, they played a constant gritty drone at a frequency which would loosen all four of a cow's stomachs. However she forgot to explain why the neighbours needed moving on and the whole thing looked like an obtuse exercise in name dropping whilst misunderstanding the ideals of the pop-myth. And that is putting to one side the saccharine style of the writing and the subsequent descent into madness that followed for this writer and the one before. After a period of recovery, this one has now moved on to write copy for an advertising firm in New York due to the stress caused by trying to finish her essay about the object. The final writer began well and it all looked promising, his essay was the longest to date. In it he tried to describe the physical attributes of the  thing in a similar way to the immaculate writing style of Donald Judd which everyone knows is analogous to his approach to making objects, so much so that it basically is object making in written form. For a brief section he tried to explain it as only part of a much larger whole but failed to convince. In another noticeably disparate and hard to follow section, an attempt was made to place this object among the obelisks at the beginning of 2001 a Space Odyssey. Allowing the film to act as a codec for deciphering the object, claiming at one point that it may be an object made by humans which can only be understood by HAL because of his emerging sentience and digital empathy, before he became a maniacal killer. Forgetting that HAL's descent into madness and any attempt at empathy which preceded it was merely a coding error itself. This marked the obvious beginning of his own mental disintegration, he was not normally the kind of writer that would make such a trite and amateurish attempt at understanding objects. He did however manage to continue over the course of a few months to try to finish the commission. More than the previous two writers, he showed an immense determination to crack the object with his text. He even wrote an isolated paragraph towards the end, which looked like an attempt at a fresh start. I found it  in red font, when I eventually received the draft, I requested from the coroners office who held the few belongings he had with him at the time of his departure, including his immaculate new mac book air.

NB 4b {add in later}

 

connects with section 2:

 

Registers of different kinds, this comes from the organ, air and pipes. There are different registers here too. At work. The edges of the object when they come into focus seem to give the effect of flipping the usual role an edge plays in demarcating what is and isn't to be considered part of the object or an object in itself. This helps us believe in the falsity that an object is distinct form the fabric of the rest of the world when of course it isn't really, scientifically (FOLOW UP NOT CLEAR YET)The edges of this object come to mark the edge of the atmosphere as it meets this object, it becomes hollow, formless, shaping the universe rather than situating itself within,*** it somehow transcends the limits of being in and becomes the out, it becomes everything else, apart from itself. A void, a vacuum, a non space. This calls to mind someone who I have always held is an object maker, the maker of an object nobody will ever see. Otto von Guericke was a German scientist and mayor of Magdeburg, he invented the Magdeburg hemispheres used to demonstrate atmospheric pressure. Effectively making a solid vacuum sphere inside his machine *** This is clunky, bit more research, maybe writing is no good may This was the last thing he wrote before he passed away. I became worried about the object before this point but the chain of events leading up to the demise of a writer I had commissioned, left me feeling palpably sick and unwilling to continue to show the object, let alone invite people to write about it.

I should explain that the object is a sculpture, although I cannot properly recall. I had had a series of dreams which one writer had, I failed to mention earlier, tried to include in his essay which was a mess. One of the dreams I told him, saw me, in a blue Versace suit, white shirt and pink tie, I never wear such outfits. This was not the main feature of the dream though. The hole where the zipper of my trousers should have been, met another shoulder pad which extended into another sleeve, complete with three buttons at the wrist and the worst was that where my genitals should have been, there was another arm which filled another sleeve and was grabbing for something. This thing may or may not be the object in question but when the hand at the end of my newly positioned arm finally reached, made contact and grabbed the object it seemed to tear it from a giant black sheet of fabric allowing an incredible bright light to flow in and end the dream.

This wordy skin for this uncooked flesh, forms a barrier, a protection from the external threats of bacteria and infection. I am lying to you about a bone which has no flesh, about some flesh which has a changeable skin, one day stripes the next day spots.

A lie for a sculpture...

