Write Only

I'm Hannah Gregory, an independent writer and editor. I write on: art, spaces, places.

[hannah-gregory]

Documenta 14*

Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Factory and River from ‘Fields of Sight’, 2014

1. Gauri Gill’s photographs in northern India overlaid with Adivasi artist Rajesh Vangad’s Warli drawings. Systems of life and living on the land.

Gill: ‘As though one were photographing an old home, and the resident of the house came out, and began to speak.’

2. Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral, a docu-film on the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting, a project for a self-defined ‘Third World’, united along axes of decolonialism, liberation theology, and socialism.

3. The tone of Edi Hila’s paintings of deserted totalitarian architectures in Tirana, Albania, as though covered in a light mist.

4. The cracks and pools of light between shade in Amar Kanwar’s Such a Morning: ‘It was magic for free and you could watch it for hours’ (eclipsed sun through blurred leaves, clouds across sky).

5. The interaction between Navajo weaving and labour, and micro-chip design, via the work of Marilou Schultz, alongside archival material of the occupation of Fairchild Industries’ micro-chip plant on a reservation in New Mexico. But no direct testimony from the Navajos themselves. 

Laurie White: ‘Although the role of Indigenous peoples in the early history of American computer manufacturing is little recorded, the strategy of outsourcing electronics manufacture to women of colour in Asia was in fact piloted within US borders on the Navajo reservation.’

6. The Serbian marching band coming over the lip of their mine in Ben Russell’s comparative film study on global mineral extraction, Good Luck, representing miners at a state-run copper mine in Serbia and a DIY gold mine in Suriname.

Lala Rukh, Hieroglyphics I: Koi ashiq kisi mehbooba se 1, 1995

7. The notational calligraphy and screen-prints of Pakistani artist, Lala Rukh. Rukh developed a style of script rooted in Hindustani musical scores, as well as the graphic identity of the Women’s Action Forum, a platform for feminisms of the Global South.

Natasha Ginwala on the potential of radical minimalism: ‘When terror is bound-up with the accelerated circulation of images, and a desensitizing iconophilia, perhaps this mode of subtraction can offer an imaginative tool to shape an appeal for civility and justice.’

8. Moyra Davey’s abécédaire of photographic ‘mailers’, sent to the home addresses of the Documenta curators and displayed in an ex-mail distribution centre.

9. Also in the Brutalist post office, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Kunstpostbriefe (art letters) and ‘Typewritings’ made during her work in East German bureaucracy (1970–80). Lists related to art-making and lists of lived complaints: SICK-ROOM HEADACHE NEUROTICS OVERTAXES / BALSAM EXPECTATION PATIENCE HESITATION

10. Otobong Nkanga’s collective process of producing charcoal soap, Carved to Flow, with olive, coconut, sage, laurel, from the Med, the Middle East and Africa.

Maya Touta: ‘It forms within it a map of untraceable lubrication channels: roads of edible substances, industries created around fuel and transportation, networks of sustenance and rejuvenation of the body.’

11. Mounira Al Solh’s recipe for nutritious Za’tar Man’ouché with sumac and sesame from Izmir, pistachios from Aleppo, Levantine herbs and German flour. The story of a bombed bakery in Syria, and a thin man asking, in real life, for spare change.

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Wait, ~1970

12. Ink and photo documentation by Chittaprosad, Zainul Abedin and Sunil Janah of the Bengali famine, caused by British colonial policy during WW2, which ruined three million lives. Chittaprosad’s illustrated pamphlet Hungry Bengal was burned by the British authorities, though the distribution of Janah’s photographs beyond India helped counter imperial censorship and augment aid.

13. A series of drawings, ‘Deportations’ (1940), of the dissolution of a human form into what could be archipelagos or puddles by Władysław Strzemiński.

14. Many pages of South as a State of Mind, including Gene Ray’s Critical Theory in the Endgame, Bhanu Kapil’s deletions, and the life story of Asja Lācis.

*Kassel-side. 

After 13 impressions of Documenta 13, 2012.

[hannah-gregory]

Three views on belonging

David Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79.

A review of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone for the Financial Times Arts section:

Disappearing in the big city is one of its allures: the invisibility granted by the heights and volume of the metropolis, being among bodies, speaking to no one. But there’s a tipping point between slipping by unseen and becoming non-existent, between wanting to be absorbed and being subsumed. In the first pages of The Lonely City, Olivia Laing describes the habitual contradiction of feeling alone in the city’s multiplicity, and the “uneasy combination of separation and exposure” that comes with emotional isolation.

[...]

There’s also a privilege to falling off the city’s map, as invisibility is less available to feminised and othered bodies than it is to those who are pale, male and able. Indeed, in Laing’s writing there’s a fantasy — occasionally promised by the interfaces of technology — of escaping the limits of the body entirely. “That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it?” she asks, in relation to Wojnarowicz’s casual encounters on the unregulated playgrounds of New York’s old piers. “That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself.