Part IV

The E missing for several months, but you wouldn't even know what I meant would you, you with your suit on, trying to move across the carpet without making a noise so you can hatch a spiky word bollock from you mouth, a hermeneutics cloaca. The one you vomited on that group just now had hairs of exclamation marks and a spine made of capital I's. If the E was missing from your keyboard, you would immediately replace, wouldn't you. Well this one has been gone for months, I wish you could find it, in a lame, helpless voice, one resigned to never being able to use any words containing the letter E. A small fish jumped from the water rendered in a modelling engine, on its simulated rear-end there is a small spiral that more than coincidentally looks like a lower case e in something like Georgia or maybe it was Gill sans. I once had an extra large spot on my hip, a few months after having an operation to remove a femoral pin from my right femur, put there after a car crash broke my bone. The spot ripened slowly and promised to be an experience. The removal of the pin, which held my femur together as it healed makes me think of typography, like I was having a serif removed and becoming once again sans. The moment language was dragged from my hip, the structure, slid out so the bone marrow could grow again. The word pin is I a bit like a pin and it always struck how onomatopoeic the operation was. As soon as the pin was put in, I had become an idea, it became and antenna for thought about the surfaces inside a body, the penetration of this stick, slightly arched like a light italic. You couldn’t even imagine this, with your snotty nose and filthy, privileged position. You became too conscious as a civilisation, prickling for information, desperate to be doused in the sensation of words, you have all fallen at the hands of commonality, reduction and categorisation. The operation went to plan, I was lucid, I could hear the surgeons talk amongst themselves.

One said;

 

“….the thing is with fossils on that bit of coastline, is they are all much the same, and you don't see much new or interesting.”.

The other replied;

 

“mmmm….have you ever been to the Dorset beaches? They are fascinating, I  found a few things and took them to a local expert to see whether they meant anything.”

The squelch of the flesh against latexed thumb and index finger, as the surgeon drill the very tip of my femur in order to locate and retrieve the titanium Femoral rod, seemed to jar with me in my semi drugged state. I imagined my thigh as the white cliffs of Dover and revelled for a small moment at how simple life would be, if only I existed. And then the intangible, tacit things which I felt an unending desire to dig at and share with others, would not be about effective communication but instead function  as self satisfaction, life becoming one elongated act of onanism. The spot...on my leg first began to appear as the wounds from the operation had almost entirely healed. The day came, and I squeezed it fully, the gunk splattered down my thigh, so much of it I thought. Then I realised an unfamiliar post-spot-pop sensation, there was the tip of something sticking out of the hole, my head went fuzzy, I thought of fossils, my cranium tingled, I thought of the way barnacles grow, my scalp animated and I pinched between my thumb and forefinger the end of a piece of thread coming directly from the middle of the spot. I dragged about 10cm out and then it became harder to pull and I feared snapping it. I was later to find out that it was a subcutaneous suture, used to minimise scarring, my body was ejecting it. I pulled some more and with gunk of blood and a widening of the whole, a small black letter e came out attached to the end of the thread with a bowline knot. I was back in the cliff face, as I looked out I could see men and women with brushes, coming over to be, one smashed me over the head with a small, very clean axe, I split open and inside I was a small letter e, the archaeologists gasped.

The problem with all this is it is not true, it is a lie for a sculpture, you need to lay off language, purge it for a bit. It was all a lie, I make these things, but you knew that, you're fully engaged aren't you. You write about it don't you. He showed me his sculpture, in his back garden, he said he had wanted to make something in glass and make it about liminal space, transience, betweenness. He commissioned a writer to write a writing about the writing he did when he wrote about writing a text to write this proposal to research some texts so he  could make this liminal sculpture and commission a writer to write the writing and dream about dreaming, and dream, dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought, that could think of the dreamer that thought, that could think of dreaming and getting a glimmer of God, I be dreaming a dream in a thought, that could dream about a thought, that could think about dreaming a dream, where I can not, where I can not, Frank. In the Ocean of words the words of words wave E's over E's until it started with so much language, the liqueur of the brain and ended with language the hangover of the brain. I pulled this e from my body, it came out of solid flesh into the air and it is a sculpture, a lie for a sculpture, but then you already new that, didn't

you…..

bottom of page