Full text here. 

Still from Chino Amobi and Rabit’s ‘Burning Tower’ video (NON Records), a critique of drone warfare.

A review of Seismographic Sounds, a collection of texts published by Norient (Network for Local & Global Sounds & Media Culture) on themes of loneliness, desire and violence as expressed in contemporary music production across the world: 

Bronze-coloured satellite dishes are scattered around the Seismographic Sounds exhibition in Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, part of the CTM festival and accompanying Norient’s text collection of the same name. As their caption reads, the parabolic dishes are characteristic of the area around Kottbusser Tor where we’re situated, attached to the 70s-era apartment blocks as signs of home and signals to homes elsewhere. These Parabols could be parables (whether or not the curators’ name play is purposeful) for the patterns of broadcast and reception over the Norient network, which begins with three researchers in Switzerland and reaches out to fifty-odd countries: connections in Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, established over twelve years of travel. 

[...]

While Norient still act as cultural gatekeepers, with a hunger to represent the ‘new’, the material collected shows that difference is just that: multiplicitous and ungeneralisable, with generative points of contact. If the book’s production feels as connective as the internet itself (which already implies some level of access and privilege), it is not flattening, but, to use theorist Sara Ahmed’s language of intersectional politics, a necessarily ‘bumpy ride’. 

Full text in The Wire, 386 (April 2016)

Flyer by Megan Nolan

A review of ‘And No Animal is Without an Enemy’, a performance-reading event organised by Megan Nolan at Cubitt Gallery, London.

Nolan has set the night’s premise as an “unravelling of assumed positions; to question what the self can mean to a disembodied subject … what it means to refuse the belief that you are alive.” Writing and finding the self in the city, finding sex in the city, following sex through different cities, finding oneself in friendships, misunderstanding ourselves in friendships, misunderstanding or abandoning oneself. Hiding oneself from oneself, or baring one’s teeth to oneself, one’s soul.

Nolan reads first and her claim of the first person is incisive, as in cutting, and traumatic, as in digging-up-the-real. She sits cross-legged on the floor, wiping her hands therapeutically with a wet cloth, turning A4 sheets on which are excerpts of her novel-in-process. It is the first basic mistake to assume that the ‘I’ is the author or the performer, because anyway, every ‘I’ is constructed; every ‘I’ a protection of insides or a gathering together of selves. Still, here the ‘I’ feels close.

Full text on aqnb.

[hannah-gregory]

Domesticity vs. Boxing

Jesse Darling & Takeshi Shiomitsu, Spirit Level, 2015, photo by Tom Clark.

A text on Jesse Darling’s sculptures, written for The Conch at the South London Gallery last Spring.

Whatever is something for Jesse Darling’s work. Isn't work opposed to whatever? Whatever is supposed to be lazy, don't care, not full of laboursome love. Jesse writes of art as love practice writing as love practice… Jesse also welds, steel, in a serious studio in the arches. JD’s website is called the ‘Brave New Whatever’, which has something of crossing the frontier about it.

Whatever is a horizon of possibilities. Giorgio Agamben said this. Whatever could seem antithetical to theorizing, so I’m not going to do too much of it, apart from to say – on the fly – that Agamben, in his suggestion of “whatever being” – “other ways of belonging” outside of conventional identity – has something for JD, despite and because of this whatever.* 

Whatever might afford me some imprecision, but whatever from JD’s POV is the shrugging off of any category anyone might put on art (/life) because nothing there feels like it fits. This makes my work harder.

In The Coming Community, Agamben translates the Latin “whatever” Quodlibet ens not only as “being, it does not matter which” – that kind of Clueless, American indifference – but, “being such that it always matters.”**

The thing of regarding an artist's work as separate from the artist, it doesn't exist easily with Jesse. This is usual for artists who use their own bodies, and/or digital presences, but less usual for a sculptor. For example, I like the pair of boxing bags Jesse made with Takeshi Shiomitsu for the exhibition “Spirit Level” at AND/OR gallery – hanging, weighted, in limbo – but I can't tell if I like them more because Jesse made them, and because the work speaks of the artists’ strength, or not.

Love, or whatever, is not about liking specific aspects of the object, or about adoring its universals (said Agamben), but about a feeling for its situation of being as such.

JD said of the provisional IKEA-conspired installation at Arcadia_Missa “Stockholm Syndrome and Other System Failures” that it wasn’t as much about single works as about the “collateral damage… material, financial, emotional” of making work as a (fragmented) whole; that the broom, the tools, the paint pot left on site were “an analogue for the subject in the world. Maybe even a self-portrait.”***

Bound in black straps, on a chain, in pink PVC – along with Hit Piece, a rectangle of drywall bashed in – the suspended balance of the pair of boxing bags packs a satisfying (if insecure?) punch.

This kind of whatever is a hard-working manual manoeuvre. A lite T-shape structure is composed of a steel bar, a metal hook and a milk bottle (soy, obv.), attached with a green belt and a cotton ribbon. Another chain trails to the ground. It’s a seemingly secured situation, a cleaner form than the chipboard shelters and plywood frame facades: minimal contemporary povera. I think of the bottle of milk falling from its brace, spraying the sterile gallery with pasteurised liquid, creamy puddles over the smooth grey floor.

These sculptures speak of everyday bondage, and not only the materials, but the lived experience of art beyond our means. Home Unit plays at home-making in impossible circumstances, an architecture of polystyrene blocks and MDF. It's built according to the predicament that “home is an idea that needs maintenance, rather than a place or a commodity,” but also that “domesticity is terrifying.”**** On wheels, it is – like the successful artist's lifestyle – portable, and only just still standing.

Wounded Door1 has an awkward frame, a single wheel, not quite enough to roll away. The steel’s bent limbs are structurally defenceless, sort-of failing, asymmetric misfits. The crippled portal leads to a kind of community, that advocated by JD and by Agamben as a “co-belonging of singularities,”***** wedged in a precarious reality. The labour of making metal sculpture contains a realism too: the forms produced are representational not in terms of a visual likeness to reality, but in the sense of working hard to stand for something – whatever that may be.

*McKenzie Wark reading Jodi Dean on Agamben, ‘Communicative Capitalism’.  **http://zinelibrary.info/files/comingcommunity.pdf  ***Darling in interview with Giampaolo Bianconi in Rhizome. ****Darling on The Kitson Road Living Project in Dazed. ‘A lesson in living together’; JD tweet paraphrase.  *****Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 130.

[hannah-gregory]

Self Resolution

Written in response to a brief on image and resolution. 

Still from Hannah Black, My Bodies, 2014.

Teachers often remind students of yoga that practice is not about exterior body, but how it feels inside. Image is secondary to sensation; being present each session is more about invisible effects than perfection of form. This is the opposite to ballet, where the insistence on supple arch and sinewy shape topples intuitive physical limits, to the detriment of ligaments and bones. Every practice comes with its own intention, and turning attention to care within, ignoring what society pressures for the out, is a tall order.

The outside body is at times easier to make comply than the mind, and corporeal demands to sculpt and turn hard are as much about self-image as the exertion of control. With experience, you learn of deeply stretching the fasciae, which the dictionary defines as ‘bands of fibrous connective tissue enveloping, separating, or binding together muscles, organs, and other soft structures of the body.’ Helixes of inner bondage, pulled taut with potential before being released, blood flow restricted then flooding forth: this is how to stretch feeling, or this is how stretching feels.

Sometimes during class I internally hear a fragment of artist Hannah Black’s video My Bodies. The soundtrack is an edit of R’n’B women singing ‘My body – my body – my bod-dayy’; black women, not singing about my body; rhythmically true, disturbed and distorted; brimming bodies, all acting differently. On the mat, comparison with other bodies is not meant to be permitted, though if you go to a chi-chi city studio – I'm thinking Carrie Bradshaw falling out of balance in SoHo – the thought that people aren't there for body image, aren’t looking at their neighbour, is self-cancelling.

In such studios, there are mirrors, which are distracting. The drishti (gaze) isn't meant to see much of the world during movement, it settles softly without seeking to bring back a focused picture. In paradox, this inwards observation of usually steely eyes may sharpen a ‘sense of self’, a heightened inner picture that is no image at all. The self, imprecisely, is not highly defined; it is a shifting process re-formed by what visions, what events, it encounters; the binds of body and mind as they meet and entwine with other bodies and minds.

Every practice comes with its own intention (not only for the new year). Each practice, each intention is set around this dynamic of control and release, inside and out. It works to save scattered stimuli and collect fractured impressions, to forgo image in the search for self-definition.

Still from Hannah Black, My Bodies, 2014.

I have an irregular TinyLetter, Thresholds, on life and home and reading-writing from Berlin – you can subscribe here.

[hannah-gregory]

Against Exhaustion

Chris Marker, 2084, via @cavvia

I keep typing ‘exhaustion’ into my document, instead of the other three-syllabled word ending in -tion that I mean to write. Some words of others, while I write privately...

Juliet Jacques on writing as productive self-cannibalism, from my interview, 'Trans Historical Narratives’,  in The New Inquiry:

"You have said that you’ve exhausted yourself in the process of writing Trans. In the interview with Sheila Heti that forms the book’s epilogue, you even speak of having 'cannibalised' yourself – it’s a violent idea.

Exhausted is exactly the word. You can’t feed mostly upon yourself and sustain enough energy to live, that’s always going to be counter-productive. The process of writing about oneself is draining, and comes with a whole set of anxieties."

~

Claudia Rankine, on placing exhaustion in society's structures, rather than the subject: 

"What if we switch the focus on tiredness to the hearing of the thing? So that the sense of exhaustion with hearing the racist moment elicits a kind of tiredness too. I'm tired of hearing this so I need to say something, because I would like a space that does not hold this. This notion that exhaustion only comes in terms of response – it should come in the hearing of it. The [racist utterance] is the burden, in and of itself, not my responding to it."

~

Stephanie DeGooyer on a peculiar or positive end-point of exhaustion in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts:

"Exhaustion is a transitive state, a state of rest and repose between fighting and fucking, or failing to fuck and fight. It defines the shift from the insatiability of sexual desire to post-partum collapse. It is not the moment of giving up, though. Exhaustion, as Nelson figures it, involves acknowledging a dependence on the care of others. [...] ‘From my station of fatigue,’ says Nelson, ‘exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped.’"

I'm interested in the (anti-)productive outcome of zero energy, and how this works against capitalist labour, to allow access to an unmarketable self. Preciado speaks to this born-again kind of state, here:

"I wish for you to no longer have the force to repeat the norm, to no longer have the energy to fabricate identity, to lose faith in what your papers say about you. And once you have lost all courage, drained with joy, I wish for you that you invent another mode of use for your bodies. It is because I love you that I desire you weak and despicable. Because it is through fragility that the revolution operates."

~

And Agnes Martin (on whom I have an essay in Eros Journal's The Interior): 

"When relationships are exhausted and thinking is exhausted, then is the time for inspiration."

Chris Marker, 2084

[hannah-gregory]

Being and Doing

Oozing Wall (Rémy), Moyra Davey, home install, 2015

‘I only think words are “dirty” if I don’t like what they reflect back to me: clichés, usually.’ – Moyra Davey

The opening of an essay on the work of Moyra Davey for her exhibition ‘The Revenants’ at Wilfried Lentz, April 11-June 21 2015: cigarette butts, prison walls, and her old flame – Genet. Dirtied words, transgression, incarceration. Full text here. 

A list separates ‘good’ and ‘bad’ elements compiled while reading Genet – Genet who lived according to impulses that often contradicted each other. ‘The Eternal Couple of the Criminal and the Saint,’ as Sartre had it. There’s an antiquated kind of Manichaeism to the divided categories, and Moyra Davey is, she says, ‘slightly self-mocking’ in compiling it. The studio of Giacometti and memories of a dead friend vs. sadism, venereal disease, killing animals. Sartre also makes a list on Genet in his experimental biography Saint Genet. The list is ontologically separated in line with his own philosophy into Being and Doing. Being: criminal / doing: lover; being: object / doing: self as oneself. In her work, Moyra Davey occasionally hints at what she calls her ‘own sadism,’ information on which is self-censored. She admires Genet’s capacity for telling transgression as he lives it; the idea, that could also seem… naïve, of writing everything bare, but also of ‘truth in blankness.’

There was snow here (in Berlin) and snow there (in New York) when Moyra asked me to write something. There is snow in the film My Saints, a whole chapter of it, and Genet’s paper, all blank paper, is snow. ‘The side I was supposed to write on had a sort of white, grainy texture, a little like snow, and it was this surface that led me to speak of a snow that was of course absent from prison, […] and instead of writing just anything, I wrote to her about the quality of that thick paper. That was it, the trigger that allowed me to write.’ The whole of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers was written from a prison cell, not on white paper, but on the brown paper the inmates were given to fold into bags, squares that ‘a match could reduce to ashes.’  There are ashes, too, in this exhibition: stubbed out butts on a window ledge. Lit and extinguished. Small embers and rough stone.  A day’s smokes? A week’s? A morning’s? The cigarette ends try, at least, to stand upright; little markers of relinquishing time.

Genet wrote from the inside of incarceration, but in the Ohio Penitentiary series we are confronted with the prison walls from the outside. These are the physical boundaries that demarcate those that were ‘bad’, or bad enough to be found guilty, from those that passed as good. The walls are imposing, horizontal stone structures, interrupted on the vertical by watchtowers and telephone poles. The bricks of one wall have been covered by poured concrete, bulbous and ‘oozing’ to the ground. The walls are impenetrable, but also perhaps protective – against those that could threaten, steal, or harm. Or that used to: I read that the penitentiary was built in the first half of the nineteenth century, operating until 1984, and demolished in 1998. The photographs date to a few years before that, circa 1990; it was summer, probably.

The opening of Genet’s film Un Chant d’Amour, a prison-locked fantasy of desire and power play, also begins at the foot of prison walls, before moving inside to claustrophobic but smouldering cells. Here sexuality could not be fully forbidden – fantasy was the only route of escape. For the captives of Our Lady of the Flowers and Un Chant d’Amour there is nothing much to do other than write, smoke, or masturbate, thinking of the man next door.  For Genet, time inside became time on the page; words carrying confinement away; chain-smoking, chains of significance; strings of phrases as a stand-in for days. The guards destroyed the first paper bag manuscript of Our Lady, so the writer began to put words – little illicit markers – on his makeshift pages again. Here there can be no separation: Being: writer / doing: writing.

Limited edition publication of 250 copies. 

I also have an interview with Moyra Davey conducted by post – in line with her epistolary practice of sending ‘mailer’ photographs to galleries and friends – in The White Review’s June online issue. She chose to illustrate it with images from an archive of correspondence of Shelley and his circle, Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft included.

This was a pleasure of stationary and delivery. 

[hannah-gregory]

Winter Wrap

Architect & designer Charlotte Perriand reclines

"Women as furniture" – the endpoint of objectification (Allen Jones at the RA) / "Gussets stretched and feet weighted with sand" (Senga Nengudi at The White Cube) / Consumerist junk turned to Constructivist composition (Keith Coventry, for Artsy) / Brutalism in Bristol (ICON) / Laura Oldfield Ford in the suburbs (ICON) / Stephen Cripps's spaces to drop out in – The Mechanical Garden & Other Long Encores (The Wire) / + something under wraps for Adult Magazine of Contemporary Erotics. 

Editorial:

Liaquat Ahamed, Money and Tough Love (Visual Editions, London, 2014); Amar Kanwar, The Sovereign Forest (Sternberg Press, Berlin, forthcoming); Eula Biss, On Immunity (Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2015). 

[hannah-gregory]

In the Spectre of Schizo-Culture

"What is resistance in relation to the soft fabric of society's control?...The Capitalists moved much faster than we did."

Semio-text(e) is one of my favourite publishers, self-situated: "always close to the art world but not part of it, separate from careerism and institutions; not the art world, but art.”

At SPACE studios' weekend of Schizo-Culture — after the infamous 1975 conference that featured Lyotard, Deleuze, Foucault, Burroughs, and Cage, amongst others, scrapping over anti-psychiatry and linguistic patriarchy — Sylvère Lotringer, one of the original organisers and a founding editor of the press, still wore a knowing kind of smile. He has kept his radical spirit with ease, rather than bitterness, in older age. Sometimes it feels like there's little room to manoeuvre, when the art world's glitz looks like this, and the price of a roof in this city keeps climbing, but Lotringer's insistence on continuing to find "cracks in the state of things, in the state of norms" (that's Guattari, writing in Flash Art, back in 1987) made me believe otherwise. Find a crack in which to subsist, survive as you can, and stay committed to that space you found(ed) in which to invent—whatever.

"To deal with society and not concepts; to see theory where it was, which was everywhere."

"Art became the new adversary... Artists in the '70s were wasting their time because they knew that that was to experience time, [to claim it for yourself]."

Read Huw Lemmey's e-flux conversation on "A Weekend of Schizo-Culture" here.

[hannah-gregory]

Architexts

Lately I've been power-editing; less publicly writing. Here is a catch-up of some recent pieces on design and art. Each approaches the idea of architectural construction, or the relationships between text and space. 

A profile on French designer Nathalie Du Pasquier for Disegno No. 6, launched as part of Milan's Salone 2014. 

 Nathalie Du Pasquier, Construction, 2012.

"Set colour palettes recur in ways that seem to reference the industrial qualities of Milan, a city whose greyscale is intercepted by flashes of 1960s Metro interiors and early 20th-century painted facades. It is hard not to read Milan as a constant reference point in Du Pasquier’s work. She loves its juxtaposition of building styles, and there is an obvious architectural influence in her constructions’ occupation of space." 

On Visual Editions' wayfinding compilation, a box-book of maps, Where You Are, in Icon 128:

"Each 'map' plots a select number of co-ordinates, rather than a comprehensive plan; most deal with the microscopic scale of daily life more than a macroscopic overview. Yet many of these personal plans reach out to communal concerns: the places where childhood experiences were unlocked, the topography of the work space, or the lines traced by writing itself, as Joe Dunthorne tells of New York poet Bill Kushner: 'He writes a line of poetry for each block of Manhattan he walks.'"

On the Victoria & Albert Museum's Memory Palace exhibition, an experiment in visual storytelling, in Icon 124:

Illustration by Robert Frank Hunter for Memory Palace. 

"'Here is how to remember. First you must pick a place.' So begins Hari Kunzru’s Memory Palace, a fiction that is the foundation for an exhibition exploring the relationships between text and space, site and story. A memory palace is a mnemonic device, attributed to the ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides, that involves placing images of memories in physical locations. [...] The exhibition itself embodies a Memory Palace, with minimal turrets and cream walls."

On Elmgreen & Dragset's installation at the V & A, "Tomorrow", which transformed several of the museum's galleries into the apartment of a fictional architect. 

"As I enter over faded rugs into the living room, it is clear that this is not the abode of a Corbusian, nor a purveyor of minimalist design. A gallery assistant dressed as a butler glides by, and I perceive the faint tones of a classical refrain. [...] The installation recontextualises the experience of the museum to supply it with a lingering sub-plot – the behind-the-scenes fictions which, we are reminded, all objects and places possess." 

In Domus - read more.

[hannah-gregory]

Cutting through the grey

Still from Content (2010), Chris Petit.

Chris Petit likes driving. Most of his films, from his first Radio On (1979), to London Orbital (with Ian Sinclair, 2002) and his last Content (2010), show the perspective of the driver on the road: a 'form of forward projection', an unfolding horizon, the field divided by cat's eyes and motorway signs. 

Petit has directed over a dozen films, including those developed for television at a time when experimentation within this medium was still possible. He is the author of six novels, all of which position the people and the places of the margins in the foreground. His work documents unchartered landscapes and non-conforming characters. Technology is employed as a framing device, offering the possibility of many formats, cuts and edits – yet it advances also as a predator. His latest project the Museum of Loneliness operates as a nebulous cultural body, documented in pamphlets and a spoken word vinyl recording released by independent publishers Test Centre.

I interview Petit in London, in an apartment in the City overlooking the Thames, in a building that feels like it has only temporary inhabitants. We are both struggling to cut through the grey; instant coffee and semi-stale biscuits. The window of the living room, at which our small coffee table, now frames the upper portion of the Shard, which is shrouded in a mist characteristic of the winter of this year. Dirty water washes onto a small portion of riverbank. Sleet begins to fall before turning into drizzle. It is the kind of monochrome British weather that smears Petit’s films and fictions.

Read the interview on The White Review. 

This weekend Chris Petit and Test Centre present a Museum of Loneliness exhibition, pop-up shop and screenings in Stoke Newington, London.  

[hannah-gregory]

You Get Around A Bit Then

A dialogue between two nameless voices, coming from the streets. Each writer took turns to compose voices - inner speech or exterior overhearing - on alternate days for a designated period, recording the time and place of the hearing.

"On Bethnal Green Road I spot John Wayne in a dress

Dylan’s in my pocket, as always, talking about boys.

It’s hot, and the street makes its case for

swimming costumes or leatherwear,

for the aviator, sportsman and motorist.

  The hijab mafia (again)

careening round the corner.

Scarves, dresses tied in place with weights,           

sailing, hiding the road. Cups of tea and

turbans, gold and henna.

Comparing wrists from billowing sleeves.

Just coming up to Arnold Circus.

There now."

Read the whole poem in StepAway magazine's Voicewalks issue (pp. 28 -31).

This project was written with Edwina Atlee.  

[hannah-gregory]

Peripheral Frieze

Cinema, graphite drawing by Marc Bauer. An empty kind of voyeurism.

Q: Why do you go to Frieze?

A: For work, but secretly for the platform-wearing plastic-surgeoned people watching. A grotesque kind of awe. 

1. The gallery assistants' heels competition: inches and inches of status-grinding talon.

2. Stapled-over pages of National Geographic next to falling-down crevasses of colour. Cyprien Gaillard vs. Morris Louis at Sprüth Magers.

3. Sou Fujimoto's concept studies for the Serpentine Pavilion - cubes on cubes, delicate stacks, wisps of plants (Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou).

4. Ryan McGinley's You and My Friends: being a teenager again and again (Alison Jacques).

5. Raphael Hefti's pseudo-alchemical disintegrations of material with lycopodium - burning moss spores like "witches' powder" (Ancient & Modern).

6. Gulf Futurism, reflected geometries and mirrored TVs at The Third Line. 

7. Linder's curling hair and coquillage collages (dépendance) - also the first lady to wear a bodice of meat. 

8. Roman Ondak's cream staircase rail Leap (Martin Janda). You want to jump?

9. The SLG's Oscar Murillo Prize Draw. Ron y salsa in a Columbian bar behind Elephant & Castle. The artist's gallerist David Zwirner comes runner-up.

10. Jesse Darling's #fuckfrieze. A hashtag made out of bunting. A living room metal band. Neuliberalism. Spiked punch.  

Read this post on Artsy.

[hannah-gregory]

Domus Dispatches

Recent dispatches from NYC for Domus:

On James Turrell at the Guggenheim:

James Turrell, Ronin, 1968

"Moon white, dusk pink, magenta; sunset orange, soft lilac, violet then canary yellow; eventually, grey twilight. This is one colour phase of Aten Reign (2013), the installation by James Turrell that fills the Guggenheim in New York, diffusing rich layers of light through concentric ellipses of the museum's rotunda.  Mostly, the transitions between tones appear steady, so that white tentatively becomes pink; sometimes, they are surprising, so that green is suddenly no longer green but blue. The names of the colours do not do justice to the actual hues."

More.

On Donald Judd's recently restored Spring St residence:

101 Spring St, image by Joshua White

"When I visit, the faded colours of a David Novros fresco are being retouched. In Judd’s studio, the empty volume within a steel cuboid frames a pair of Alvar Aalto armchairs against the lines of the windows behind, a slender glass sculpture by Larry Bell standing to the left. The balance of works is as finely attuned as you would expect from an artist who exercised an almost megalomaniacal level of control; Judd’s hand still seems to direct the space, although the artist has passed on." 

More.

On MoMa's Le Corbusier exhibition 'Atlas of Modern Landscapes': 

Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, 1928-31. Photo by Richard Pare, 2013. 

"The word “atlas” is drawn from the myth of the eponymous ancient god, who is frequently depicted carrying the celestial spheres or the terrestrial globe. Atlas was known to be enduring, as hard as the Berber peak to which he also gave his name. As though standing on the summit of Mount Atlas, Le Corbusier is shown to be a steadfast surveyor of the land. What resounds is his interest in creating not only structures, but views – whether looking out, from the intermediary space of the balcony or the rooftop, looking down, from the high-rise, or looking over, as in his urban macro-plans."

More.

[hannah-gregory]

On Google Glass

Barisini, Tomaso da Moderna, Cardinal Hugh of St. Clair, 1352. Painting in the Dominican Monastery of San Nicolò, Treviso (thanks to Dan Hill for the tip-off). Image from Vincent Ilardi's Renaissance Vision.

I wrote on Google Glass for Domus Magazine's SuperNormal column, aiming to situate the technology within the history of augmented vision. SuperNormal is curated by Dan Hill of City of Sound, to "sketch a different kind of technology journalism" - that is, one that recognises that technology is, and always has been, deeply embedded in culture. 

"In a chapel in Treviso, Italy, there is a fourteenth century painting of a cardinal wearing spectacles. The first kind of spectacles - a rivet model, which perch on the end of his nose. These early spectacles were initially worn by scholars and members of the clergy, gradually becoming accessible to craftsmen and small business owners. Their invention was celebrated for enabling more efficient work, but their clumsy appearance was often the subject of caricature and satire.

The twenty-first century invents other kinds of vision. Just as in the Renaissance the diffusion of eyeglasses began with an elite set of Italian monks and cardinals, so Google closely gate-keeps the spread of Glass through Valley technologists and their circles."

[...]

"When feminist theorist Donna Haraway wrote in ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ in 1985: 'The main trouble with cyborgs is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,' she believed that the human-machine amalgam could transcend its starting point: 'Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.' But Google must remain essential to Glass; it is Google, not God, that becomes the all-seeing Eye."

You can find the piece in Issue 971 July/August 2013. Online version on Domus Web. 

[hannah-gregory]

Breakfast in Naples

A special dispatch for the London Review of Breakfasts

Gran Caffè Gambrinus Via Chiaia 1 Piazza Trieste e Trento Naples, Italy by Maggie Arto It has been written in the LRB before that the Italians do not know how to have breakfast. Or don't have breakfast at all. Many a disappointing hotel table – featuring, for example, those small packets of dry toast biscuits, sugary yoghurt and an individual pod of jam – testifies to the fact that in Italy you might be better off waiting for the primi pasta and seconde of carne at lunch.* Which is sad, for where lunch feels functional, a punctual interruption to the tasks of the day, breakfast is hopeful: you begin half-there and end half-high. The transition from bleary-eyed to awake is a space not only where dreams linger, but where fresh ideas are made. Alas, breakfast in Italy rarely summons reveries. This noted, I'm here to write about the most essential Neapolitan morning ritual:  coffee. It is said, in some roundabout histories, that in 1901 a gentleman in Naples complained about the time that his coffee took to brew, that in response an engineer in Milan invented a faster method of coffee extraction – what we would come to know as the modern espresso machine. Today in Naples, the expression of espresso occurs via hefty manual machines – still several models removed from this early prototype – whereby a large lever is pulled down to build up pressure, and as it is lifted, the shot starts to drip. At first caramel in colour – this is the coffee's surf, the oil-ish amalgam that will form the espresso's head – a chain of steady, small pearls soon become thin mice tails, which curve slightly inwards, then stop; for the Neapolitan espresso is nearly always more of a ristretto, and must be cut off before in any way dilute. Next there is the option of a macchiato dash of foam, or for the sweeter inclined, a spoonful of nocciola cream, which is dished out of an obscene-looking vat. If, and only if, you're drinking mid-morning or earlier, you may enjoy the svelte foam of a cappuccino. Such is the espresso spectacle at the Gran Caffè Gambrinus, one of the prestigious nineteenth-century establishments in Naples' Vomero district. As is proper, it has a metres-wide machine and a solid zinc bar. There's also a marble-floored tearoom, should you wish to linger, a gelato bar and a pastry counter. If you must wedge your hunger, a slice of anything orange or lemon-scented is desirable given the proximity of Sorrentine citrus groves. Those who can stomach sweetened ricotta in the first part of the day could opt for sfogliatelle, a local confection of fine pastry leaves forming a clam-shaped shell, piped with candied fruit filling. Biscotti come sharded with almonds, sometimes in the shape of thorny crowns. This same ritual may be observed in countless other corner cafés. Your espresso is served with a thin glass of effervescent water while you watch other shots delivered in plastic cups, on yellow trays with covers, to nearby households and businesses; a zip-fast, to-the-door service that seems, from the perspective of a waitress, overly generous, but also crucial to the functioning of an informal but highly caffeinated city. Waiting staff develop keen right angles between their upper arm and elbows, my favourite delivery sighting being macchiato-by-moped, one arm on the bars, one beneath the tray. As I write this, over a slow home breakfast and a fast coffee take-out, I am grateful for the Milanese engineer's invention.

*I had once believed that the breakfast situation in Portugal could be similarly under-thought, but one of the best hotel breakfasts I have ever experienced was on a twenty-five degree morning in the Lisbon hills - the kind of early spread that requires much rearrangement of crockery: freshly baked madeira cake, wild strawberries and home-strained yoghurt, seedy bread drizzled with olive oil alongside sliced, glistening tomatoes and soft white cheese, delicate jasmine tea and a silver pot of coffee…

[hannah-gregory]

Encounters: Lyotard & Monory

Ciels no. 4, Jacques Monory (1980), oil on canvas. 

The recent exhibition at SPACE in Hackney evolved from the encounter of philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and painter-filmmaker Jacques Monory. Initiated by a letter from Lyotard, this eventually grew into decades of dynamic exchange.

Theirs was a relationship that shook Lyotard’s writing beyond purely philosophical prose, as he saw Monory move freely between the media of painting, serigraph and film. In Death Valley, Monory would paint both the desert and the stars, while Lyotard, witnessing satellite receivers decoding signals from above, would realize that space, through technology, had become a digital medium, drawing an arc from the romantic to the technological sublime.

Full text on the Frieze Blog. 

[hannah-gregory]

The sentence that idles

Pae White, Too Much Night, Again, 2013, South London Gallery. Photo, Andy Matthews.

  “To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive, to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.”*

  A camera advances into a dark field, a time-lapse sunrise morphing from auburn to aqua on the horizon. Cicadas, chimes.

  In a forest quiet but for leaves in the breeze a tree is toppled from base of trunk; it teeters at sixty, fifty, forty-five degrees as gravity works an inevitable pull. Onto a bed of bracken, a dead crunch.

  On a paper tablecloth in an emptied restaurant lies a cream page with grey rules, no text. A slight body studies horizontal lines, without a word to write.  

  Through white mist two figures in felt coats ride the back of a truck – keen jaws and the clunk of wheels. The track’s surrounding detritus is sealed in frost; an unthawed landscape cast monochrome.

  With broad stroke and bobbing head, you follow the black lanes, length after length. Above, the large clock hand seems stuck, stopped; lapping, time does not progress.

  Emitting vapours of red wine, bay and blood, the pot rests on the stove for hours. Occasionally, a vermilion bubble erupts.

  A lady’s coiffed head turns to look over her shoulder; her movement slowed into several separate gestures. Her eventual about-turn becomes a stunted pirouette. Someone, invisible, is there.

  A gradual letting go - neck thrown back at the end of a wave from hips to crown, a creeping flush across neck and chest: release.

  The favoured perspective of sodium shifts in the bathtub; froth islands connecting, dispersing, eclipsing pink toes.

  At the wooden bar since early evening, midday, or earlier – the clouds, whatever the time, a low grey - she traces the concentric grain with a long finger, then lifts bitter liquor to lips.

  In a softly lit room, thirty ankles circle in the air, legs elevated, backs reclined. These unbuckled feet do not walk anywhere.

  A camera advances into a wide field as the sky, which fills more than two-thirds of the frame, moves from indigo to midnight. A single star is multiplied, as more appear with adjusted eyes.

  *Don DeLillo, Point Omega. NY: Scribner, 2010. 

This text was commissioned by South London Gallery for Slow Art Day, Saturday 27 April 2013. Together with more than 250 international art venues, the South London Gallery celebrated the experience of looking at art slowly. On entering Pae White's installation, each visitor was presented with a series of sentences evoking slow scenes.